Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

To create a Communist society requires mass appropriation (i.e., theft) of property, abolition of class differences and direction of all social effort to the transformation of humanity based on claims about Homo sapiens that are not true while using ludicrously inadequate analysis of social dynamics. This is a massive concentration of power over others based on falsehoods.

Of course Communism has demonstrated itself to be murderous, tyrannical and hostile to human flourishing. Indeed, the greater the commitment to the goals and claims of Communism, the more murderous, tyrannical and a disaster for human flourishing a regime has been.

This is all particularly so in the Marxist version—the only version of Communism of significance in modern history. For Marxism explicitly holds that there are parasite classes, whose elimination makes everyone else better off. All the Marxist mass murders used categorising people as exploitive parasites, or being lackeys thereof, as justification for mass killings.

In the 1917-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern and Central Europe that Lenin, Stalin and Hitler created; the Soviets mass-murdered deemed-parasite classes, the Nazis mass-murdered deemed-parasite races. Trying to parse moral differences between them in the face of such horrors is ridiculous.

They were also using different evolutionary strategies. The Nazis mobilised a culturally-connected—that they racially defined—set of lineages against other lineages, organised around territorial aggression, a very old pattern in our evolutionary history. Our evolutionary history includes plenty of genocides, though the Nazi scaled-up-through-industrialisation intensity was horribly new.

This is why the Nazis come across as atavistic and—in their murderous grading of entire races as unfit to live—as a profound affront to the moral universalism that Christianity embedded in Western Civilisation. But being a greater affront to particular moral sensibilities is not a moral category.

Communists use an aggressive, block-any-escape, version of a levelling down evolutionary strategy. A strategy of social aggression, eliminating those with more status and resources than themselves and transferring both status and resources through and to themselves (allegedly on behalf of others). During their respective Civil Wars, both the Bolsheviks in Russia and the CCP in China mobilised the least successful, the most angry and resentful, locals to kill the larger landowners and take their property, in a series of local massacres.

It is the moral arrogance that left-progressives so regularly display that they seek the social power to cement and enforce, hence the prevalence of dissent-suppressing mechanisms such “no debate” demands, blanket moralised condemnations, and so on. In the contemporary West, they use networking tactics rather than a centrally-directed Leninist Party, but it is the same social dominance exercise, generating many of the same patterns.

Thus, we have the equivalents of commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc) whose “training” often involves little more than struggle sessions; Zhdanovism in the arts and literature (writer Jenny Lindsay writes about her experience, an example of much wider patterns); Lysenkoism in science and science publishing (see, for example); and censorship (originally paraded as “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information).

Notionally, the levelling-down strategy’s downward transfers are done for the general good, but there is a huge difference between those being equalised and those doing the equalising. Every Marxist revolution or takeover creates a highly exploitive bureaucratised activist elite as an inevitable consequence of the entire political project. For the total transformation of society requires total control of the society by the declared transformers.

The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, not of the proletariat. But that is true, and inevitably true, of every Marxist revolution and takeover then and since. The NGO advocacy economy; the HR scolds; the moral-project bureaucracies; are the networked contemporary versions of this: a “softer, gentler” form of moralised predatory parasitism.

The levelling-down strategy turns some groups into righteous targets and others into righteous mascots. So, precisely because of its ostentatious commitment to equality, Left-progressivism creates moral caste systems.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in contemporary Western societies is very much a moral caste system, that puts heterosexual “white” males at the bottom of the moral heap. Such moral caste systems are very apparent in the precursors to DEI: the Soviet Union’s Korenizatsiya program; Mao’s Black and Red identities; the Kim Family Regime’s Songbun system. (A short outline of the full horror of the last is here.)

The failure to confront the way their own political tradition metastasises by editing out the tyrannising mass murderers, and their regimes and their social control mechanisms, from their conception of the Left does, indeed, matter.

James Lindsay’s formulation that:

Communism represents progressive means to regressive ends;

Fascism [and Nazism] represent reactionary means to progressive ends

therefore has something to it. Marx conceived Communism as the return, on a global scale, to humanity’s “species being” as originally manifested in “primitive communism”: so, regressive ends. Left-progressivist politics, from the Jacobins onwards, has stressed the embrace of modernism, of new is better, of championing the socially disenfranchised: so, progressive means.

Conversely, Fascism and Nazism both wished to progress their favoured groups to a higher state of social being and achievement: so, progressive ends. They were clever adapters of the techniques and technology of mass politics. Nevertheless, their fetishising of military modes of social action, their glorification of the past and of military heroism, their explicit rejection of liberal and left notions of progress, their fondness for Roman imagery and forms, their corporatist harmonising of social orders (within the nation or the volk) are reasonably cast as reactionary or regressive means.

Moralised mislabelling

We are normative beings because we needed persistent and robust structures of cooperation to raise our biologically expensive children reinforced by the human predatory pattern. Hunting providing highly variable nutritional returns from day-to-day—so encouraging the pooling of risk via habitual sharing of food—further encouraged the evolution of norms as a basis for robust social cooperation.

Our emotions are a much more basic decision-making mechanism than our reason and well precede it in evolutionary development. Tribalism is also normative and can have great emotional power. Politics operates by mobilising shared emotions and sense of belonging. Normative is not the same as moral.

Such emotional and (yes, normative) tribalism makes it very easy to read political categories as also being moral categories. Easy to do, but wrong, no matter how much people seek to moralise the tribal affiliations of politics and find it congenial to do so. Political categories such as Left, Right or Socialist are not moral categories.

References

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Frank Dikotter, Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, Bloomsbury, 2026.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Paul L. Hooper, Hillard S. Kaplan and Adrian V. Jaeggi, ‘Gains to cooperation drive the evolution of egalitarianism,’ Nature: Human Behavior, 5, 847–856 (2021). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian-Jaeggi/publication/349707572_Gains_to_cooperation_drive_the_evolution_of_egalitarianism/links/603e684392851c077f127935/Gains-to-cooperation-drive-the-evolution-of-egalitarianism.pdf

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, The Bodley Head, 2010.

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32008953/

Jessica C. Thompson, Susana Carvalho, Curtis W. Marean, and Zeresenay Alemseged, ‘Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins,’ Current Anthropology, Volume 60, Number 1, February 2019. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:da2850f1-f415-4130-9d35-8ed23fdd6b89/files/r2b88qc185

First Easy Test

Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?

If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.

Second Easy Test

Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?

If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.

The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.

It is a regime of eschatological terrorism. Israel and the US are its proclaimed enemies-to-be-destroyed, but so is every Sunni monarchy: Israel and the US are simply more salient targets. The Islamic Regime’s role in both Lebanon and Yemen has been highly destructive. Where does it end with a regime that has been ever more violently destructive and disruptive across decades?

This second test also applies to commentary on the Russo-Ukraine War. Does a commentator examine or consider the patterns of Russian history? If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Western politics and policy.

Putin is acting like a Muscovite autocrat from anytime in the last half a millennium. This is something Russia’s neighbours understand. If a commentator refuses to do so, or is so ignorant they do not realise that there is a clear historical pattern, then their commentary can be dismissed.

As I have previously noted, both the Russo-Ukraine War and the current Iran War are part of much deeper historical patterns of the wars of continental anarchy and with the mercantile maritime order.

Third, More Subtle, Test

The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.

If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.

A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.

Yes, great battlefield commanders have an excellent sense of the opponent’s responses and have already incorporated that into their own operational plans. Yes, better trained and equipped forces, with superior operational capacity, can overwhelm opponents, sometimes with startling speed.

But, with any military campaign—and particularly such a complex, multi-level campaign as the Iran War—successful military action is going to operate as a decision-tree, even in such lopsided cases. This is even more so in a period of flux in military technology.

Now, one can hope that one’s side has a well-thought out if-then decision-tree, but there is still going to be a fair bit of “if, then”. The real test is how one copes with the unexpected.

A persistent advantage Western armies—including the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF—have displayed in conventional warfare is being much more able to cope with a fluid battlefield than their Arab opponents. Indeed, the IDF, and Western armies in the Gulf Wars, found generating fluidity on the battlefield very much to their advantage.

This has also proved true for the Ukrainian Army fighting Russia. Hence the successful advances to Kherson and from Kharkiv in late 2022. Unfortunately for Ukraine, the Russian Army has learnt how to block such fluidity from arising. Well, mostly. Recent, albeit limited, Ukrainian successes suggest turning off Starlink has degraded Russian ability to follow its preferred operational patterns.

Whether the Iranians have the same military limitations as Arab conventional forces have displayed is less clear. The disruptions of the revolutionary military purges, problems of coordination between the regular army and the IRGC, and the Iraqi use of chemical warfare, complicates assessing the (highly variable) Iranian performance during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 and they have not been involved in a major conventional land war since.

The US and Israeli forces have very rapidly established naval and air supremacy in the war against the Islamic Regime, but they are superior forces at every level—number, training, equipment, technology, operational capacity, command and control. This has included completely negating the operational strategy that Iran had developed for use against the US Navy in the aftermath of Operation Praying Mantis (1988). The US and Israel have still not been able to fully suppress IRGC missile, and especially drone, attacks, even in such circumstances.

So, two easy, and a more subtle, test to winnow out the truly remarkable amount of bad commentary on the Iran War.

References

Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.

This was a disastrously bad decision. The argument for going back at the 1914 rate was to preserve the UK pound’s value as a medium of account: meaning that, prices and debts were expressed in pounds and were paid in pounds.

Going back on the gold standard turned gold into the medium of account for what was still the world’s premier reserve currency, mediated by (and denominated in) pound notes. UK bonds would thus have the same value as they did in 1914, when the UK left the gold standard so it could finance its war expenditure.

The bonds would have the same value provided the UK Government could continue to service the interest owed. There are some complications here regarding bond yields, but the intent and reasoning was clear. Government bonds were a promise, and the UK Government was keeping its promise.

The lower the risk on bonds, the lower the interest rate, the cheaper (in pounds) bonds were to service and the easier to sell new bonds as “risk-free assets”. As UK bonds were denominated in UK pounds, the value of the pound made a difference to the value of the bonds. Hence, the decision to go back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate was focused on the UK pound as the medium of account for UK bonds.

So, if the logic is clear, why was going back on gold on the 1914 rate such a bad decision? Because a lot more pounds had been printed since 1914 than the UK had gold to support at the 1914 exchange rate. (This increased printing of pounds was the point of going off the gold standard in the first place.)

In terms of output, of goods and services, a pound in 1925 bought considerably less than it did in 1914. This meant that, at the 1914 exchange-rate with gold, the pound was significantly overvalued. Gold bought more outside the UK. The consequence was obvious: gold tended to flow out of the UK, putting the pound under more stress.

The solution to the pound being overvalued—it did not buy enough goods and services, enough output, to support its exchange-rate with gold—was to have the pound increase in value in goods and services, in output-value. [For prices in pounds to express the value of gold as the medium of account.]

Money increasing in output-value has a name: we call it deflation, or falling prices, as each pound or dollar or whatever buys more and more goods and services. (Just as money decreasing in output-value is inflation, or rising prices, as each pound or dollar or whatever buys less and less goods and services.)

So, putting the pound back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate imposed serious deflation on the UK economy. Prices fell, so incomes fell, while debts increased in output-value. This all put downward pressure on wages. The 1926 General Strike was a direct consequence of putting the UK pound back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate.

All this made the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been, increasing the burden of the public debt. It also tended to bleed confidence out of British society, prolonging the effects of the trauma of the 1914-1918 Great War. (You may not be interested in Economics, but Economics is interested in you.)

The roles of money

The classic analysis of money is that it is a unit of account (what prices and obligations are set in), a medium of exchange and a store of value. The store-of-value role is the least important role of money. We can tell that, because people still use money during hyperinflation episodes when money is, by orders of magnitude, the worst asset, the worst store-of-value, in the economy.

People’s expectations about the future value of money do, however, matter a lot. Precisely because a hyper-inflating currency is such an awful store-of-value, people unload it as quickly as possible. This creates a hyperinflation spiral, where the speed at which money travels between transactors heads towards infinity and the output-value of the currency heads towards zero.

Conversely, if people have strong expectations that money will increase in output-value, they will tend to hold onto it, so transact less, so incomes fall, so production falls, so prices fall, so money increases in output-value, increasing the incentive to hold onto it. Debts increase in output-value while incomes fall, so bankruptcies multiply. All this creates a debt-deflation spiral where transactions fall dramatically, so output heads downwards as the output-value of money heads upwards.

The fact that there is a certain level of consumption people are going to do regardless puts something of a limit on the deflation spiral. Also, money constantly increasing in value creates an increasing incentive to inject money into the system. In the case of the gold standard, to either find new sources of gold (what cured the 1890s Depression) or to take the currency off the gold standard (what cured the 1930s Depression).1

The less store-of-value risk there is in money, the more money becomes a potential safe haven for wealth if there is some increase in risk.2 Hence, if a central bank credibly protects the output-value of money—for instance, by generating expectations of low and stable rates of inflation—but does not credibly generate expectations of stable levels of total spending (so incomes) in the economy, then a sudden increase in risk can lead to a flight to cash (and other “safe”) assets, so a crash in transactions.

Why did the US and other developed economies experience the Great Recession after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but Australia experienced neither? Because Australian prudential regulation protected from it from the GFC and the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy generated strong expectations of stable levels of total spending in the Australian economy, which almost none of the other Western central banks did for their economies. In those economies, there was a flight to cash (particularly US dollars) and other “safe” assets and so a crash in transactions aka the Great Recession.

Transaction good

But money is a store of value because it can be used in future transactions. This is why expectations about its future value matters so much.

Holding money is using it as an asset. Using money in transactions is using it as a medium of exchange. The term medium of exchange is a usage I particularly dislike, because it helps mystify money.

I much prefer to call money a transaction good, because that focuses on what money primarily does: it reduces transaction costs (particularly search and information costs). It does so massively. That is why people continue to use money even during hyperinflation episodes when money is, by orders of magnitude, the worst store-of-value asset in the economy.

Calling money a transaction good also helps think about money in terms of supply and demand. Any analysis in terms of supply and demand has to define the scope of the commodity—i.e. supply of what, demand for what. If money is being held as an asset, it is not being used as a transaction good. Therefore, money held as an asset is not included in the supply of money being used as a transaction good.

Expectations about the future value of money hugely affect people’s willingness to use money in transactions, so its supply as a transaction good. But no analysis of money that conflates its use as an asset with its use as a transaction good is going to be a good analysis of money.

Thus, any quantity theory of money that aggregates together money being used in transactions—so, as a transaction good—with money being held as an asset is going to be wrong. Calling money a transaction good makes the importance of avoiding such conflation of the uses of money clearer.

Even with supply and demand for money as asset or as transaction good there are some scope complexities. The number of US dollars that circulate outside the US is remarkable. Demand for US dollar notes is by no means limited to their use within the American economy. The excellent Conflicted podcast recently provided a very informative discussion of the dynamics of money laundering and why US cash remains king.

I also dislike the usage the real economy or in real terms, preferring output or goods-and-services as the role of money—and, indeed, credit—in facilitating transactions is very real. Both money and credit can be means of payment, but the latter is even more driven by information and risk than money.

Money is a physical—so physically possess-able and storable—thing. Credit is a promise, paid for (i.e., made worthwhile to do) by interest. (If someone is paying interest on it, it is credit, not cash.) Cryptoassets, such as Bitcoin, are … odd.3

Banks generate credit, based on their assessments of risk. Such credit can, and usually does, generate claims on cash; but it does not multiply money—it does not increase cash in the economy, unless the bank can issue its own banknotes. It does multiply means of payment denominated in monetary units. Hence, it is perfectly possible to analyse monetary policy without worrying specifically about credit, as these are another set of transactions affected by expectations of the future value of the money they are denominated in and the expectations about future income that they have to be paid back in.

Monetising

The term transaction good also helps thinking about the process of monetising an economy. The more an economy is monetised, the lower transaction costs are going to be, so the more transactions and so the larger the economy can be expected to be. Governments have a particular incentive to encourage the monetising of an economy, not only because a larger economy generates more taxes and other revenue, but because monetisation reduces the transaction costs for government itself in acquiring revenue and expending funds.

The alternative to monetised transactions are in-kind transactions. I much prefer to talk about in-kind rather than “barter” because you can have in-kind taxes, in-kind debts as well as in-kind exchange. A medieval manor was not a “barter” system, it was a series of in-kind arrangements.

The processes of monetisation took centuries. As late as the 1940s, the Chinese economy was far from fully monetised, as villages tended to avoid using money in their internal arrangements—to the extent that villagers would travel to the local market town to engage in monetary transactions with a fellow villager.

Chinese society was based around kin-groups, and other connections, far more than were the very individualist Western societies. Law also penetrated Western societies—including rural communities—far more than it did Chinese villages. All this made in-kind arrangements more viable within Chinese villages and monetisation more viable in Western rural communities.

Historical aside: the long history of Chinese villages keeping the state at arms-length helps explain how Chinese villages could spontaneously de-collectivise agriculture after the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution had disrupted Party (CCP) control in the villages. The “clever” thing that the CCP did was to work out how to cope with the de-collectivisation that was already happening.

Robust expectations of a stable path for total transactions

In summary, Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, focused on money as the medium of account for assets (specifically, UK public bonds) rather than the central role of money—as a transaction good. Eight decades later, the Great Moderation was interrupted by the Great Recession because the US Federal Reserve, and other central banks, focused on expectations about the future value of their currency (i.e., inflationary expectations) and not on generating expectations of a stable path for total transactions when financial risks dramatically increased.4

The medium of exchange usage gets in the way of thinking clearly about money.

Money is first and foremost a transaction good. Its use reduces transaction costs, so makes the economy larger than it otherwise would be. [Its greatest benefit is enabling transactions that otherwise would not happen.]

Monetary policy does best, when it generates strong expectations of a stable positive path for total transactions in an economy. What is the most useful measure of total transactions in an economy? NGDP: GDP at current money (nominal) value.

Sure, there is an asset economy as well as an output—a goods and services—economy. But new assets require goods and services in their creation. (Cryptoassets, for instance, require computers, computer code and electrical power.) Assets are mainly of value either from producing goods and services or providing more reliable access to the same. This includes prestige/status assets.

Moreover, as money can be used as a transaction good, or held as an asset—and is the medium of account for output, assets and obligations—money operates as the “hinge” between current and future transactions and between output and assets.

So, monetary policy does best when it generates robust expectations of a stable positive path for NGDP.

References

Katy Barnett, ‘The Australian Approach To Cryptoassets: Another Block In The Chain,’ forthcoming Journal of Banking and Finance Law and Practice JBFLP (2026). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6477598

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Independent Institute, 2015.

Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Money, University of Chicago Press, 2021.

James Tobin, ‘Commercial Banks as Creators of ‘Money’,’ Banking and Monetary Studies, (ed. Dean Carson) 1963, 408-419, cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cm/m21/m21-01.pdf.

Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society, trans, with an introduction and epilogue by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, University of California Press, 1992.

Chenggang Xu, ‘The Fundamental Institutions of China’s Reforms and Development,’ Journal of Economic Literature, 2011, 49:4, 1076–1151. https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/153452/2/Content.pdf

It was also my birthday, so friends took me out for drinks. Four glasses of an excellent Otago Champagne and a snifter of an excellent whiskey (Port Charlotte) followed by a meal at an African (Ethiopian specifically) restaurant and a couple of stubbies of an Ethiopian beer I am very fond of. This is WAY more alcohol than I normally drink. I also indulged in a couple of blocks of chocolate (Mint and Rum&Raisin) which is way more sugar than I normally consume. But, well, birthday.

That night, I had restless legs for the first time in years. I used to suffer, but since shifting to an essentially ketovore eating pattern, it had gone away. Restless legs is another example of an essentially metabolic condition that can be treated by changing one’s eating patterns.

Folk are probably aware of bulletproof coffee. It is an adaption for American tastes of Tibetan butter tea. Proper Tibetan butter tea is quite an exercise to make. But it is possible to make a tasty butter tea relatively simply that suppresses hunger pangs with a minimal insulin spike.

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Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.

National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.

As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.

Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration—higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures)—are then magnified. [The effect of swamping people’s locality-based social capital, so reducing their ability to manage risks, is also magnified.]

In the case of Australia, the 14 December 2025 Bondi massacre by an Islamawi immigrant father and his locally-born son brought these concerns into sharp relief, but the pushback against mass immigration had been building well before that, hence the Albanese Government sharply cutting back its immigrant quotas. (As Australia enforces its borders, the official immigration quotas actually matter.)

One would think that the obvious tension between Net Zero and mass immigration would be an open part of the public policy debate, within and without government. This is where the serial incompetence of mainstream economists in analysing immigration—incompetence that I have discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and especially here and also here—is very much germane. For part of their incompetence is utterly failing to produce useful models of the capacities of economies and societies to absorb immigrants. The absence of such models both represents the failure to take the costs of immigration seriously and limits the capacity to examine trade-offs with other policies, such as Net Zero.

Another factor is how much of elite politics is dominated by performative status games. One is a Good and Very Serious Person by affirming the correct narratives. The more folk are insulated from having their beliefs reality-tested, the more dominant in their networks such performative status games will be.

To ensure feedback to correct against wandering off into dysfunctional nonsense is, of course, the point of having open discourse and free elections. But those who adhere to grading people by their beliefs—so take dissent to the beliefs that make them “morally superior” people to be morally illegitimate—are highly motivated to frustrate open discourse and effective democratic feedback: hence cancel culture, the push against “disinformation” and the adoption of the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

This networked incentive to frustrate open discourse and democratic feedback extends to mainstream media organisations, who have come to live off selling the narratives that affirm one is a Good and Very Serious Person.

Such pressures have led conventional centre-right politicians to either adhere to, or pander to, those elite status games. This particularly applies to politicians obsessed by getting mainstream media coverage. They then have even more reasons to pander to the Narratives That Good People Affirm pushed by mainstream journalists who are playing, and playing to, those same elite status games.

Mainstream journalists, government bureaucrats, advocacy non-profits, academe—these social milieus are all pervaded by such narratives. This is what institutional capture means. It takes a fair bit of intellectual curiousity, and moral courage, to stand against all that social pressure. Too many politicians on the conventional centre-right have neither, so fail as instruments for voters to push back.

Hence the rise of national populism. Precisely because both Net Zero and mass immigration are so much Non Player Character (NPC) “I don’t think things through, I just tick the Good Person status boxes” political/policy positions the obvious, serious, tension between the two gets overlooked. The willingness to punish those who dissent—as is required to have particular beliefs, the affirming of particular narratives, show that you are a Good Person—leads to purity spirals around an ever-narrowing set of acceptable beliefs. Such insulation from reality-tests within elite circles—and so within conventional politics—leads to the surge in non-conventional politics.

Within elite circles—among those addicted to the elite status games of affirming Correct Narratives—national populist electoral surges are viewed as a bizarre and wicked pathology. Yes, inconvenient realities are pathological for those elite status games. But that is because those elite status games are very much pathological in the first place. This is especially so given that the more one has to rationalise away or ignore, the stronger the signalled commitment to the shared status games is.

The tension between Net Zero and mass immigration is obvious if you just think things through. A deep problem across Western societies is that so many Very Serious People are playing status games that rely on not thinking things through: indeed, that actively block doing so.

References

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, HarperCollins, 2021.

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Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

George Borjas, ‘Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 2013. https://cis.org/Report/Immigration-and-American-Worker

George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, W.W.Norton, 2016.

Ben Cobley, The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, Societas essays in political & cultural criticism, Imprint Academic, 2018.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

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Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

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Israel got (and gets) a lot of attention because it is a Western-style democracy, with the openness and sense of familiarity that involves. It is the only such Western-style democracy stuck in a region of continental anarchy, which has led to all sorts of jarring with the sensibilities of the mercantile maritime order most Western democracies are deeply embedded in. Sensibilities that are epitomised by the fable of international “law”.

The best single lecture to understand the evolution and nature of the current world order.

Many Arab regimes were only too happy to encourage a focus on Israel and its sins (real and imagined). Such regimes for decades ran a sort of geopolitical shell game with their people—we won’t provide freedom, political participation or much in the way of economic development, but we will confront the Zionist Entity. The Islamic Republic of Iran epitomises this in extravagant style.

The Palestinians have entirely lived off confronting the Zionist Entity. That of all the C20th population movements, they were the only ones not taken in (with the partial exception of Jordan) as citizens by their ethno-religious confreres—being kept as stateless sticks to beat the Zionist Entity with—was not something it served the Palestinian leadership to draw attention to. That they had their very own UN body—UNRWA—which maintains their status as the world’s only hereditary refugees, and pays them hundreds of millions of dollars a year to never make peace with Israel, just reinforces the point. They literally live off confronting the Zionist Entity.

If they make peace with Israel, they stop being hereditary refugees, and the money stops. Hence they insist on the right of return—the basis of them being hereditary refugees—which Israel will never agree to. The late Charlie Munger’s point of show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome strikes again.

If one looks at the numbers of fatalities, the Arab-Israeli/Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not even close to the deadliest conflict in the postwar Middle East.

The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-8—with its death toll in the vicinity of 500,000 dead—remains by far the deadliest inter-state conflict in the Middle East since 1945.

The Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990—with a death toll of 120,000-150,000—was largely triggered by the political and social dynamics generated by Palestinians being hereditary refugees.

The Algerian Civil War of 1992-2002—with its death toll in the vicinity of 150,000—killed more people than all the conflicts with Israel up to the Gaza War.

The Yemeni Civil War of 2014 to present—with its death toll of at least 150,000 from violence, though famine and other indirect deaths may push the death toll to around 380,000—is the latest, and worst, bout of Yemeni internal violence. (Yes, that the same number keeps recurring does suggest that casualty estimates are very much estimates.)

The anti-Taliban War in Afghanistan of 2001-2021—with a death toll of around 180-212,000—was a remarkably restrained insurgency conflict, given civilian deaths are estimated around 46,000.

The Iraq War of 2003-2011 has highly disputed casualty counts, but ranges of 105-150,000 deaths would put it in a similar level as other Middle Eastern conflicts.

The Iraq War of 2013-2017 against The Islamic State may have killed around 218,000 including 67,000 civilians. Taking the Costs of War Project estimates up to 2018 of up 295,000 deaths would make the two wars combined one of the deadlier conflicts in the region since 1945.

The Syrian Civil War of 2011-2024—with its death toll of around 670,000—managed to be the deadliest conflict in the region since 1945.

The casualties from the various interstate wars with Israel have been relatively light, as the wars have mostly been brief and not fought in urban areas. The estimated total casualties from the Israel-Palestinian conflicts before the Gaza War that began on October 7 2023 (so, 1920-2023), was around 10,000 Jews/Israelis and around 30,000 Palestinians. The casualties from the interstate wars with Israel since 1947 push the numbers up to around 80,000 deaths.

Nevertheless, in terms of death toll, Israel’s conflicts prior to the Gazan War have been a lesser conflict by the standards of the region, despite extending across decades and consuming huge amounts of media attention. The Islamic Regime of Iran may have managed to kill about the same number of its own people in a few days in putting down the recent nationwide protests as had the specifically Israel-Palestinian conflicts prior to October 7 2023.

Gazan Trap

The Gaza War has around doubled the numbers of violent deaths from the conflicts with Israel. Months of urban warfare where the civilian population could not escape will do that. For comparison, the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul had much lower civilians deaths, because civilians could escape.

The civilian population was blocked from leaving Gaza by Egypt. Like other Arab countries (other than Jordan), Egypt refuses to accept Palestinian refugees. Indeed, like other Arab countries (other than Jordan and Lebanon), Egypt refuses to accept Arab refugees, period.

If the civilian population cannot escape, then urban warfare will kill civilians. The entire point of the Hamas strategy of taking all those hostages and hiding them and its military forces—but not Palestinian civilians—in the tunnel network it spent huge sums creating was to use Palestinian civilians as human shields. The more Palestinian civilians who are killed, the better for Hamas’s strategy—both to delegitimise the Zionist Entity and to sabotage Israel’s diplomatic normalisation within the region.

Hezbollah uses the same strategy of civilians as human shields in Southern Lebanon. The Islamic Regime in Iran also uses a version of this human shield strategy.

Anarchistic Regime

The Islamic Regime shoots thousands of missiles and drones at Israel and kills barely any Israelis, not only because of the Israeli air defences—including, famously, the Iron Dome—but also because Israel provides its civilians with very extensive bomb shelters. The Islamic Regime does not provide such shelters for its civilians because Iranian civilians killed by Israeli (or US) strikes are a propaganda win for the Islamic Regime. The Islamic Regime has repeatedly shown it will sacrifice any aspect of the interests of the Iranian people for its ideology, and for the corrupt benefit of the institutions (primarily the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC) that exist to prosecute its ideology.

It is actually telling that it is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On the subject of that ideology, the Islamic Regime has created/supported a series of proxies that have violently destabilised the region in the interests of prosecuting its ideology. Since 1979, the Islamic Regime has been the prime factor making the Middle East a realm of continental anarchy, where degrading and vassalising neighbours is the path to geopolitical “success”.

Consider that series of conflicts listed above: again and again, the Islamic Regime and its proxies are deeply involved in the violence. You add up all the Muslims killed in the Islamic Regime’s wars—either by its own forces, or its funded and armed proxies and allies—and it is quite clear that the Islamic Regime plus proxies plus allies have been the champions at killing Muslims since 1979.

The Islamic Regime is not a “normal” regime. It is not such either ideologically or structurally. We have decades of the performance of that regime, and its proxies and allies, to see that. If the Middle East is to shift from being a region of continental anarchy to being much more thoroughly part of the mercantile maritime order of “win-win” interactions, then the Islamic Regime in Iran—it is less and less of Iran—has to be overthrown or thoroughly neutered.

Maritime order

The waterways of the world—about 80 per cent of world trade flows by water—are dominated by oceans and seas. They in turn have been dominated by an Atlanticist maritime order that began with the Iberian conquests in the Americas, Portuguese domination of the Indian Ocean and the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.

That Atlanticist order, which is thoroughly global, is now half a millennium old. Its most recent manifestation is the US Maritime Hegemony, that is sustained by the greatest alliance network in history.

There are regimes which resist that US-led maritime order. Those regimes have nothing in common apart from the way they oppress their own people for their own—typically deeply kleptocratic—benefit. They have that in common, as that maritime order is the basis of the unprecedented mass prosperity of our age.

If those regimes were genuinely focused on the well-being of their own people, they would be broadly supporting that maritime order, even if they might seek to renegotiate parts of it. Iran is the most grotesque example of sacrificing the well-being of their own people to the interests and obsessions of the ruling regime. It is also the most actively and violently disruptive of the continental anarchy regimes. Unfortunately for it, it is also the militarily weakest of these regimes.

The regime with the most ambivalent attitude to the maritime order is CCP China. Post-1978 China has become by far the biggest beneficiary of the maritime order. Yet the CCP’s ambitions to re-unite with Taiwan represent the most dangerous point of potential conflict for that order, while the CCP very much seeks to control its citizens interactions with that order. As a Xi Jinping-led CCP seeks to emphasise CCP control over economic and other considerations, its relationship with the mercantile-maritime order is likely to become more ambivalent rather than less.

The Atlanticist maritime order began to be built around 1500. It is still with us. It has become an overwhelmingly positive thing for the prosperity—past, present and future—of the peoples of the world.

[From 1500 to the Napoleonic Wars, there were major wars between maritime Powers. From the Napoleonic Wars to the present, major wars involving maritime Powers have typically been against continental anarchy Powers. The Iran War of 2026 is very much a case of this.]

Most of the Middle Eastern states want to integrate into that maritime order more, not less. Hence proposals such as IMEC—the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.

The Iran war—which is the first war that Israel has fought with the US, as well as the first war Israel has fought alongside Arab countries—is not a “distraction” war. It is not about Epstein, or Israel, or Bibi’s legal problems. It is the Atlanticist maritime order asserting itself against a disruptive regime almost everyone else in its region is completely over and which is now attacking all its Arab neighbours, hoping to raise the cost of the war beyond what the US will endure.

Ignore all those who analyse it through their (ultimately childish) political obsessions. Look at it through the prism of history.

All those who wished for a multi-polar world order that was less US-dominated? Congratulations, you have the results of a more contested world order—more violence, not less.

The transcript has been lightly edited to remove pause noises and words.

Winston Marshall

54:20 I’d love to take your impression on this. I’ll start by saying mine is international law is a mirage, in my opinion, and it’s only ever been might that keeps people acting moderately well behaved. It’s only been American hegemony that has kept the peace. And I don’t quite see the point in international law. If anything, international law seems to be an excuse for people like my prime minister, Keir Starmer, to do nothing and to be a coward, as he’s keeps landing on international law. What do you think about international law?

Haviv Rettig Gur

55:00 I share your skepticism and I share it deeply and viscerally.

I remember as a young man in the army, I was a soldier on the northern border for a short time and standing on that Israeli border looking into Lebanon and seeing villages of South Lebanon, Shia villages, ordinary places, populated by wonderful, decent, ordinary people. and knowing that a 100,000 missiles and rockets are buried under those villages, and knowing that Iran put them there, and knowing that Hezbollah manned them, and knowing that the purpose was to make sure that any Israeli attempt to clean out those missile arsenals—meant to set our cities on fire—would have to result either in many civilians fleeing or many civilians dying, and standing there and then seeing alongside places that we knew were Hezbollah outposts or maybe even, we knew, Hezbollah tunnels, were built alongside UNIFIL bases, alongside UN forces that were meant to challenge Hezbollah, prevent Hezbollah—disarm Hezbollah after 2006—but in fact just served as themselves human shields who refused to ever challenge Hezbollah and allowed the arming of this militia buried under this massive civilian population—everything that we’ve seen in Gaza Hezbollah planned in Lebanon—and asking myself, what the hell is the UN? What is it?

UN forces in the Israeli experience, they divided us from the Egyptians. And in the run-up to ‘73 and in the run-up to ‘67, the Egyptians just said leave and the UN forces all left and then they proceeded to have a war with us. The UN forces on the Golan Heights separating the Israelis and the Syrians: well, in the Syrian civil war, I think around 2013 roughly or 14, when Jabhat Al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, was coming down the Golan plateau, all those UN forces fled behind the Israeli military line. In other words, instead of separating Israel and Syria, they ended up being people that the Israeli army now has the headache of having to protect.

There is no such thing as international community and international law when the rubber hits the road.

International law did not stop the massacres in Bosnia. International law did not stop the genocide in Rwanda. International law never stops anything.

When Bill Clinton makes the decision personally, literally, to bomb Belgrade, the Bosnia war ends within two weeks—after four years of nobody doing anything because “international law”. International law is not a thing.

It won’t protect you if you’re a small people in this world and if you rely on it to protect you, it will fail you, guaranteed. There’s zero chance it will actually save you, protect you, or do anything useful for you.

So what actually is it? Why do people constantly talk about it? Well, then you go and look at who’s constantly talking about it.

The progressives teach us a very important lesson. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it claims it is, not what it pretends to be, but what it actually does in the world.

International law does one actual thing in the world. It allows very safe, very powerful people to feel very morally righteous about their safety and power. That’s it. It doesn’t actually do anything more than that.

Europe constantly talks about international law because it has zero challenges. If it actually had a security challenge, if Putin invaded Poland, defeated the Poles—which is I think unlikely because Poland has quite a significant military—but if it did that, and now Germany had to face directly the Russian army, you know what the Germans wouldn’t care about? They wouldn’t care about having a lawyers’ committee figure out every air strike before they dropped the bombs because they would be desperate and they would actually have to survive this thing and win this thing. And so international law only survives because Germany doesn’t think that’s ever going to happen and so it can just talk about the the great and enormous and self-congratulatory morality.

I want international law. I wish we had international law. I desperately wish we had international law.

You know what international law would mean? It would mean that Iran was constrained by the world from being able to ever try to exterminate my people from putting 200,000 rockets onto the villages of South Lebanon. That would have terrible costs for Iran. Costs Iran cannot afford.

Because that’s what law is. Law is enforceable. If you can’t enforce it, it’s not law. It’s a conversation. It’s a suggestion. It’s a best practice at best.

You know what law is? Law flows from the population that it imposes itself on. Right? I have a social contract with law. Community law enforcement infrastructure protects me. Every day they go out there and they catch the bank robbers and they catch the people speeding who threaten my teenage son so that he can drive on a safer road. And therefore, because they protect me, they can also demand of me things.

Well, international law can’t protect me. So, what right does it have to demand of me? What right does it have to tie my hands behind my back in a fight Hezbollah if it can’t do a damn thing to protect me from Hezbollah? And I happen to be powerful, self-made powerful. So, you know, I’m relatively safe from an international law that can’t protect me. But, you know what? You want to take this case to the other side of the aisle and not have an Israeli declare he doesn’t care about international law? Palestinians. What the hell has international law ever done for them? Has it protected them against Israel?

Has it protected them from Lebanon, which for decades had laws on the books that were basically the Tsarist oppression laws against the Jews in Eastern Europe for a century under the Russian Empire? They couldn’t own land. They couldn’t work in professions. Lebanon treated the Palestinian refugees for four generations in Lebanon the way the Tsarist regime treated the Jews that sent millions of Jews fleeing.

Where was international law to protect Palestinians? Either from us or from anybody. Where was that? What happened to that?

You come to the Arab world and you ask about international law. Nowhere do people scream and shout and yell about international law more than in the Arab world and in Iran. The Iranian foreign minister talked about international law this very week. Well, that’s an interesting point. Israel has been taken to the International Criminal Court to face charges of genocide and various other charges. And then you actually look around the Middle East and you notice, there are no Arab countries that are even members of the ICC, that signed the Rome Statute, except, I think, Tunisia.

The Arab world demands that Europe take in millions of refugees from Syria. The Arab world took in almost no refugees from Syria with a couple exceptions of Jordan and Lebanon. I think that’s it.

Well, why didn’t the Arab world take in any refugees from Syria? Why does Germany and and Britain and France have to take in more than all the Arab world combined, each one of them on any given month, more than the Arab world ever has? And then you realize that all these Western countries in the name of morality and international law are all signatory to the Refugee Convention. You know who’s not signatory to the Refugee Convention? Just about every Arab country.

International law is the law in which the people who would behave that way anyway—the good, the decent, the democratic—constrain their ability to face down those who just don’t care and don’t plan to ever follow these laws. It’s a bad idea, if only the good people can’t defend themselves, and that’s what international law has become.

It’s not even built. It inherently can’t be enforced and actually be the one thing that I need a law to be. The one thing that gives it the right to make demands on me, which is that it protects me. It doesn’t protect me. What right does it have to make any demands?

Exactly.

Queers for Palestine, and feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, are particularly blatant examples of this. Hamas in Gaza and the Islamic regime in Iran literally kill homosexuals and violently repress women’s rights: they are religiously committed to women having less rights than men and being subordinate to them.

The inconsistency between who Hamas and the Islamic regime are, what they do, and the alleged ideals of Queers for Palestine and the feminists supporting Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran is obvious. Pointing out such inconsistency has, however, no purchase on Queers for Palestine, feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, or similar groups.

On the contrary, pointing out the inconsistency brands one as not merely an outsider, but an enemy. It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause; to the shared political goals; to the shared politicised moralised status games. Doing all the required not-noticing, the required rationalisations, is a signal of commitment.

If they can make people ignore—or, even better, embrace—such inconsistency, that manifests their social and political dominance. The propensity of academics to be “risk averse”, and be conformist in various ways, has enabled motivated zealots to create the Critical Theory magisterium that has come to dominate more and more of Anglo-American academe.

As women are more risk averse and conformist than men, this has gathered steam as academe has feminised. This effect is all the stronger when they generate an accompanying elite status strategy based on “good people believe X”, turning beliefs into moralised cognitive assets. Assets to be defended—and defended together—as shared assets in a shared status game.

By attacking such inconsistency, one is simultaneously signalling one’s outsider status and attacking the signal they are using the show commitment to the cause; to the moral in-group.

As part of such signalling commitment, believers produce commentary shorn of all inconvenient context. We saw plenty of that in commentary blaming NATO and the US for the Russian attack on Ukraine. We are seeing plenty of the same on Iran.

Even more important than this—at least among the core believers—is that, at the foundational belief level, it is not inconsistent at all. The question is not what Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Regime actually stands for: the question is, who they are enemies of.

For this is the politics of the Friend/Enemy distinction. One of the foundational beliefs of left-progressive politics is that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This was stated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Moreover, this is eschatological politics: politics oriented to a final, socially-transformative goal that trumps all other considerations. Both the moralised status games and the politics are directed against people and social structures within their own societies. The issue is not what folk outside such societies do, it is what the implications are within their own societies.

Anyone who is an enemy of such social structures, such people—literally anyone—is a political Friend. This is how the politics of the Friend/Enemy distinction works.

The dynamics of such politics were stated quite clearly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the end of The Communist Manifesto:

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring, to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

…

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

It is no accident that Marx and Engels set out the key elements way back in 1848. All forms of Critical Theory are developments of Marxian thought and utilise the same underlying dynamics and oppressor-oppressed template. They are just updates to avoid the burdens of Marx’s failed predictions; to quarantine away the record of tyranny, mass murder and economic stagnation that operational Marxism so relentlessly generates; and to move away from relying on a Western working class that utterly failed to fulfil their designated role as the foot soldiers of revolution.

Yes, this is monstrous politics that regularly generates and attracts monsters both grand (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim dynasty, Mengistu, Pol Pot) and small (such as all those who carried out their mass murders and pervasive cruelties).

Universities increasingly dominated by the Critical Theory magisterium are training graduates—particularly in elite institutions—to be conformist liars who despise people who think differently, replicating patterns within Communist countries because they are the same foundational ideas with the same consequences.

Part of such politics is that its adherents are the only ones who Truly See. This is the metaphysics where (untutored) consciousness is a realm of illusion.

The “true” reality is that the True Enemy is worse than anyone else, and absolutely Worse than anyone who opposes them. A good example of such commentary—carefully stripping events of all inconvenient context, to the extent of outright lies and misrepresentations—is here. It is a display of correct Friend/Enemy consciousness.

Those who think that the inconsistencies should have purchase, should matter, are embracing the primacy of empirical reality, not the primacy of correct consciousness. Giving lived experience priority—a development from Standpoint epistemology—is precisely about denying a shared reality. Instead, it is about whose consciousness has primacy.

Yes, it is worth reminding those outside such politics just what monstrous contortions such politics requires. But none of this will be persuasive to those who embrace such politics.

In pointing out the monstrous inconsistencies, you are broadcasting your outsider and Enemy status. Moreover, given the underlying consistency of any enemy of The Enemy is a Friend, the Friend/Enemy principle that anything that attacks the existing social order within their own societies is to be supported, is far more powerful among the believers.

References

Tim Kaiser, Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, ‘Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset,’ Journal of Personality, 2020, 88, 415–429. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12500

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Oskari Lahtinen, ‘Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes,’ Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, (2024) 65: 693-705. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.13018

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Amazon, [1848] 2023.

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, Translation, Introduction, and Notes by George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, [1932] 2007.

So, it is a genuine question whether President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in his attack on Iran. But that is a genuine question because the US has a Constitution that matters. The US is a rule-of-law state, no matter how much other common law jurisdictions may point and laugh at how politicised US law is.

In terms of the international order, however, there is no such thing as an illegal war, because (public) international law is not law. It is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law. It only pretends to be law as it has no remedies—apart from declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. (Private international law does have enforceable and enforced remedies, so is law.)

One of the consequences of this is that (public) international law, as an academic discipline, has no substantive reality-tests. There are no decisions by judges that are enforceable and enforced. This has led to academic international law being the vector by which the toxic ideas of the Critical Theory magisterium, that increasingly dominates Anglo-American universities, have infected Law Schools.

(Public) International law should not be taught at Law Schools, because it is not law. It should be taught in International Relations or Political Science Departments. A PhD in International Law should not qualify you to teach in Law Schools. Indeed, if you cannot tell the difference between actual law—with genuine remedies—and a simulacrum of law, you should not be teaching students at all.

Rules-based international order

When folk refer to the rules-based international order, they are not referring to nothing. There are various rules and conventions it is convenient for states, and other agents, to follow.

There is also a difference between the mercantile maritime order and continental anarchy. It is not an accident that the original international conventions pertained to sea travel and trade.

Within continental anarchy, it is relative power that matters. A war that depletes your resources and capacities, but depletes those of your neighbours more, is a winning proposition, within the state-geopolitics of continental anarchy. The geopolitics of continental anarchy leads states to seek weak or subordinate neighbours. The mercantile maritime order, on the other hand, is all about creating win-win interactions.

Russia, India and China are all continental Powers that live, at least to some extent, in a situation of continental anarchy. But they are also trading States that benefit from the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony. The tension between China as a trading nation becoming the biggest single beneficiary of the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony, and the interests of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), is the central strategic difficulty that CCP China faces.

Israel faces the strategic dilemma of operating in a region of continental anarchy but seeking support from states deeply embedded in the mercantile maritime order. Whether the Middle East has to be a region of continental anarchy, or can it become far more embedded in the mercantile maritime order, is precisely what is at stake in the latest conflict.

Any social order has to be enforced. This is even more true of international orders. As there is no such thing as international (public) law, enforcing an international order is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of those who actively support and enforce that order and those who seek to subvert it.

A vivid example of how central enforceability is to any international order is given by comparing the treatment of Germany after the two World Wars. Germany was treated far more harshly after the Second World War than after the First World War. The crucial difference was that the Versailles order was not enforceable by the victors and the Potsdam order was.

An order-disrupting regime

By far the most disruptive force in the Middle East since 1979 has been the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its sponsorship of jihadis and terror organisations; its own terrorist activities; its arming of non-state actors; its active killing via it and its proxies on behalf of oppressive regimes; has generated violent conflicts, massacres of civilians and disrupted entire societies.

The Islamic Regime did not start the Lebanese Civil War, which predates it. Its armed proxy—the state-within-a-state Hezbollah—has been profoundly disruptive of Lebanon and undermined Lebanon’s ability to recover from its civil war. Similar dynamics can be seen in Yemen, via the Iranian proxy state-within-a-state the Houthis. The Houthis have engaged in direct attacks on maritime trade, and so the maritime order, in the Red Sea.

The Islamic regime’s proxy Hamas has done everything it can to disrupt Arab states making peace with Israel; carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since 1945; and turned the people of Gaza into human shields, taking Israeli hostages en masse precisely so Gazan civilians were placed between its fighters, the hostages they took, and the IDF (Israeli Defense Force). The Iranian regime provided the military muscle that kept the Assad regime in place in Syria—it is no accident that the Israelis gutting of Hezbollah, and forcing its withdrawal from Syria, was immediately followed by the overthrow of the Assad regime.

The ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been murderously disruptive of order within the Middle East for decades. Particularly now, given Israel’s gutting of Hezbollah and Hamas, and its demonstration during the 12 Day War of the lack of military capacity of the Iranian regime, governments across the Middle East are just over the Islamic regime’s endless, murderous, disruptions. They want to move more completely into the mercantile maritime order—hence, for example, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).

The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), the state-within-a-state that controls around 40 per cent of the Iranian economy, is committed to the continuation of this murderous disruption. As it became clear that no negotiations with the regime—negotiations clearly subject to the IRGC’s veto—would result in an outcome that the US, and the other states in the region, could live with, the frustration with the regime of the Islamic Republic has become terminal: see Aimen Dean’s comments on Triggernometry and elsewhere.

If there is to be a stable order in the Middle East, the regime of the Islamic Republic has to be either overthrown, or its capacities so gutted that all its energies are re-directed to staying in power. A sufficiently degraded regime would be in a position to accept a deal other states could live with.

Yes, it is entirely possible that a collapse of the regime would lead to a civil war in Iran. Yes, that would be disruptive. But none of the civil wars, or quasi civil wars, in the Middle East since 1979 have been as disruptive to the order of the Middle East as has the regime of the Islamic Republic, whose Constitution commits it to spreading its ideology.

This war is the hegemon of the mercantile maritime order (the US) seeking to move the Middle East from the continental anarchy the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran imposes on the area to becoming far more a region within the mercantile maritime order.

The Israeli-US attack on Iran is about seeking to create a stable order in the Middle East. It is an order-enforcing effort. This is very clear if you look at things in their Middle Eastern context, with a clear-eyed understanding of the history of the past decades.

Commentary destructive of context

Many people, however, do no such thing. Their commentary is entirely driven by what they think of Trump, of Israel, of the West. Such commentary actively undermines understanding.

We saw the same pattern with the Russian attack on Ukraine and the attempt to blame the expansion of NATO for that attack. NATO is a profoundly stabilising force. Joining NATO is about committing to the mercantile maritime order and protecting oneself against continental anarchy.

It is precisely because of their experience of Russian autocracy across centuries that Russia’s neighbours have sought to join NATO. If you do not look at, or understand, the centuries-long patterns of Russian autocracy, you do not understand what is going on and your commentary will actively undermine such understanding.

No war is illegal. It may be an unconstitutional act. It may be an immoral act. It may be a strategic failure. But it is not illegal because (public) international law is not law.

A much more useful question is: does the war disrupt an existing order or does it seek to enforce (even extend) it?

The likelihood of success of any war is an open question. But the US-Israeli attack on Iran is about enforcing an international order against a regime that has proved itself, for decades, to be murderously disruptive of any such order.

ADDENDUM: The UK Attorney-General declaring the war illegal has been part of what has led to the astonishingly incoherent British response. Part of the backstory is that—since the Blairite debauching of the UK Constitution—such legal determinations from within the Civil Service have been used to hobble Ministers and hamstring the British military.

The Zoom link paid subscribers require is below the fold.

Helen has also been commissioned to write a piece on Epstein, Mandelson, Starmer, and Blair—and UK politics. Of necessity, that means drawing out the implications of this earlier piece on the Epstein Files. We want input from our readers, but we’re both also still baffled by and curious about Australian absences from Epstein—even hugely wealthy and influential ones, like Rupert Murdoch.

The few Australians that do appear do so in what are odd contexts (see Kevin Rudd, for example). There’s even a serious case to be made that British-Australian microbiologist Melanie Thomson has managed to emerge from a place in the Epstein Files with her reputation enhanced.

Read more

This magisterium has come to increasingly dominate academe for a range of reasons. It generates intolerant zealots, so benefits from the dynamics of an intolerant minority.

It offers a powerful shared status game—affirm beliefs X, Y, Z and that makes you A Good Person. This status game spreads a supporting censorious intolerance, for if affirming beliefs X, Y, Z and makes you A Good Person, then denying X, Y, or Z makes you A Bad Person.

This justifies shaming and shunning anyone who denies X, Y, Z, because they are Bad People and its shows your commitment to what makes someone A Good Person. It shows commitment to the shared status game. This status game generates moralised cognitive assets, and you protect the value of those assets by participating in—or at least going along with—the shaming and the shunning.

The status game generates moral projects that the central administrations of universities can use to expand their authority, range of action, and so resources. An opportunity they have enthusiastically embraced. An opportunity that corporate, non-profit and government bureaucracies have also enthusiastically embraced.

The emotions this status game attaches to those moralised cognitive assets—care, compassion, concern for the marginalised, if you affirm those beliefs, the opposite if you deny them—also plays into fears about threatening emotions (and safety through norm conformity) which are much stronger among women than men. Women are thus systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than men.

It is an exaggeration to claim that “wokery” is just the consequence of feminisation of institutions and occupations. It is, however, true that what works for—what is emotionally resonant in—increasingly feminised institutions and occupations has been selected for.

But the Critical Theory magisterium has expanded across academe—and beyond—due to the nature of its three foundational claims:

• A blank slate view of human nature.

• A view of social dynamics as dominated by conflict.

• An activist relationship with information: that the trumping purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it.

The blank slate view of human nature—not merely that we are born without inborn ideas, but that everything that forms us is social—means that any level of social transformation that can be conceived is attainable. Provided enough social power can be assembled—to move human action, speech and thought in the correct direction—the socially-transformative society free of oppression and alienation can be created.

The grander the conceived purpose, the more energising and motivating it is. But also the more it rhetorically trumps anyone who is willing to “settle” for less than complete human liberation. This then feeds back into energising and motivating, as it provides an endless sense of being moral trumps.

A recurring version of such blank slate claims is that our “true” nature has been obscured or repressed by oppressive forces. This might be the alienation via private property (Marx) or by patriarchy, or white supremacy, or heteronormativity or whatever.

The most dramatic statement of the “repressed true nature” claim is also the earliest, in the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762):

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. (l’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.)

The view that oppressive forces are blocking our true nature goes naturally with the claim that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This dominated-by-conflict claim was classically stated by Marx and Engels as the first sentence of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

If conflict dominates social dynamics, then the prosecution of such conflict so as to achieve human liberation becomes the ultimate moral good. Coordinating the fighters for human liberation becomes a moral urgency. To prosecute that struggle becomes the most important thing one can do.

Both of these claims naturally lead to, and gain strength from the claim, that the morally trumping thing to do with information is to prosecute the struggle for human liberation. Marx famously said:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis Eleven, 1845.

Max Horkheimer, in his seminal essay Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) tells us that:

Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society.

Critical Theory is activist Theory, aimed at human liberation from the unwanted constraints of existing society and epitomises the activist relationship with information. All scholarship is trumped by this aim and so the most authoritative scholarship is that which is most committed to this aim.

Since such motivated and coordinated commitments are aimed at human liberation, all institutions must either be bent to that purpose, or destroyed, so that said human liberation can be achieved. This combination of motivation, coordination and all-trumping purpose that de-legitimises all dissent is thus structured towards taking over institutions.

What has come to make it particularly effective is that it has evolved to generate a supporting status game that people can adhere to without having any idea of where the underlying ideas come from or what their purpose is. People who have never heard of, or read, Marcuse can nevertheless prosecute his repressive tolerance strategy because they are committed to a status game of believing X makes you a Good Person, so believing not-X makes you a Bad One.

This status strategy thereby turns affirmed beliefs and modes of speech into moralised cognitive assets that folk in elite networks—or aspiring to join or create elite networks—can (and do) add to their other assets. There then develops an entire media/education/IT/advocacy non-profit/corporate/government bureaucracy infrastructure that prosecutes this strategy. They do this both on their own behalf as individuals—albeit in networks—and as a service they are selling: these are the narratives that affirming make you a good person, let us help you curate your information flows to build, maintain and protect your moralised cognitive assets.

It is creating a situation where academics and journalists are becoming less and less representative of the wider society.

One of the more contemptible patterns of our time is elite folk—who live by their networks, their connections, their social capital—sneering at working-class folk who arc up at having having their locality-based social capital swamped by newcomers flooding into their communities.

The surface doctrines of left-progressivism—adherence to which provide the basis for coordination in various times and places—can, and do, evolve over time. What is selected for is what works better to coordinate and motivate in various cultural and institutional circumstances. Hence the current selection is for what works best in feminised institutions and occupations.

The underlying foundational claims, however do not go away. As we have seen, they date back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

The evolutionary mechanism that this most builds on is human status-seeking. More particularly, status-through-moral-propriety.

Humans have always been willing to shame-and-shun fellow humans who violate accepted norms. This is very clear from the work of Christopher Boehm and others on the dynamics of foraging societies. The women’s movement became semi-notorious for it. Left-progressivism has evolved on the basis of basic, foundational claims that allow the very effective mobilisation of the shame-and-shun mechanisms.

Levelling downwards

It has also mobilised the levelling strategy that humans—particularly but not only women—mobilise to improve their social position. The levelling strategy is directed against those with more status and resources, to transfer both downwards.

Humans do not typically direct the levelling strategy downwards—so against themselves—thereby transferring resources and status from themselves to those who have less of both. That makes one’s situation worse, which is not a winning evolutionary strategy. Humans using the levelling strategy regularly seek to level downwards towards them, rarely upwards away from them.

What makes Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism so historically odd is precisely that they exult such downward transfers (so levelling up). They do, however, sharply distinguish material transfers from spiritual status. One gets improved spiritual status from the downward material transfer: provided, of course, that what you are giving up is yours; that you are actually making a material sacrifice.

Left-progressivists makes a rhetorical fuss about such downward transfers: but not from themselves. It is very conspicuous that their moral invective is directed upwards, as one would expect in evolutionary terms and particularly as a status game. The most obvious emotion in Communist propaganda—and left-progressivism writing generally—is anger: anger at those materially and socially above them.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell is quite correct: Marx is way more animated by animus toward the bourgeois than any putative love of the proletariat. Indeed, in The Communist Manifesto, it is made quite clear that that proletariat need their cognitive superiors—the Communists—to lead them to liberation.

Moreover, the demanded transfers are not personal sacrifices. On the contrary, they are to be compelled on others, to be taken from those who have materially more.

It is those who commit themselves to the grand project who oversee this grand process—with all the authority, status and resources that accrue to doing so. Left-progressivism has never created a dictatorship of the proletariat: every one of its Party-States has been a dictatorship of (activist) bureaucracy.

A further great advantage that the Critical Theory magisterium has is that it generates moral projects—from speech codes to DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion)—that justify expanded bureaucratic authority and resources. This continuity in foundational doctrines and evolutionary strategy is why the first DEI program was the Soviet Union’s Korenizatsiya program; the next was Mao’s Black and Red identities; and the third was the Kim Family Regime’s Songbun system.

Left-progressivism generates commissars whenever it can.Nowadays, they are called DEI officers, bias response teams, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers …

In Marx’s theory, all the social classes above the Communists—as the vanguard of the proletariat—are to be abolished. Given the required transfer of social power to the Correctly Motivated, this is absolutely a classic levelling downwards strategy, with any levelling upwards being in support of the dominant levelling downwards strategy and not coming from the Communists. As all Revolutionary Marxist societies demonstrate—and, for that matter, every welfare state demonstrates—there is a huge gulf between those who are to be equalised and those doing the equalising.

These three foundational claims—the blank slate; dominance of social conflict; activist approach to information—generate various doctrinal ways of making the following claims:

• All unwanted constraint is oppression.

• What is in my head is better than decades, centuries, millennia of human experience and achievement.

The first claim is obviously highly motivating: who does not have unwanted constraints they wish to get rid of? It is also endlessly motivating, as there are always unwanted constraints, so there is always oppression, so-defined. It allows any blue-haired graduate of an elite university to claim to be oppressed.

The notion that any part of her life experience is somehow in the same continuum as, say, a zek in a Soviet gulag; or a slave being worked to death in a Caribbean or Brazilian plantation; or a Neolithic farmer woman forced to live and breed with the rapist who killed all her male relatives; is utterly, utterly offensive. But playing to people’s narcissism—indeed, enabling them to moralise their narcissism—is a social selection advantage. (This is so, provided that no reality-tests or character tests get in the way.)

The second claim—what is in my head trumps decades, centuries, millennia of human experience and achievement—is also a rampantly narcissistic claim. (It does not become less narcissistic if one hides it behind grand Theory.) But this cognitive narcissism flows quite directly from making human liberation the all-encompassing social goal that trumps all other human achievement.

Such human liberation has never been achieved. It is entirely an imagined and imaginary goal. It is also terribly useful—including rhetorically—as it turns the imagined future into the trumping benchmark of judgement, the trumping moral and epistemic authority. Anyone defending anything with a past—so with flaws—is rhetorically trumped by the imagined vision of the perfected future.

All human history becomes condemned for failing to achieve that imagined liberation. The past becomes a litany of human oppression, while the present is structures of the same. None of such pervasive moral failure provides any basis for learning, beyond what does not work; what has morally failed. Yet past and present constitutes all the information we have, as there is no information from the future. This is a pathological relationship with information.

So, the three foundational claims are highly motivating; they readily enable a great deal of coordination; they naturally combine both towards taking over institutions. Thus is the enduring power of left-progressivism for over two centuries explained.

These three foundational claims also have something else in common. They are not true. They are all false. Nor are they a little bit false: they are comprehensively false.

Systematic falsity

Humans are not blank slates. We are evolved beings with genetic variations between individuals and variations in the distribution of genetically-transmitted traits in different human populations. The longer a human population has been separate from other populations, the more differences in the distribution of such traits there will be.

The more intense the genetic-selection bottlenecks, the more differences in the distribution of such traits there will be. The male expression of human genes is systematically much better at forming and maintaining effective teams than the female expression of human genes. This is in part because of different evolutionary roles across human history but those differences became much more intense due to the y-chromosome Neolithic bottleneck that arose once farming and animal herding had developed enough to create increasingly intense social conflict over farm and grass lands.

Only about 1-in-17 male lineages made it through the bottleneck. Female lineages were unaffected. Effective male teams killed less effective male teams, took their women as the spoils of victory and bred with them.

Generations of women bred with their rapists who had killed all their male relatives. It is horrible to contemplate. (That romantic novel trope of the male brute tamed by a love of a good woman, well …)

The continuing consequence has been that boys and men are much better at teams than girls and women. Hence teenage boy sporting teams regularly crush adult female national teams. Hence—given that institutions and organisation are formalised teams—there are issues with the feminisation of institutions, organisations, occupations.

The left-progressive program of human liberation requires a concentration of social power that no set of Homo sapiens can be trusted with. The very things that makes left-progressivism work so well to motivate and coordinate themselves operate off a combination of evolutionary mechanisms, plus human variation, operating in various social contexts. Homo sapiens will continue to be Homo sapiens.

The grand social and human transformation will not—indeed cannot—happen. This is so even if we engage in some grand genetic manipulation. For enormous levels of knowledge would be required; genes probably do not work as required; selection processes would still happen; it would require abolishing genetic variation; and it would almost certainly require suppression of traits that are necessary to be a socially competent, resilient, reproducing species. (See the problem with The Pax in the film Serenity.)

It is also not true that human social dynamics are dominated by conflict. Indeed, the opposite is true: every human society is dominated by cooperative mechanisms. The more complex and larger the society, the more that is true.

We are the biosphere champions at non-kin cooperation because we are so able to develop cooperative mechanisms. Western states came to dominate the planet because Medieval Christendom—riffing of how Rome did it—put non-kin cooperation on social steroids.

If you see human societies as dominated by conflict, not only are you basing your program on false claims; you will systematically undervalue, and under-consider, such cooperative mechanisms. You will therefore degrade or break such mechanisms.

We can see this process in progressive-governed cities in the US, where the mad program of redistributing status breaks giving prestige to pro-social actions and stigmatising anti-social actions.

An even more dramatic example of under-valuing—indeed failing to notice or understand—key mechanisms of social cooperation is the disastrous consequences of Marx’s (false) labour theory of value.

By (falsely) characterising all value as generated by labour, Marx systematically under-valued the discovery, coordination and risk-management roles that commerce is structured to do. The attempt to replace commerce with central command—to bureaucratically replace commerce—proved to be a serial disaster that no Marxist regime has been able to fix, except by allowing commerce to once again do its thing.

Marx’s economics were developed to serve his social vision. Hence it has proved relatively easy to unplug that economics, and class analysis, from the foundational claims and put other social groupings into the underlying vision—race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, indigenousness, disability … This is the basis of the Critical Theory magisterium.

The Critical Theory magisterium both systematically ignores and/or undervalues the cooperative social mechanisms whose good operation is required for a well-functioning society while also systematically undermining them as “oppressive” structures whose elimination will allow social transformation to take place. As every single attempt to do so shows, no it will not.

What is “de-colonisation” but seeking to replicate in high-functioning societies that passed the stress-tests of history with flying colours the patterns of lower-functioning societies that failed them? But, of course, one of the deep taboos from the normative dominance of blank-slate claims via elite status games is to not notice inconvenient successes or inconvenient failures.

So much of this is built on the disastrous activist relationship to information. Activism corrupts and degrades every realm of human action whenever it imposes on that realm pre-set requirements from outside. We can very much observe this in the degrading of area after area of popular entertainment by the imposing of the “Diversity Message” on behalf of the (almost entirely mythical) “Modern Audience”.

The only source of information we have is past and present. The future provides us with no guide at all. Certainly not our imaginings of the future, which so easily become directed to very self-serving ends, as the entire history of left-progressivism demonstrates.

So much knowledge is dispersed and embedded. It is not centrally articulated and often can’t be. There is a huge amount of such embedded learning in the institutions and practices we inherit from the past. Yes, they have to be allowed to evolve to adapt to changing conditions, but we humans are very bad at creating Theories to so adapt.

Especially when those Theories are not subject to adequate—or any serious—reality-tests. A huge problem with academe is so much of it treats approval by other academics as an authentication procedure when such approval is very much not a reality-test. Structures of raging falsity can be—as they way too often are—“authenticated” by academic approval, if they play correctly to academic status games.

Useful falsities

Alas, even the falsity of the foundational claims is a motivating and coordinating advantage. For their very falsity becomes a mechanism for displaying commitment to shared purpose, to the shared status-game. The not-noticings and rationalisations one has to do to signal one’s adherence to the correct doctrines and affirmations of the moment display one’s commitment to the same.

The Trans madness is an excellent example of this. Claiming that a person with a penis is a woman—and that the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of a gender non-conforming child is care and compassion—requires monumental levels of not-noticing and rationalisations to support a bunch of evil lies that destroy lives. Something that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated their ability and willingness to do. But their earlier confreres did the same with Castro, Mao, Stalin …

The current cohort display by their not-noticings and rationalisations their commitment to the socially dominant left-progressive status claims generated by the Critical Theory magisterium of the universities especially strongly with Trans. Such status claims have been spread via gay and lesbian non-profits—who shifted to Trans to keep the donation flows going—and by mainstream media whose business model has become selling the narratives the affirming of which made one A Good Person.

This status game is one that so many mainstream journalists became committed to. Indeed, it is part of a matrix of status games that more and more journalists in the mainstream media have become committed to.

But the Trans madness—however horrible for specific individuals and families—is a relatively minor example of the disasters for human flourishing that are the consequences of operating from the three foundational false claims of left-progressivism.

The first—even obvious—point to make is that left-progressivism never achieves what it says on the tin. Ever. The past and present which has failed to achieved the morally-trumping human liberation that justifies all this includes every left-progressive regime ever.

But that failure is not just a failure to achieve human liberation. It is worse than that. Left-progressive governance is regularly a disaster for human flourishing. Mass murder, terror-famines, tyranny, poverty, economic stagnation, intensely exploitive Party-elites: these are the wages of left-progressive governance when it achieves the social dominance it seeks.

Even when it just achieves local control, we see failure. Left-progressive urban government in the US is a litany of failure, from street non-cleaning through entrenched homelessness to crime surges. The current “woke” version of left-progressivism—which seeks to redistribute status—breaks a basic social mechanism, as it separates prestige and propriety from pro-social behaviour and strips stigmatisation from anti-social behaviour. Elevated crime, economic stagnation, fiscal stress, problems with providing basic services: this is what we can observe in such cities.

So, the question arises, how can something based on such false claims, and which has a litany of failures of governance, get so far, and does so in democratic societies? This is due to two factors:

• The expansion of the unaccountable classes.

• The accelerating effect of the coordinating unreality of social media.

The unaccountable classes are all those who are paid to turn up, so their incomes do not directly rely on their performance generating ongoing consent for their income. They include a large proportion of paid employees. They include most people in any bureaucracy, corporate, non-profit or government. They include academics, teachers, public broadcasting journalists.

If one is not subject to the reality-test of performance, then status games that do not require reality-tests become very, very attractive. Such status games the Critical Theory magisterium generates in abundance.

Consider the package it generates: that its adherents own morality; that those who disagree are morally illegitimate and epistemically incompetent; that the past is irretrievably sinful, the present oppressive; that the imagined future—from which we have no information—provides a reliable, indeed superior, benchmark of judgement; that nothing is ever their fault. It is a package made for those who lack systematic reality-tests or character-tests, or where shaming-and-shunning status games can override the same. The larger the unaccountable classes become, the more such politics can be selected for.

The networking unreality of social media has, demonstrably, generated an accelerating effect. That on social media we interact with narrow avatars of humans that lack the full-feedback effects of a living person means that the self-deceiving mechanisms of relational aggression—where you hide your aggression from yourself, and others, behind moral or social concern—can get full flight. Linguistic taboos become king, while online mobbing is so much quicker and easier than the real thing.

These are social displays of performative “goodness” and of casting out “devils”. But a performance of goodness structured to impose costs—including cruel costs—on others is just the ticket for the socially-impoverished feedback-narrowness of social media.

Social media provides a remarkably low personal cost, but potentially very large effect on others, vehicles for moralised social cruelty.

As both Rousseau and Marx were pretty vile human beings, we should be deeply sceptical of any notion of human good emanating from such people, because it will be a conception compatible with being a vile human being. Which is exactly what we find: a whole series of monsters, both great and small, have been attracted to, and empowered by, such politics precisely because it not only hides, it actively mobilises, psychopathy behind grand purposes.

The politics of appropriation of the property of others, and the elimination of entire classes of people, is a politics of violent aggression. It attracts violent aggressors.

It is not only the tyrannical murderous of Revolutionary Marxist regimes that is remarkable, it is their sheer systematic cruelty. A very physical cruelty in the case of the Soviet regime, a more emotional and psychological cruelty on the part of the CCP regime. (Though both regimes exhibited plenty of both.) This difference in patterns of cruelty manifests differences between Russian and Chinese culture. The contemporary politics of left-progressivism is full of emotional cruelty.

The feminist embrace of the blank slate—seeing any argument based on biology as an oppressive constraint on women—has had a disastrous effect for many women, as it lies about biological constraints. A women’s eggs age as she ages, so women’s reproductive capacity peaks in their late teens and early twenties and declines thereafter. So does the quality of men in their dating pool, while observing bad divorce outcomes discourage men from marriage. For lots of reasons, for so many women, “build your career first” has turned out to mean not having the family they wanted.

Mass urbanisation, particularly into apartments, has largely eliminated the large-family tail that positive fertility rates rest on. No-children-outside-marriage cultural patterns—as in East Asia and Southern Europe—then imprisons the fertility rate inside the marriage rate. Nevertheless, blank slatism treating biology as if it was some manipulatable social construct has misled women dreadfully.

A disastrous science of meaning

When we consider the toxic falsities that the Critical Theory magisterium generates and mobilises, Cardinal Newman’s claim, in his The Idea of a University (1852), that a university without an explicit Theology will generate one eventually—just a bad one—is very much not contradicted by the evolution of modern universities. By Theology Cardinal Newman meant the study of God, but we can broaden his definition from his statement that:

All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from Him.

A Theology is a coherent conception of ultimate aims, of ultimate purpose. To put it another way, a Theology is a science of meaning. This is absolutely what Marxism, and its various derivatives, provide. This is particularly true of Critical Theory and its derivatives.

They provide a social ontology—a theory of what exists. They provide a social epistemology—a theory of what we do (or do not) know. They provide an eschatology—a theory of the proper purpose and direction of history. They provide a theory of proper social action—realisation of a society free of oppression and alienation.

They have a realm of divine authority—the imagined future, achievement of which becomes the benchmark of judgement. There being no information from the future, it is a realm from which there is no feedback, so generates no inconvenient feedback. Since the aim of social transformation is moral trumps, no citing of information from the oppressive past or present counts against its authority.

They have a structure of sacralisation—the sacred marginalised groups, whose claims are not to be traded-off against. It generates a structure of demonisation—oppressor groups and whoever speaks on their behalf. It generates a series of linguistic and other taboos. It has a moralised caste system, rating groups on their oppressor/oppressed marginaliser/marginalised scale. Hence entire disciplines and areas of employment stopped employing straight white males.

When French economist Thomas Piketty referred to the Brahmin Left he was so spot on.

Our religiosity is, very likely, an adaptation to being cooperative self-conscious beings. Critical Theory—like the Marxism it evolved from—mobilises our religiosity. It allows people to turn their politics into their religion, their identity.

This is, of course, a very bad thing to do. The modern conflicts of political religions have been as very bit as polarising and destructive as the previous Wars of Religion.

Using politics as religion-substitute—creating salvationist politics—has also enabled a painful unlearning of the lessons of those Wars. Hence the attempts to ban blasphemy, the heresy-hunting, the reputational witch-burnings.

The Critical Theory magisterium is absolutely pushing a Theology, a science of meaning, just a very toxic one. James Lindsay provides a useful definition:

Postmodernism is really a Marxist analysis of who gets to say what things mean.

How much that may or may not be true of the original French Theorists, it is absolutely true of what their New World adapters did with postmodernism.

In the case of Paulo Friere, he went straight into a Marxist Theory of Knowledge—hence his The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is full of citations of Marxists. What pedagogy there is in the book is entirely subordinated to the Marxist analysis and activist aims. Feminism and Critical Pedagogy have been two key vectors through which postmodern analyses of who gets to say what things mean was melded with the Marxian template and adapted to contemporary conditions.

Critical Pedagogy enables any form of Critical Theory to be adapted for use in schools. This has been particularly true of Queer Theory, whose penetration of schooling has been truly remarkable.

Trans became the epitome of all this. The idea that the unwanted biological constraints of the body can be overcome; that your “true” identity was what you willed yourself to be; that such “true” identity was hidden under oppressive social constraints (“sex assigned at birth”); all in the name of the “ultimate” marginalised group; requiring heroic amounts of rationalising and not-noticing; generating a whole new set of linguistic taboos marking one as a member of the cognitive and moral elite: Trans is a perfect storm of left-progressivism foundational falsities in an online age.

Trans generates claims of divine authority from the imagined future on behalf of the ultimate sacred—because against their claims no trade-offs are permitted—minority. It also epitomises left-progressivist politics in another way: it is a pack of evil lies who cost is registered in devastated families and the hormonally and surgically mutilated and sterilised bodies of children. A cost that goes with the mass murders, the tyrannies, the terror-families, …

Mass immigration as cultural disaster

These foundational falsehoods and elite status games have interacted badly with mass immigration. What has become increasingly obvious is that, without a strong and coherent civic culture, your institutions start decaying—as the norms and rules of your institutions will not be enforced—if and when they come under pressure. Such pressure can absolutely come from large influxes of people with very different cultures, so very different maps of meaning, very different patterns of cognitive significance and so patterns of behaviour.

The combination of the elite status games generated by the Critical Theory magisterium—whose original ideas are aimed at breaking down Western civilisation and institutions—with influxes of large social “lumps” of people with cultures, with maps of meaning, with patterns of cognitive significance, that are very much in tension with—or incompatible with—the norms and rules of Western institutions, and civic culture, is demonstrably corrosive of having any coherent civic culture, and so of basic institutions. This pattern has a great deal to do with the decline in trust of basic institutions.

For the elite status games generated by the Critical Theory magisterium make blank slate claims normatively dominant. It becomes verboten, taboo, to consider differences between human groups that contradict (the utterly false) blank slate dogmas. It becomes verboten, taboo, to consider any possibility that immigrants might make things worse.

But there are differences between human groups that matter. Immigrants can make things worse. In certain respects, various immigrant groups are demonstrably making things worse within their receiving societies. The ironically named “diversity bollards” are merely a physically conspicuous form of this. Turning formerly high-trust societies into lower-trust societies is not a social improvement.

When you get as sensible a person as Noah Smith citing well-run cities in notoriously culturally homogeneous societies as a reason to import further cultural diversity into Western societies, you know immigration has become a realm of thought-terminating cliches. Yes, Noah Smith is doing so to promote East Asians as being good immigrants, but he is still citing achievements of culturally homogeneous societies to promote cultural diversity. Besides he never asks who might be bad immigrants? (Somalis, obviously; with the bigger their immigrant “lump” the worse—Sweden is now paying them to go away.)

Thanks to the Critical Theory magisterium, the blank slate is too normatively dominant, so immigrants become the only Homo sapiens in history who cannot make things worse. They become another sacred group (“no person is illegal”) against whose claims no trade-offs are permitted.

Disastrous in any context

But the foundational ideas of left-progressivism do not need culturally-corrosive immigrants to be a disaster for human flourishing. They can manage that in any and all circumstances where they take over institutions.

Left-progressivism represents the worst possible combination of ideas: ideas that are false, yet highly motivating; that readily coordinate people; and thereby easily take over institutions. So, not only are they are a disaster for human flourishing, they are structured to gain power and so be—again and again—lived and experienced disasters for human flourishing.

What stops them? A serious commitment to a vigorous pro-social civic culture. A vigorous commitment to truth. The minimisation of the size of the unaccountable classes. The maximisation of pervasive reality-tests. The operation of genuine and systematic character tests. Institutional barriers to looting the treasury: perhaps going as far as those paid by the state cannot vote.

It means reforming and gutting the universities, that have become such grotesque institutional failures. Ban taxpayer funding of activist scholarship. Replace bureaucratic research grants which are way too easily captured by Critical Theory magisterium status games with block grants for STEM. Move the training of journalists, nurses and teachers out of universities.

(In response to that stunningly stupid meme Weimar problems require Weimar solutions, yes, it is demonstrably true that just shooting enough left-progressives also stops them. That was proved in Spain in the late 1930s, in Indonesia in the mid 1960s, in Chile in the 1970s, in Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in Iran in the early 1980s, in… Apart from the obvious murder-is-wrong, unless your civic culture and institutional structures erect effective, continuing systematic barriers against its revival, left-progressivism just get re-selected for, as Spain is currently experiencing.)

Such program of systematic barriers is not an impossible program to assemble and implement. But it is a program that needs to be actively and seriously assembled and implemented. This means refusing to give any ground to these destructive falsities and their toxic moral grandiosities.

The conventional centre-right has—again and again—failed to do even that much. At various times, they have done the opposite. Hence, in country after country, they have been pushed aside by national populists. (In large part, because they listened to economists on immigration and entirely failed to realise how much immigration is a cultural issue.) Whether the national populists can do better, we shall see.

ADDENDUM. This is how people behave in Communist regimes. It is what the Critical Theory magisterium that dominates our universities produces.

Under the Critical Theory magisterium, academe has become the most corrupt industry in the Western world.

References

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Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A Spiral of Silence

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one point: Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Not a week has passed without the publication of an open letter…

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3 months ago · 109 likes · 35 comments · Maarten Boudry

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Badly done monetary policy includes chronic inflation and stagflation—where both inflation and unemployment are high. Disastrous monetary policy includes hyperinflation—the Zimbabwean hyperinflation being a spectacular example—or some debt-deflation disaster, as in the 1930s Great Depression.

Monetary policy can be done well. Keeping expectations about the value in goods-and-services of money stable, and—directly or indirectly—expectations about the (positive) growth of spending in the economy stable, is good monetary policy. That produces the Great Moderation. Australia, from “the recession we had to have” until the pandemic shock was an example of such monetary policy.

If an economist said “monetary policy is good” or “I favour monetary policy”, they would be rightly regarded as saying something pretty silly, as how monetary policy is done matters so greatly. Yet as sensible an economic commentator as Noah Smith thinks it fine to say “immigration is good” and as perceptive an economist as Scott Sumner thinks he has said something sensible when he says “I favor immigration”.

The fact they think these are sensible statements to make tells us exactly how economists get immigration wrong. These statements treat immigrants as if they are a homogeneous, economically positive, group in all the ways that analytically count—including the implicit claim that the economic effects are all that matter and are reliably positive. That immigration is so wonderful that the net marginal benefits reliably exceed net marginal costs over all the ranges across which immigration happens and across all immigrant groups. That immigrants are the only Homo sapiens in human history who can’t make things worse.

You may claim to be agnostic at the optimal level of immigration, but even that implies it is just a level problem, not a content problem.

Given that the negative effects of mass immigration include fracturing countries along existing fault-lines leading to civil war—[Mexico in the 1830s], in the US in the 1860s; in Jordan and Lebanon in the 1970s—and mass rape of underage girls (Britain’s problem with “grooming gangs”), this is a deeply silly way to think of immigrants. (Actually, it is an offensively historically illiterate way to think about immigration.)

Immigrants are people. People vary in all sorts of ways that matter for the flourishing of human societies. They also vary quite dramatically in ways that affect how sustainable a liberal society is. People can make things worse.

Neither the costs nor the benefits of immigration are evenly distributed across recipient societies. If one talks of immigration as if it is reliably positive, that not only massively discounts discussion of its costs, it particularly discounts the claims of anyone who suffers disproportionately from the costs of immigration. As that is very much the resident working class—a group whose views and experiences economists rarely have to grapple with, and who they have social-status reasons to discount—this effect is not accidental.

Now, if you think the only things that vary between societies are institutions and policies—that we humans are otherwise interchangeable widgets, so people moving from countries with worse institutions to better ones is unproblematically a net gain—then treating immigrants as if they are interchangeable widgets may make a certain superficial sense. It takes astonishing historical ignorance to think in this way, but if you are the right sort of Theory-fool, it makes a certain superficial sense.

A Theory-fool is my term for what Adam Smith calls a man of system:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Yet treating immigrants as interchangeable widgets—to be analysed as if countries are analytically arenas for transactions where efficiency is what counts above all—does not make all that much sense, even in its own terms. If immigrants change the balance of labour and capital in a society, that matters. The level of capital—including skills, i.e. human capital—that immigrants bring with them matters even more if you are running a welfare state that transfers income from high-income folk to low-income folk.

People can make things worse

If you are running a welfare state, then importing low-skill immigrants will put increased pressure on the fisc. Importing large numbers of low-skill immigrants then makes one’s welfare state less financially sustainable over time, as copious evidence from Europe is now demonstrating. (Europe is famously 12 per cent of world population, 25 per cent of world GDP and 60 per cent of world welfare spending: of course the impact of immigration on welfare states matters.) This is aggravated if immigrants come from populations that have been marrying their cousins for centuries, driving up their rates of birth defects, increasing their sickliness and so driving up health costs.

But the comments by Noah Smith and Scott Sumner demonstrate something else that is quite conspicuous—how mainstream American commentary on immigration ignores European experience and the European debates over immigration. This is not a pattern one sees elsewhere. In Japan, for instance, the Western European experience of immigration is very much seen as something to avoid. Ignoring the European experience of immigration seems to be a very American arrogance.

Even more basically, the claim that the only things that vary between societies are institutions and policies—that we humans are otherwise interchangeable widgets—is flatly wrong. Any commentary that treats immigrants as homogeneous in all the ways that count is either intellectually negligent foolishness or disingenuous charlatanism.

First of all, relying on institutions to generate convergent behaviour in Western societies requires that their rules and norms are enforced. One of the deep dysfunctions in the contemporary West—particularly in Anglo-America—is that elites are not sufficiently enforcing those institutional rules and norms. This is from a mixture of cowardice, political patronage games, and morally performative deference to favoured (“marginalised”) groups shading into outright subversion of those norms and rules (e.g. “decolonisation”), due to how elite status games have evolved, as I discuss in this review of Musa al-Gharbi’s mostly excellent book.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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4 months ago · 64 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

Indeed, mass immigration can—and increasingly is—setting up downward spirals. The need for immigrant votes encourages politicians not to enforce the norms and rules of institutions in ways that the loudest voices in the immigrant communities speak against. The failure to so enforce the norms and rules then degrades the operation of those institutions. The more immigrants from such sources one gets, the stronger the effect becomes. Minnesota is currently providing an object lesson in this pattern, but you can see it across much of Western Europe. This pattern of moving away from the same rules for all is why UK PM Sir Keir Starmer is known as Two-Tier Keir.

The most appalling example of this—and the most egregious example of “Broken Britain”—has been the serial failure to enforce basic laws, due to “anti-racism”, interacting with Islam’s legitimation of rape, thereby creating a Muslim “grooming gang” problem across multiple decades. Conversely, Australia crushed its local problem by the simple expedient of enforcing its laws. See Louise Perry’s excellent discussion below.

This corrosion of local norms and institutions is absolutely a pattern that is strongest among and from Muslim immigrants. So, Muslim immigrants come to the West to get away from the social dysfunctions of their own countries. Then, due to a mixture of familiarity, religious commitment, Western political convenience and cultural cowardice, the same patterns that made their original countries dysfunctional are increasingly replicated in their new countries. Any public noticing of this pattern, let alone attempt to do anything about it, gets denounced by the normal patterns of moral abuse—racist!, xenophobic!, Islamophobic!

Formal and informal censorship mechanisms are then brought in to punish and deter citizens from publicly noticing any of this. So, the citizens find their institutions being debauched, their authority to speak attacked and their public discourse degraded.

But immigration, it can’t be done badly, it’s just inherently good. I am sorry, why the f#@k do we listen to economists when they talk such f#@k-witted nonsense as immigration is just naturally good? As if immigrants are these saintly folk who can never screw things up? Unlike every other set of Homo sapiens under the sun.

Civil wars, mass rapes, degradation of institutions: we can observe these consequences of mass immigration. Why pay any attention to these Theory-fools that cannot do the elementary thing of analysing immigration like they analyse monetary policy?

It’s the culture, stupid

The bit that is missing from “all folk need to do is move from bad institutions to good ones” is, of course, culture. Analysing culture has had an awful record in the social sciences. There are an enormous number of definitions of culture. People regularly use culture as analytical silly-putty—they define and analyse culture to fit whatever hole in their analysis is required to be filled.

I used to be enormously sceptical about culture as an analytical concern for precisely these reasons. Then I read Kenneth Pollack’s PhD dissertation on Arab military effectiveness, and my analytical world changed. The work of Glenn Loury, James C. Scott, Joseph Henrich, Garret Jones; Jordan Peterson noting that we humans cognitively model significance not facts; all added to taking culture seriously.

Trying to find things that only humans do compared to any other species is surprisingly hard. Finding things we do at orders of magnitude greater levels than any other species is easy.

One thing that we humans do way better than any other species is non-kin cooperation. Medieval Christendom took that advantage, put it on steroids, and came—as Western civilisation—to dominate the planet from doing so.

Due to our incredibly biologically expensive children—it takes almost 20 years to train a forager child to garner as many nutrients as they consume—all humans societies transfer risks away from child-rearing and resources to child-rearing. We organise doing these things via culture.

Yes, cultures generate institutions, but our organisation of our societies to so cooperate starts with culture. That need to organise pervasive patterns of cooperation is why we have both culture and institutions.

Both culture and institutions operate to deal with collective action problems. We are the cultural species par excellence because we are the non-kin cooperation species par excellence.

Institutions are the systematic operation of norms and rules. We can think of families as informal institutions but the reality is we grow up immersed in culture far more than any formal institutions. There are reasons that parents in all cultures are nervous about peer groups.

Moreover, as I have noted repeatedly, we cannot neatly separate culture and incentives precisely because we humans cognitively model significance not facts. Culture is what gives us shared maps of meaning, shared patterns of significance. It is hugely easier to organise and maintain institutions when participants share patterns of significance, and so share norms and expectations.

It has become more and more obvious that how organisations and institutions work—or not—depends greatly on the culture of those interacting within, and without, the institution. Families and kin-networks operate as intermediaries between the same. The Roman Republic, the Greek city-states, the Papacy, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches; medieval Christian rulers; the knightly and noble class; everyone who ran a medieval manor; all participated in the systematic suppression of kin-groups in the Classical Mediterranean, Medieval European and Early Modern European worlds for good reason—to destroy an alternative source of authority and social action.

Rulers come and go. The kin-group is forever. This became not so in the Graeco-Roman Classical World, then European Christendom, as kin-groups were suppressed. This suppression created far more individualistic cultures than the human norm. (Kin-groups held out in the non-manorial, agro-pastoral Celtic fringe and the Balkan uplands, until they didn’t.)

Culture is built on the after-birth mechanisms for transferring information; but cultures also shape that information, they shape what is transferred and how. They are shared maps of meaning; shared patterns of significance; plus the bundles of life strategies that go with the same.

Yes, people can (and do) move between cultures. Yes, cultures evolve. But, just as we are not accidentally or incidentally social beings, we are not accidentally or incidentally cultural ones. On the contrary, the two march together. As a Darwinian psychologist with Jungian predilections says:

Now, being is not the same thing as objective reality. Being is what you experience as a conscious creature. That’s being.

Culture profoundly affects how you view and experience the world. Not in some robotic way, but in a pervasive way—especially when it is reinforced within your social networks.

Liberal universalism is itself predicated on an individualism that is the product of a particular cultural and civilisational matrix and is not remotely a universal perspective among humans. Western liberals are so often unable to see how specific to Western cultures the individualistic maps of significance through which they experience and view the world are.

As the scholarship has made increasingly clear, people from different cultures will react differently to the same circumstances. That is because, cognitively, they are not the same circumstances.

This means that people from different cultures—so with different maps of meaning, different patterns of significance—will react differently to institutions. This is why, what superficially look like the same institutions perform so differently in different cultural landscapes.

Hence we end up with patterns such as the correlation between how collectivist cultures are and how corrupt states are being 0.91. (Somali culture is, of course, highly collectivist and clan-based.)

This is why it is so important for high-functioning societies to insist that the norms and rules of their institutions are enforced. But that takes a strong level of cultural confidence. It does not happen in a period of cultural collapse.

What does cultural collapse looks like? When Western elites fail to enforce the norms and rules of our institutions and cultural heritage is no longer transmitted, but rather is actively debauched, subverted and “decolonised”. A cultural collapse that makes mass immigration way more costly as both cause and effect. Indeed, as we have noted, mass immigration spirals up the corrosive effects, as mass immigration puts those norms and rules under more and more pressure, and immigrants are more and more used as excuses not to enforce the norms and rules of the institutions, that make Western countries attractive places to come in the first place.

This pattern of cultural collapse; when the norms and rules of institutions are no longer enforced; when cultural heritage is not only no longer transmitted but is actively debauched; is what we can observe across the Western world. This is a pattern of cultural collapse largely arising out of our toxically incompetent (to put it “positively”), or deliberately destructive (to put it more negatively), universities.

As said universities are increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium that explicitly aims at the systematic subversion and replacement of Western culture, institutions and civilisation, the original intent of the core ideas is to be so destructive. What has given them far more reach is the transmutation of ideas from Critical Theory and its derivatives (Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Settler-Colonial Theory, etc.) into elite status signals, into elite cognitive assets—what you have to affirm to be a good person; to be of the moral elite.

More and more, the West, particularly Anglo-America, suffers from skin-suit institutions. Institutions that no longer do, or no longer do well, what it says on the tin they are supposed to do, but nevertheless garner resources, and insist on respect, as if they were still doing what they are supposed to be doing. This includes mainstream media that sells narratives of “this is what good people, informed people, believe” resulting in selectively curated information flows, so information siloes and “bubbles”.

Doing mass immigration badly includes fracturing countries along their fault-lines that extend to civil war; serious political fracturing along provincial/metropolitan and generational divides; mass rape, increasing crime in various localities; degrading institutions … Mass immigration can be done really badly. Any analytically serious approach to immigration would grapple with how badly mass immigration can be done.

The trouble is, so many economists are not analytically serious about immigration. They are performing “skin suit” economics. They engage in the superficial forms of economic analysis—and demand respect for doing so—while refusing to get into the meat of the subject. Because, of course, the meat of the subject leads to inconvenient places.

Such places are inconvenient in a social sense. One is clearly Not A Serious Person, Not A Serious Economist, unless you repeat mantras such as immigration is good and you favour immigration.

Limits of mainstream Economics

It is, however, also inconvenient in an analytical sense. To analyse immigration seriously you have to go to places that demonstrate, very clearly, the limits of Samuelsonian “social physics” Economics.

That one can walk into any shop, market or bazaar anywhere across the planet and the same conventions of property operate, is a realm of astonishing commonality in human behaviour. That the loss-gain-risk pressures of commerce are so powerful leads to more commonalities in human behaviour. This enables economists to identify, and make robust predictions of general tendency, in these realms of human action.

Similar pressures operate in, say, military affairs: but only up to a point. It is easily possible to have cultural patterns that get in the way of being militarily effective. When the British, for example, identified martial and non-martial “races” (i.e., ethnicities) they were observing something real.

Military analyst S.C. “Sally” Paine explains why so much of what seems baffling about Japanese military and strategic behaviour in the Pacific War makes far more sense if you look at Japan’s military culture.

Kenneth Pollack identified features of Arab culture that get in the way of effectiveness in modern conventional warfare because of huge difficulties dealing with the fluidity of modern warfare. A striking example of this was the Toyota War, where the combined forces of mighty Chad—using machine guns on top of Toyota pick-up trucks—crushingly defeated Libyan forces lavishly equipped with every Soviet military item they could purchase.

On the other hand, set-piece defence and attack that they were well-drilled in, Arab forces can absolutely do. See the highly effective Egyptian attack on the IDF’s Suez Canal defences in 1973 or the series of set-piece Iraqi offences against Iranian positions in the late stage of the Iran-Iraq War, or the Iraqi Army’s step-by-step reconquest of Mosul from ISIS.

Being good at set-piece operations and bad at fluid operations in conventional warfare flows quite directly from features of Arab culture. It is how well-trained, well-equipped British and American tank forces—whose armies had not fought any tank battles since the 1950s—could crush Iraqi tank forces in 1991 that had defeated Iran on the battlefield a few years previously. Arab militaries have the same formal institutional structures as do armies around the world, but they operate differently due to cultural reasons.

So, culture matters. The more differences in maps of meaning, in patterns of significance matter, the more culture matters.

Hence the success of mainstream Economics in dealing with the gain-loss-risk patterns of commerce, and similar resource use, is so hugely misleading. Since immigration affects every aspect of the functioning of societies—so every aspect of where and how culture matters—immigration seems to be amenable to conventional “social physics” “economic particles” economic analysis, but is so not.

In fact, it is profoundly an area requiring cultural analysis and cultural politics. As conventional centre-right politicians across the Western world have—again and again—proved to be incompetent at cultural politics, it is mass immigration that is leading them to be pushed aside by national populists. It is why country-club Republicans got Trumped; Gaullists got Le Penned; Forza Italia got Melonied; Tories are getting Faraged; and now the Australian Liberals are getting Hansoned.

It is working-class voters who tend to lead the revolt, as it is their locality-based social capital that gets diluted and swamped by newcomers. It is their rents that get driven up. It is their localities, and access to infrastructure and government resources, that get swamped. It is their localities that have crime rates surge.

But modern economists do not have to grapple with such issues, nor talk to the people who do. On the contrary, they can get their social jollies looking down on such benighted folk from their lofty moral and cognitive heights on top of their Empires of Theory. After all, these people vote for Trump/Le Pen/Meloni/Farage/Hanson, they must be awful. Besides, GDP goes up.

A splendid example of economists being socially-positioning Theory-fools is this paper, whose authors include a future Nobel memorial Laureate in Economics. When you read the paper it is obvious that those quoted therein are complaining about the dilution and loss of their locality-based social capital—social capital as a term appears nowhere in the paper.

The authors of the paper entirely fail to notice this, as the paper does not have the analytical humility to see how things look to its largely working-class subjects, it is about positioning the authors as Very Serious People, who are Very Serious Economists, who can look down on the cognitively and morally benighted working class folk from their Heights of Theory. The authors clearly engage in the necessary level of self-deception to do so. Such self-deception we Homo sapiens are very good at. Contemporary Western academics have brought such moralising self-deception to a peak of perfection.

Mainstream economists have not strangely lost credibility among national populists and other alienated folk, they have pissed their credibility away with their incompetently narrow—and ridiculously Panglossian—takes on immigration. This is the sharp end of a wider over-rating within mainstream Economics of efficiency and under-rating of resilience—the ability to navigate changes in circumstances—even in its Theory-acceptable form of “risk management”.

Hence economists talking as if societies are just free-floating arenas for transacting individuals and firms where maximising efficiency is all we need worry about, not any social cohesion nonsense. If US corporate employers import Africans so they do not have to hire African-Americans, or Indians so they do not have to train Americans, that is just fine. Why do we worry about this citizen silliness anyway?

A large reason why conventional centre-right politicians have proved to be so hopeless at cultural politics—and so have been supplanted by national populists—is precisely because they bought the delusions of economists that immigration was just an economic issue and the economists could tell them what’s what.

No it isn’t and no they can’t.

Mainstream economists then whine about this shift, taking absolutely no responsibility for their role in it. The problem was not that conventional centre-right politicians did not listen to economists, it is that they did.

This analysing-culture-incompetence of too much of mainstream Economics, coupled with immigration becoming something with such strong social desirability bias—after all, we cannot possibly agree that the Western working class might have a point, or several points—is why economists do not analyse immigration as if it was monetary policy: as something that can be done well, badly or disastrously.

It is also why economists should be ignored on matters immigration unless and until they do. Until they stop with the skin-suit economics, and start looking at the entire picture, not just what their Theory tells them to look at. But serial analytical incompetence—provided one plays the correct academic status games—works across so much of contemporary Western academe, why should economists be any different?

ADDENDUM: The Lotus Eater boys discuss the horrors of mass rape across decades as a cost of mass immigration and the callous malfeasance of so much of the managerialist British state. (A Professor of fiqh—Islamic jurisprudence—at Al Azhar university sets out the sanctification of rape under Islam.) The effects of mass immigration are not some theoretical exercise, they are what happens given the people imported and given how the state actually performs.

References

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Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

George Borjas, ‘Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 2013. https://cis.org/Report/Immigration-and-American-Worker

George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, W.W.Norton, 2016.

Maarten Boudry, ‘A Spiral of Silence: How Academia Enforces Orthodoxy,’ Maarten Boudry’s Substack, Jan. 31, 2026.

Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A Spiral of Silence

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one point: Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Not a week has passed without the publication of an open letter…

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3 months ago · 98 likes · 22 comments · Maarten Boudry

David Card, Christian Dustmann and Ian Preston, ‘Immigration, Wages, and Compositional Amenities,’ Norface Migration Discussion Paper No. 2012-13, February 2012. https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/immigration-wages-compositional-amenities.pdf

European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en

Jean Ensminger (ed.), Joseph Henrich (ed.), Experimenting with Social Norms: Fairness and Punishment in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Russell Sage Foundation, 2014.

Mohd Fareed and Mohammad Afzal, ‘Genetics of consanguinity and inbreeding in health and disease,’ Annals Of Human Biology, 2017 Vol. 44, No. 2, 99–107. https://www.academia.edu/33934871/Genetics_of_consanguinity_and_inbreeding_in_health_and_disease

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I wish to contribute to the general debate, which is why I do not put my posts behind paywalls.

I am absolutely against restricting comments to paid subscribers, because I want to encourage feedback and I dislike anything that encourages cognitive “bubbles” or “siloes”.

So, I have come up with a new series of occasional posts that will be behind a paywall—posts on my experiments with low carb (and gluten-free) cooking.

I am not a Coeliac, but my intestines really do not like gluten. Small amounts give me diarrhoea and large amounts cause considerable intestinal pain.

This is something that became clear after going low-carb over the Covid lockdowns, as I stopped eating grains. After the lockdowns were over, I suddenly started getting intense digestive discomfort, which I rapidly ascertained stopped if I avoided gluten.

I had not realised that it is possible to develop sensitivity to gluten later in life. It is. Our (comparatively recent) evolutionary adaptations to a farming diet can wear off as we age. (Adoption of a farming diet was a metabolic disaster, as is the ultra-processed/industrialised food diet.)

In the course of going keto, I lost 43kgs (95lbs). I also got my hip-to-waist ratio to where I wanted it.

Temporarily.

The ratio has creeped back up since, so I am back to waging the battle of the bulge, but still way ahead of where I was.

I am very much a proponent of the n=1 approach—find out what works for you. We vary genetically; epigenetically; in life experience; in habits and preferences. What works for one person will not work for another.

And a routine that you cannot stick to definitely will not work for you.

So, I am measuring my waist regularly (once a week), as regular measurement is pretty much necessary for success in the battle of the bulge. I am not so bothered by weight, as I do not care if I put on more muscle than I lose in fat. Hence using hip-to-waist ratio as my indicator. I have lost 3cm (1.5”) off my waist since 30 December 2025: it has gone up and down a bit, but the trend is down.

As part of this renewed effort, I wanted to replace the alcoholic drink I had been recently having in the bath. So, I tried a concoction of my own.

It had an unexpected effect. I stopped getting up in the night to pee, which had been a nightly thing, whether or not I had any alcohol.

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Mercantilism is one of those terms which is used very loosely for a variety of things, including a certain set of policies AND how they were theorised. What I am referring to in this post is a preference for a trade surplus, for exports to be higher than imports.

For any polity that (1) did not have sufficient local sources of silver or gold (i.e. bullion) and (2) whose economy was not fully monetised, in an age when (3) bullion dominated money, it was deeply rational to prefer to have a trade surplus. It was deeply rational to prefer inflows, rather than outflows, of bullion.

Money is a good. It is a transaction good. It provides a service. That service is to hugely reduce transaction costs. (Transaction costs are search and information costs; bargaining and decision costs; policing and enforcement costs.) Across history, bullion (particularly silver) dominated money, especially for international trade.

Brief diversion about money

Money can be held for later time periods, acting as an asset. Hence money can be analysed in terms of supply and demand, like any good, but you have to separate its use in exchange from its being held as an asset.

That money can be held over to later periods is why Say’s Law—that production generates demand—does not work as Jean-Baptiste Say originally thought it did. Money earned in the current time period could be held over to later periods. If people do that enough, there can be a general “glut” of good and services: that is, the crash in the level of transactions that we call a recession—or if it goes on long enough, a depression.

That debts are typically denominated in money; that money can be either a transaction good or an asset; makes money the “hinge” between output and asset markets and between current and future time periods. That is why expectations about future levels of spending, and the future value of money, are so central to macro-economic performance in our fully monetised economies.

All of this is fascinating stuff for understanding how economies work, though it is less germane to economies still in the process of becoming monetised. (We will return to these dynamics in the discussion of bullion—gold, silver, bimetal—standards.)

Back to the utility of shiny metals

Money reduces transaction costs. The more your economy is monetised, the larger it will tend to be. The less your economy is monetised, the smaller it will be tend to be. A large reason that various credit instruments developed was precisely to lower transaction costs without physically relying on bullion.

So, if your economy was not fully monetised, inflows of bullion expanded your economy. Conversely, outflows of bullion shrank your economy. An expanding economy provided a larger tax base, a shrinking economy a smaller one.

Apart from a bigger economy—most visible through more trade—meaning more tax revenue, rulers particularly favoured monetisation, as it so reduced the transaction costs, and administrative burdens, of their taxation and expenditure.

Clearly, if your economy was not fully monetised, you wanted bullion to flow in, not out. The easiest way to get that to happen, was to have a trade surplus, for the value of exports to exceed imports. So, if your economy was not fully monetised, and you did not have sufficient internal sources of bullion, it was rational to have a policy that fostered inflows of bullion.

How long did it take economies to fully monetise? Centuries and centuries. China imported silver for centuries. At no stage did it suffer significant inflation from silver “saturation”. (It did suffer bouts of inflation, and even hyperinflation, from its pioneering use of paper money.)

By the time of the first Opium War (1839-1842), the Qing Emperor ruled over perhaps a third of the population of the planet and something approaching a third of global GDP. American silver—i.e. silver from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires—had been flowing to China since the mid C16th. Perhaps one third of all the silver mined in the Americas went to China and Asia. At no point did China reach silver “saturation”, at no point was its economy fully monetised.

On the contrary, when there was a sudden sharp drop in silver inflows in the early C17th, this caused a major contractionary effect—in part as falls in transaction costs stalled or reversed—while population growth meant silver rose in value: such deflation had a serious contractionary effect, especially as peasants paid taxes in silver. This helped destabilise the decaying Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

In the C18th, bullion outflows destabilised both the northern Trinh and southern Nguyen regimes in Vietnam (Lieberman Vol.1, Pp421-2). Much of the success of Muscovy came because exports persistently exceeded imports, especially from its Volga and then Siberian conquests, creating a persistent bullion inflow (Lieberman Vol.2, Pp 218ff) that helped finance its imperial ambitions.

That China never reached full monetisation, full silver “saturation”, makes the Qing Dynasty’s resistance to European imports make much more sense. They wanted silver inflows to continue, especially after the Qing central government had expended its silver reserves putting down various rebellions, notably the White Lotus Rebellion (1794-1804).

Not thinking through the implications of economies not being fully monetised—and the role of money as a good that reduces transaction costs—has led to glib denigrations of the Qing Dynasty’s policy. Yes, there was a lack of curiousity about the outside world and an intellectual insularity. Yes, the Court cast its decisions—as Imperial Dynasties usually did—in terms flattering to itself and China. But as was also usually the case, the self-flattering spin was over the top of a practical policy.

It was in the Qing Dynasty’s (and China’s) interest that silver continue to flow into China. This is especially as the experience of paper money under the Song (960-1279), (especially) the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Ming (1368-1644) Dynasties had been rather unfortunate. It was a case of tried that, didn’t like it.

Meanwhile, in Europe …

All this contrasts with Europe, where the flood of first Central European and then American silver generated the “great inflation”, the Price Revolution. If about one-third of American silver went to China and Asia, that meant about two-thirds of it went to Europe.

The European economy was significantly smaller than China’s, was already more monetised, and had more extensively developed credit instruments, which it would develop further. So, silver was flowing into Europe faster than both increases in output and how fast economies were monetising, driving up prices over time. The flood of silver, and expansion of credit instruments, continually lowered transaction costs, generating an expansionary economic effect.

As Europe was recovering demographically from the C14th Black Death (and later) plague outbreaks, the population was increasing, driving up in-kind demand in the non-monetised sections of the economy. This population increase—generally in excess of increases in output—saw the increased returns to labour due to plague-imposed labour scarcity disappear across much of Europe, especially further away from the Atlantic littoral. The increase in trade in the Atlantic economy ameliorated the fall in returns to labour in Northwestern Europe.

The inflationary effect of the inflows of Central European and then American silver was muted, as part of the silver inflows went into expanding the monetisation of European economies. Nevertheless, we can see why, given the size of its population and scale of its economic activity, a China with larger population and output, and smaller inflows of silver, never reached silver “saturation”.

We can also measure (somewhat) the rate of monetisation. We can do that by comparing how much increases in the price level were driven by monetary factors, and how much by population growth.

If your economy is fully monetised, then inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. If your economy is not monetised at all, then any rise in the price level cannot be a monetary phenomenon. (What price level means in an economy without money is an interesting question, but we will leave that aside.)

A rising price level means that aggregate demand is increasing faster than aggregate supply. What raises aggregate demand? The use of money in exchange increasing faster than output. The population (so in-kind demand) increasing faster than output. Both these things can raise the price level.

So, the more monetised your economy is, the more inflation will be a monetary phenomenon. The less monetised—the more dominated by in-kind exchange—your economy is, the more inflation will be a result of population increase.

It will also directly signal immiseration, due to the population/land ratio increasing without matching increases in output. Specifically, the supply of labour—very closely tied to population—is increasing faster than output, due to land (and capital) constraints. Malthusian dynamics operate if technology is sufficiently static.

Claiming population increase drives price level rises only makes sense if a significant part of the economy is not monetised. So, the more price level rises are driven by population increase, the less monetised your economy is. Conversely, the more price level rises are driven by increase in the use of money in exchange in excess of increases in output, the more monetised your economy is.

Fortunately, there is a paper that measures precisely that. From it we can see that the European economy did not become fully monetised until sometime after 1700. Even then, the monetisation was not done purely by bullion. The development of banknotes enabled monetisation to spread well beyond payments in bullion, even if their value was still anchored in bullion.

Bullion (gold and silver) standards

Money as a transaction good became a mixture of bullion and banknotes. Means of payment denominated in money extended to some credit instruments. Nowadays, means of payment denominated in money, but using credit instruments, has been massively expanded by EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale).

(A debit card means the bank is borrowing from you, hence it pays you interest. A credit card means you are borrowing from the bank, hence you pay interest. They are both credit instruments, just in different directions. They are also both means of payments denominated in money.)

In 1914, most major Atlantic economies, apart from the US, went off the gold standard. From the UK completing going back onto the gold standard in 1823 to the mass exit in 1914, money as a medium of account—the thing that both denominates prices and promises and is used to pay them—was bullion.

The output-value of bullion was the output-value of money. This was gold in the gold standard countries (notably Britain and its settler dominions), silver in the silver standard countries (Germany, Austria-Hungary) and both in the bimetal standard countries (France and the Latin Monetary Union).

If bullion went up in value relative to output, the output-value of money went up and the money-prices of goods and services fell (deflation). If bullion went down in value relative to output, the output-value of money went down and the money-prices of goods and services rose (inflation).

Periods of gold rushes—of increased output of gold—were inflationary periods in the gold-standard economies. More gold meant cheaper gold, if the gold supply was rising faster than output—which, during the gold rushes, it was.

Periods when the demand for the monetary use of gold increased faster than output were periods when the output-value of gold rose, so prices fell. These were deflationary periods in gold-standard economies. The first such period in the late modern era (i.e., after the French Revolution) was in the 1820s, as the UK completed officially going back on the gold standard.1

There was another notable such period after 1873, when Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and the US all went on the gold standard, greatly raising the monetary demand for gold. The deflation became much more intense in the early 1890s. This severe depression ended with the surge in gold supply from the Witwatersrand, the Klondike, and the Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, gold rushes.

The last major deflationary episode was what became known as the Great Depression of the 1930s. As the gold-exchange rate of the franc—set in June 1928, when France completed going back onto the gold standard—meant that gold bought more in France than elsewhere, gold flowed into France.

The franc was under-valued (cheap in gold terms), hence gold flowing into France. Conversely, when the UK went back on the gold standard (May 1925), the pound was over-valued (expensive in gold terms). So, gold flowed out of Britain. This pattern somewhat poisoned Anglo-French relations.

The Bank of France simply used the gold inflow to top up its gold reserves. That meant the Bank of France—which was one of the small number of central banks that dominated gold holdings—was continually taking gold out of the monetary system. This continually increased the output-value of the gold still within the monetary system, driving prices down. This meant that money would buy more in the future, so people held onto it. This meant spending fell, so incomes fell, so debts became more and more onerous, setting off a wave of bankruptcies and financial collapse.

This Debt-Deflation economic death-spiral in all the gold-standard countries came from the policy of the Bank of France driving up the output-value of gold by continually reducing its effective supply within the monetary system. (Plus the failure of the US Federal Reserve to counter this.) Countries exited the economic death-spiral the Bank of France had created by exiting the gold standard.

For all folk complain about inflation—especially since the US finally abandoned the link of the US dollar with gold in 1971—the effects of the incompetent technocratic management of the gold-standard in the late 1920s and early 1930s were far worse. In a situation where four central banks (the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of France, the Reichsbank) overwhelmingly dominated gold holdings, the gold-standard became technocratic money.

I have little patience for gold-bugs who write as if the millennia of monetary history reached some sort of apogee in … the forty years from 1873 to 1914. Not only was, historically, silver a far more important monetary metal, Milton Friedman suggested—and he was probably right—that the previous period of 1823-1873 where some countries were on the gold standard (mainly Britain and its settler dominions), some were on the silver standard (Germany, Austria-Hungary) and others were on a bimetal standard (France and the Latin Monetary Union) was probably more stable.

The slow process of monetisation

But all this story since 1823 is a story of fully monetised economies, where money is one side of almost all transactions. For most of history, economies were not fully monetised, they included a significant level of in-kind transactions. This was particularly true of economies with significant rural hinterlands.

If your economy was not fully monetised, and you had insufficient local supplies of gold and silver—of bullion—then you wanted bullion to flow in, not out. So, you wanted exports to exceed imports.

Some of the theorising about this was rather silly. But, then, some of contemporary Theorising in mainstream Economics is rather silly too.

Nevertheless—given that money so reduces transaction costs—wanting bullion to flow in, not out, when (1) you did not have adequate local supplies of bullion; (2) bullion was by far the dominant form of money; and (3) your economy was not fully monetised; was sensible public policy.

References

Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, and Peter Howitt, ‘The Schumpeterian Growth Paradigm,’ Annual Review of Economics, Vol. 7:557-575 (August 2015). https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115412

David Hackett Fisher, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” and the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of World History, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 2, 323-389. http://culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/goldstone-efflorescences.pdf

Morgan Kelly, ‘The Dynamics of Smithian Growth,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, no. 3 (August, 1997), 939-964. https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucn/oapubs/10197-521.html

Tjalling C. Koopmans, ‘Measurement Without Theory,’ The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Aug., 1947), pp. 161-172. https://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/ec439/koop1.pdf

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume I, Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge University Press, [2003] 2010.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia and the Islands, Cambridge University Press, [2009] 2013.

Debin Ma, ‘Rock, scissors, paper: the problem of incentives and information in traditional Chinese state and the origin of Great Divergence,’ Economic History Working Papers 37569, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History, 2011. https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2011/WP152.pdf

Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, ‘The Paradox of Power: Principal-agent problems and administrative capacity in Imperial China (and other absolutist regimes),’ Journal of Comparative Economics, (2019), 47(2), 277-294. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/212/

Jacques Melitz, & Anthony Edo, ‘The Primary Cause of European Inflation in 1500-1700: Precious Metals or Population? The English Evidence,’ CEPR Discussion Papers 14023, 2019. https://www.cepii.fr/PDF_PUB/wp/2019/wp2019-10.pdf

John H. Munro, ‘Review of Fischer, David Hackett, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History,’ EH.Net, H-Net Reviews, February, 1999. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2828

Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127. https://conference.nber.org/confer/2011/CE11/Sng.pdf

Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Independent Institute, 2015.

For a horrifying number of people in our modern, highly bureaucratised, highly regulated, highly taxed, highly subsidised societies, the answer is: nothing. Nothing happens to them if they are wrong.

Note, this is different from the question of: did you follow the correct process? It is relatively easy for failure to follow the correct processes to have consequences. The what-if-you-are-wrong question also applies to: what if you follow the correct process and are wrong?

The question of being wrong has lots of layers. Something can simply block good things from happening, but those good things’ lack of happening is typically invisible.

Economic stagnation is a normal condition of human societies, in large part because what is blocked from happening is invisible. Such has become more visible in the world since the 1820s, as mass prosperity has been demonstrated to be an achievable thing. Compare, for example, the post-2008 economic performance of the UK and much of the EU with, say, the US. But such is more visible only by comparison with other societies—we cannot directly observe good things that are blocked from happening.

Even in the US, comparing the path of median incomes in different postwar periods shows that there has been a fair bit of blocking of good things from happening.

Moreover, comparison does not always resonate. People can not bother to compare or think that the comparisons do not apply. This time will be different has a great deal of wish-fulfilment appeal.

Across so much of modern societies, the what-are-the-consequences-of-being-wrong? question has the horrifying answer of no consequences to the person being wrong. (Real consequences, but very delayed, is not much better.)

I have already discussed this no consequences for being wrong with regard to the universities. But the same point applies across much of the non-profit world, the apparatus of the welfare state, etc. It applies intensely to UN bodies.

The end of the (anti-Soviet) Cold War in 1991 was a pivotal year in so many ways. Until then toxic ideas within Anglo-American academe—and Western academe generally—had inflicted their worst disasters on countries outside Anglo-America. After 1991, those toxic ideas increasingly infected Anglo-America itself. Yes, being packaged as elite status strategies was a key distribution vector, but it is also clear that the lack of an external existential threat, and the multiplication of people who suffered no consequences from being wrong, reached a certain critical mass, undermining the ability and willingness to fight off conveniently wrong toxic ideas.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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4 months ago · 62 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

The other aspect of the what consequences for being wrong? question is: what are the accountability mechanisms applying in practice? The answer is too often some version of: none, attenuated, weak or haphazard. Even if we ask what feedback mechanisms are operating?, it is often unclear that such feedback is grounded in consequences in a positive-for-human-flourishing way.

If you want a picture of bizarre, demented, feedback patterns hidden from any accountability, listen to Dominic Cummings explain how the Human Rights Act and government lawyers generate pervasive dysfunction within British government.

The delegated state

Let us consider what is known as the administrative state. That is, the issue of regulations by autonomous or semi-autonomous government agencies. It represents legislatures delegating legislative power to subordinate bodies.

Well, bodies that are formally subordinate. What accountability mechanisms do such bodies have? Typically, tenuous and somewhat intermittent ones. Some elected official or officials appoint the heads and boards of such agencies, who are presumed to control the organisation. If the agency’s performance attracts public attention—and if mainstream media does not subordinate its coverage to whatever accepting this makes you a good person narratives they are pushing—then there is some active accountability.

Generally, however, not attracting public attention is all you need to continue doing what you are doing. Which, of course, gives disproportionate leverage to those motivated and able to potentially kick up a fuss about what you are doing. Legislative oversight via Congressional hearings or Australian Senate Estimates committees or similar can provide some accountability, but much of that depends on the quality and motivation of the legislators (and their staff) and is intermittent rather than systematic (though the threat of it has some systematic effect).

Now, consider those regulators. How good is their knowledge base likely to be? No matter how conscientious they are, very limited is the answer. How well are they able to calculate the implications of the regulations they issue? Again, to a very limited degree. How quickly will the effects of those regulations show up? Often, very unclear. They can claim endless notional bad things stopped, but the good things stopped will remain invisible.

So, why does China dominate drone production? In part, because the US FCC banned drones operating beyond line of sight. China just builds drones.

Once you think through the knowledge problems of regulators, and add to that the public invisibility—so inadequate accountability—of a lot of such regulatory activity, the chances that the net effect of such regulation is socially positive is … low. After all, a lot of the reason for legislators to delegate regulating is precisely to make such regulation less visible and, as much as possible, not their problem. This overlaps with providing benefits to some constituency in a way that is insulated from the vagaries of future Legislative majorities: which is also insulation from the vagaries of future democratic feedback.

One should always be sceptical of shifting government activity from the more visible and accountable to the less visible and accountable. One should also be sceptical of shifting such decision-making from those who have to weigh up trade-offs across the society to those who have much more narrow considerations.

A case of this being done right is how Australian monetary policy operates via an agreement between the Treasurer (an elected official) and the Governor of the Reserve Bank. But central banks are unusually prominent agencies, inherently subject to a lot of public scrutiny.

Much of the problem with “technocracy” is that it presumes way more knowledge than is actually held by the technocrats; greatly narrows the consideration of trade-offs; and skirts (or worse) the accountability issues. So often, making things “less political” means either pretending one is not making such trade-offs; being very narrow in your consideration of trade-offs; or making trade-offs that do not bear much public scrutiny.

One of the strong patterns in the economic data is the positive connection between economic freedom and mass prosperity and economic growth. That is, the lower the transaction friction in a society—i.e. the easier it is for people to transact with each other—the more prosperous a society is. The lower the transaction friction, the less value-creating things are blocked from happening.

It is eminently possible to have laws that reduce transaction friction, that are transaction-friendly. Indeed, social pacification by the state is a huge boon to transacting. Nevertheless—particularly with detailed and specific regulation issued by subordinate agencies—regulation generally being net transaction-friendly is not the way to bet.

Ask yourself the question: what are the consequences to the regulators of being wrong? Ask the question: how much of the relevant knowledge do they actually have? Ask the question: how well can they calculate the full consequences of any regulation?

Ask yourself those questions, and you become way more sceptical of the regulatory efforts of the administrative state. Ask yourself those questions, and the strong association between economic freedom and economic growth and prosperity makes much more sense.

Being conveniently wrong

Now apply those questions more widely. Think about how many resources are consumed and diverted by people who suffer little or no consequences from being wrong. Think how, if they suffer little or no consequences from being wrong, they might then be conveniently (for them) wrong? Think how many resources can then be diverted to the service of those able to be conveniently wrong (e.g. the homeless-industrial complex).

Much of the malaise of modern societies makes a whole lot more sense if you ask (and answer) those questions. After all, if public health regulators are wrong about, for instance, nutrition guidelines, what are the consequences to the regulators, to the issuers of the guidelines of being wrong? (The US nutrition guidelines have been vastly improved, but the scale of the needed change is revealing in itself. We might also ask whether it is a good idea to have nutrition guidelines at all, given human variation.)1

If nutrition guidelines are wrong in ways that degrades the metabolic health of the population—so drives up public health budgets—how conveniently wrong are those nutrition guidelines likely to be? Especially as we Homo sapiens are very good at being self-deceptive in our own interests, in telling stories to ourselves about our noble motives. We are even better at it if we operate in networks with the same interests and perspectives. We are better still if there are social sanctions for dissenting, or raising awkward questions against, said convenient perspectives.

How many of the mis-steps over Covid were about what was conveniently wrong for the resources, reach, and authority of public health officials? The combined water, power, inflation crises in Iran provides an example of how appallingly dysfunctional a system built on being conveniently wrong can be.

A flourishing society is a balance between law and order; commerce and production; culture and connection. Systems positive for human flourishing systematically turn information into incentives, and incentives into information, in pro-social ways.

State apparats that are both overweening and dysfunctional—where both tendencies increase the other—have become interwoven with a careening techno-commerce without the shared sense of meaning or webs of connection to restrain either. Not least because the universities, publishing, the artistic and literary fields, and mainstream media have been actively sabotaging having such.

This creates societies both flooded with information and starved of it: full of media silos, information bubbles, and structural ignorances—see the above comments by Dominic Cummings. It creates anarcho-tyranny: states and local jurisdictions that are increasingly burdensome on the law-abiding but lax about crime and readily manipulated by organised minorities.

We live in societies that have been multiplying the range and ambit of people who benefit from being conveniently wrong because we increasingly live in societies of complex density with broken feedbacks that shield people from the consequences of being wrong. How many toxic ideas have come out of the academy—and then colonised government, non-profit and corporate bureaucracies—for precisely these reasons?

There are so many examples—all the Trans nonsense to start with, but also DEI and everything else derived from Critical Theory. The mountain of blank slate nonsense taught by the academy leaves people ill-equipped to apply evolutionary reasoning to, for example, imposing selection effects on a virus by targeting a particular protein or the likelihood of emergent phenomena in Artificial Intelligence.

This is not going to end well.

ADDENDUM: A post making similar points from a systems analysis perspective.

DataRepublican’s Substack

Minnesota as a Systems Failure

In my upcoming book (preorders open next week), I argue that late-stage empires do not fail because they are weak or poorly intentioned. They fail because they become autopoietic…

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4 months ago · 442 likes · 14 comments · DataRepublican

References

Sean P. Alvarez, Vincent Geloso, Macy Scheck, ‘Economic Freedom Matters A Lot More for Economic Development Than You Think!,’ George Mason University Department of Economics, Working Paper No. 23-14. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4368623

Joana Araujo, Jianwen Cai and June Stevens, ‘Prevalence of Optimal Metabolic Health in American Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2009–2016,’ Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, Volume 17, Number 1, 2019, 46–52. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30484738/

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Murray J. Horn, The Political Economy of Public Administration: Institutional Choice in the Public Sector, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, [1980] 1996.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.

Now, lots of folk have pointed out that the diversity-is-our-strength folk are typically very much against diversity in views. Indeed, one of the uses of “diversity is our strength” is to sort the good people—who endorse diversity is our strength—from the bad people, who disagree or raise awkward questions.

Lots of folk have also pointed out that the diversity-is-our-strength folk are very much against noticing any inconveniently substantive diversity between groups. Any hint, for example, that there might be different distributions of genetic traits between human populations in ways that have consequences is very much a bad take on diversity. But exactly the same adversity to substantive diversity applies to noticing awkward cultural differences between groups.

Over a whole range of phenomena, the diversity-is-our-strength folks are also there-is-no-such-diversity folks. They want “diversity” as a performative moral marker, and no more. They want multi-ethnic—like my local cafe—but not multicultural. (So, like my local cafe.)

They may want it, but reality does not work like that. The “multiculturalism is great” folk do not want any inconvenient multiculturalism. Which means they do not want substantive multiculturalism at all, they just want the cute folkways and funky cuisines.

They don’t want female genital mutilation. They don’t want violent clan feuds in their neighbourhood. They don’t want their daughters to be sexually targeted because kaffir girls who go unchaperoned and don’t wear headscarves have shown themselves to be sluts and so fair game. They don’t want to ripped off by clannish cultural collectivists who regard deceiving outsiders in order to benefit themselves and their clan as just normal behaviour.

There are all sorts of cultural traits they do not want to have to deal with. They do not want multiculturalism at all. They just want the convenient-to-them funky bits.

That is all pretty standard—if contemptible—progressive moral posturing. (Though for sheer entitled arrogance, it is hard to go past the Lord Finkelstein’s of the world, who think it fine for Israel to preserve its Jewish identity, but diversity is morally compulsory for everyone else.)

What is worse is when ostentatious multiculturalists are functionally just fine with all the bad bits, as long as it is not in their neighbourhoods: not their raped daughters; not their knifed sons; not their ripped-off services. Which is precisely how you see progressives behaving in the UK, in the US, in Western Europe.

They still do not want to live with substantive multiculturalism. No one of any sense does. But they demonstrably do not care if their social lessers do. Multiculturalism, “diversity is our strength”, becomes a classic luxury belief insulated from reality-tests, adopted for social status or other reasons, imposing costs on others lower down the social scale.

And then they wonder why such people vote for Donald Trump, for Nigel Farage, for Marine Le Pen, for AfD, for Sweden Democrats, for … . The serious-multiculturalism-for-thee-but-not-for-me people are beyond contemptible.

References

Peter McLoughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, New English Review Press, 2016.

The first post established that property predates the state or the law. The second post examined how property could operate outside—or even against—the law. The third post looked how pervasive conventions are, the uses of law, pacification, and different institutional paths. The fourth post covered owning people and animals plus regulation as the control of attributes of owned things. An interlude post looked at why the Great Enrichment—the shift from mass poverty to mass prosperity—started in Great Britain. This fifth and final post seeks to answer the original question of how China did it.

It is useful to distinguish between the level of commerce (buying and selling goods and services, whether produced by yourself or by others) and the level of trade (any exchange of goods and service, especially over distances). Command economies—which existed well before modern Communism—engage in trade while supplanting or repressing commerce. As rulers—and their agents—were often major participants in trade, pacification could drive up the level of trade more than it did commercial activity.

When China was unified, the Emperor would be the world’s largest international trader, through the exchange of silk for horses. Some of these exchanges were vast, involving tens of thousands of horses and over a million bolts of silk (Beckwith, p.22).

But the Son of Heaven could clearly not be a mere merchant, despite a considerable amount of imperial revenue coming from the Emperor’s salt monopoly (along with—depending on the period—tea, alcohol and perfume monopolies). So such silk-for-horses exchanges were presented as the Son of Heaven making gifts of silk and receiving tribute of horses. At least some of the Chinese tributary system operated as a congenial re-characterisation of the trading activity of the Emperor and his agents. Some of such also was a conduit for commerce, both Chinese and foreign.

Since Chinese emperors were dynastic autocrats, they operated as sole proprietors of their monopolies. They sought to maximise returns and minimise costs, including managerial costs. Under an attentive emperor, their monopolies could be quite operationally efficient.

Moreover, it was the sale of the products of the monopolies that generated revenue. This gave Chinese emperors an interest in flourishing exchange. One could reasonably argue that—especially given administrative limitations—such imperial monopolies were more favourable to flourishing economic activity than an equivalent tax regime would have been.

It is also clear that administrative simplicity was a major consideration in what taxes were levied. Indeed, across civilisations, simplifying taxes and expenditure was often a major motivation for rulers in encouraging monetisation.

To recap earlier discussion in these series of posts, elevating the frequency and scale of exchange—and production for the same—is the core economic benefit of effective systems of legal property rights. Clarity of property rights—of rights-to-decide-over-what—ease of adjudication, and reliability of their protection, all lower transaction costs, potentially dramatically.

Transaction costs are costs entailed in making an exchange or other interaction. Specifically, they are search and information costs; bargaining and decision costs; policing and enforcement costs. Transaction friction is the degree or rate at which transaction costs impede transacting. (Money is a highly effective transaction-friction reducing mechanism, hence why societies keep evolving some form of it.)

The haggling and information hoarding that is a feature of bazaars arises from the patterns of dealing in hand-made goods and the significance of intensely personalised connections for flows of information and trust. Conversely, conventional mechanisms such as hue-and-cry work much more poorly in a world of standardised, machine-produced items than they did in one of hand-made (so more distinctive) items. Hence mass production and modern policing arose in tandem.

Commerce generally aims to reduce transactions costs, to seek ways of exchange with the least transaction friction. Indeed, commerce tends to reduce inefficiency: to find resources currently “locked up” and make money by releasing them for wider use. Motivated discovery is a major factor in commerce.

This is in stark contrast to bureaucracy, with its incentive to accrue resources to itself, adding to the expense (and inefficiency) of processes. If bureaucrats are paid to complete processes, then they have an incentive for such processes to continue indefinitely or, even better, expand. Hence bureaucracy can easily profit by increasing transaction friction, by people being forced to deal with it.

This is especially true if bureaucrats can then sell official approval. As is discussed in the second post in this series, corruption is the market for official discretion. The more official discretions there are, the larger the potential market for corruption.

President Xi Jinping is attempting to simultaneously increase Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control over, well, everything while rooting out corruption. He is thus increasing the potential value of CCP-official discretion while attempting to crack down on the sale of it. This is, fairly clearly, a losing game—hence the apparently endless purges.1

The tendency of bureaucracy to hoard authority—including seeking to de-legitimise other forms of action or sources of information—and to evade the complexities of competence, can also lock-up resources and increase transaction friction. Avoiding state-generated transaction frictions is why informal exchange—using the conventions of property and exchange while evading state authority—happens within, and across, the territories of states and can grow into extensive networks.

The lower transaction costs are—including the lower the risks involved in transacting and in having assets, plus the greater the clarity in who has what rights and claims—so the lower the level of transaction friction, the higher the scale of transactions are likely to be and the more willing people are going to hold, and invest in, commercial assets at scale. The state-revenue and economic growth advantages of this situation are likely to be very large.

Thus, the biggest single factor in explaining the difference in economic trajectories between Latin America and Anglo-America is that state action in the former imposes high transaction friction through complex, time-consuming and expensive property use, registration and transfer rules compared to the latter. Consequently, the scale of transactions—so economic activity—has been systematically greater in Anglo-America across centuries, with large (compounding) effects. It is also why the informal sector is so much larger in Latin America than in Anglo-America.

While the advantages of the reduction of transaction friction through an effective legal system are very real, this is—as we have also seen in earlier posts in this series—very different from stating or implying that such a happy situation is required for commercial activity to occur. It is perfectly clear—from history and anthropology—that such a well-functioning system of property law is absolutely not necessary for commercial activity, even considerable levels of commercial activity. Hence, as economist Douglas Irwin notes of the economic scholarship on property rights:

A regular finding is that informal norms are more important than formal rules in protecting property

As, of course, the case of black and other informal markets starkly demonstrate.

Property established by conventions of mutual acknowledgement—whether or not such is formally ratified by the state—can in themselves support considerable levels of commercial activity. Especially if agents within the state provide functional acknowledgment of property, even if formal ratification is lacking and their acknowledgement is merely passive acquiescence.

The single biggest benefit that a state can provide to encourage people to transact is pacification, is providing a sufficiently peaceful social order. The Chinese economic take-off after 1978 happened in a state well able to impose social order.

The social returns on pacification are large. But a state that can pacify can also predate. The state as protector and predator creates the paradox of polities or the paradox of politics, famously enunciated by the first and greatest historical sociologist, ibn Khaldun (1332-1406):

Mutual aggression of people in cities and towns is thus averted by the authorities and by the government, which hold back the masses under their control from attacks and aggression against each other. They are thus prevented by the influence of force and governmental authority from mutual injustice, save such injustice as comes from the ruler himself. (Muqaddimah, I:2:7)

Principles of China’s reform

In 2002, Chinese economist Yingyi Qian published a very revealing working paper (later expanded into a book) on the post-1978 Chinese economic take-off. When examining that take-off there is both the public, and the surreptitious, story—what was happening “under the hood”.

The early stages of economic commercialisation were not supported by the Party. But the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) had so disrupted Party control in the countryside, that the CCP found itself fighting a losing battle against peasant-driven de-collectivisation and commercialisation. In the Chinese countryside, the old patterns of avoiding entanglement with the State re-asserted themselves. Over the post-1978 reform period, the CCP shifted from resistance to acquiescence to active embracing of commerce—provided its dominance was never threatened.

It is clear from the scale of prosecutions for commercial activity—all of which were then illegal—that, even during the Cultural Revolution, there was a lot of commercial activity happening, despite the collectivisation of productive assets and commerce being illegal. This was the operation of property, and exchange, against the state, as discussed in the second post.

The implication of this was that, if the Chinese Party-State simply stopped repressing commerce, some level of commercial take-off was likely. This was especially so given China’s long history of people finding ways to avoid entanglement with the legal apparatus of the state, including its courts, while engaging in extensive commerce, manifesting the power of the conventions of property and exchange. This systematic avoidance was very different from Europe’s institutional development (or, for that matter, Japan’s).

While private commercial activity was not fully legalised until the 2004 Constitutional Amendments, starting in 1988, a sequence of such Amendments signalled the increasing official tolerance of private commerce. Yet, even before 1988, there was already considerable economic take-off and commercialisation.

Economists examining how to achieve economic take-off have typically worked back from what the most historically successful did (or at least apparently did). This ignores differences in starting points—both cultural and institutional. As Prof. Qian notes:

the real challenge of reform facing transition and developing countries is not so much about knowing where to end up, but about searching for a feasible path toward the goal.

A key insight of Yingyi Qian is that the more inefficient your starting point, the wider the range of what might work to improve economic efficiency—that is, will get more out of what you have. The corollary of this is, economic gains will tend to get harder over time, once the “easier” gains have been made: a pattern that is clear in China’s post-1978 economic trajectory.

The central principles of the post-1978 reforms in China were (1) no losers and (2) align incentives. For instance, the plan continued, but a price-driven, increasingly commercialised, sector was added on. The more successful the latter became, the more the former could be phased out. This was “dual-track” pricing: plan plus market. The switch to requiring a set amount of produce from farmers, they could keep the rest, essentially created a lump-sum tax with zero marginal taxes on their further production.

The other successes were Town-Village Enterprises (TVEs), Fiscal Federalism, and anonymous banking. By devolving a lot of decision-making to local areas, allowing local governments to keep a substantial part of increased revenue, and promoting officials according to economic performance, the capacity and incentive to discover what worked was greatly increased. It also meant corruption tended to work with commercialisation and economic growth, rather than against it.

Anonymous banking, by making private finances opaque to the state, limited predation by state actors. This gains extra poignancy with the rise of de-banking in the West, particularly under the Obama and Biden Administrations.

One of the very strong patterns of history, is that the more transparent to the state economic activity is, the easier it is to tax (or otherwise predate upon). That agricultural production in the Nile valley was highly predictable—the soil was of standard quality and all water came from the annual flood—enabled the state (Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s agents) to dominate resource extraction and allocation. Similarly, the development of the modern factory/workplace/firm made it much easier for modern states to tax economic activity (particularly income).

Feedback systems

The clear failure among the post-1978 policy changes in China was the attempted reform of the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Even the economically reforming “engineering state” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has failed to find a way to make public sector production match the economic efficiency and dynamism of commercial production.

A good social feedback system generates and uses information by turning information into incentives, and incentives into information, in a pro-social way. Central planning destroys, suppresses, and fails to use, relevant information. This both creates, and is aggravated by, poor incentives, creating profoundly inadequate feedback systems.

The price mechanism of commercial exchange economises very efficiently on information but—even more to the point—it turns available information into incentives, and incentives into information, to create value: including by active searching for value-creating opportunities, while the operation of loss and bankruptcy steers resources away from value-destroying activities. China managed to use commerce to progressively replace central planning.

Value is not an intrinsic quality but represents the interaction of human judgements of (positive and negative) significance with some particular set of constraints and opportunities. Hence the economic calculation problem—the importance of the interaction of information and incentives for how well any economic system operates.

Managers of State-Owned Enterprises typically get little benefit from successful discovery, but are likely to suffer if they try something that does not work. The safest thing to do is to follow the set processes. Such processes will not, in any strongly responsive way, reflect the interaction of information and incentives that expands (or even maintains) value.

An attentive dynastic autocrat—supervising a small number of commercial monopolies—can hope to achieve efficient production. This is not a mechanism that is reproducible at scale.

During his rule of the Soviet Union, Stalin used competing information flows—Party, Government, Secret Police, all reporting to him—along with purges that broke up local cliques, as information and control devices. Thus, he could squeeze far more out of the smaller population and territory of the Soviet Union for his purposes than Tsar Nicholas II could for his out of a larger Russian Empire.

Even Stalin, however, could not generate high quality production at scale. Thus, the much-famed T-34 tank was somewhat mechanically unreliable and part of why the Soviets valued British and American trucks, rolling stock, etc that they received en masse during the Great Patriotic War was that it was much more mechanically reliable than their own stuff. Without the purges, and the economic surge that comes from shifting peasants to factories, the patterns of corruption, stagnation and increasing dysfunction asserted themselves as the years passed. (Gorbachev sacked officials at a similar rate to Stalin’s removals of officials: it did not save the Soviet economy.)

The problem with the State-Owned Enterprises was that they were State-Owned Enterprises. As this was not a status that the reform process in China was willing to change, the SOE reforms failed.

How to China a Great Enrichment

China was confronting two problems in 1978. (1) How to make its economy much more efficient. (2) How to update its technology—both physical and social. With the latter, it had the advantage that lots of countries had, by that stage, moved from the mass near-subsistence living which is normal in human history to mass prosperity. Moreover, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, China had prosperous and mercantile Chinese-population neighbours whose capital and expertise could be tapped.

Even more basically, the technology already existed. It could be adopted and adapted. As noted above, “catch up” economic growth when you are a long way from the production-possibility frontier is a lot easier than “new discovery” economic growth when you are at the production-possibility frontier.

So, the problem for 1978 China became to synergistically improve efficiency while adopting and adapting available technology. Some foreign investment; some sending people abroad to learn; some negotiating tech transfers, enabled the latter. (Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can be over-hyped, as key decision-makers are not embedded in local concerns and connections.) Improving efficiency required aligning incentives towards increased efficiency.

The two principles that Yingyi Qian identified of (1) no losers and (2) align incentives, became crucial. No one was motivated and able to veto the take-off, except in the SOEs. The SOE reforms failed for the normal reasons public sector firms are comparative failures—they could not positively align information and incentives sufficiently and there were folk motivated and able to veto change: so the two reform principles Prof. Qian identifies did not apply.

The CCP had an extra reason to avoid creating losers. It was Communist. It was very easy for potential losers from market-oriented, commercialising reform to cite the ideology of the Party itself if they wanted to veto change. The no-losers principle minimised the incentive to block change (except in the SOEs).

Creeping commercialisation

A large part of the story, particularly early on, was creeping commercialisation simply from the CCP increasingly not even attempting to repress commerce. This came to be reinforced by the sequence of Constitutional amendments from 1988 on that increasingly signalled CCP acceptance of private commerce, culminating in its full legalisation in 2004.

This was a process where functional property rights were morphing into legal property rights. Various state actors were also becoming officially involved in commerce via the Town-Village Enterprises. Over time, many of these enterprises were themselves privatised.

Post-1978 China demonstrates that such acknowledgement within the state apparatus can be sufficient to engage in commerce at scale even though private commerce and ownership is formally illegal, as it was in China until 2004. Especially as the Party-State —due to the fraying of its local control due to the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution—had already proved itself unable to stop village-level commercialisation.

China in the period 1978-2004 was not so much a matter of black markets—the state was at first failing to, and later simply not, enforcing its bans on private property and exchange in anything remotely resembling a systematic way. It was more informal markets becoming increasingly formal over time. Markets whose existence and exchanges were formally banned, but functionally permitted: grudgingly at first, but then more actively.

That such markets could operate at all points to the key role of mutual acknowledgement in functioning property and exchange systems. It shows the power of conventional (or economic) property rights even in the absence of legal property rights.

Culture and convention

The fact that anyone of us can walk into a market, a shop, a bazaar, anywhere in the world and proceed to apply the conventions of property and exchange that operate across human societies has misled many economists in two ways. The first is that very unspoken ubiquity led many to not fully notice that property is pre-law, is pre-state, so to underestimate how important functional—rather than formally-recognised—rights-to-decide are. Black markets, the simple concept of illegal possession, show the importance of functional rights-to-decide due to (pre-law and pre-state) conventions of property and exchange.

The second error is—precisely because of the ubiquity of the conventions of property and exchange, and how powerful profit-and-loss commercial incentives are—to over-estimate the commonality of human motives. Because we humans cognitively model significance, not facts, the further we move away from the basic incentives and conventions of property and exchange, the more those judgements of significance are likely to diverge between cultures. This applies particularly as we move away from exchange to connections and to insider/outsider interactions. Transnational corporations have discovered that culture matters for their internal operations (which, of course, are all about connections).

We cannot neatly separate culture from incentives, as cultures generate varying judgements of significance, so varying incentives. That is why people from different cultures will make different judgements—and so act differently—in the same circumstances. Because they are NOT cognitively the same circumstances, as the maps of meaning being applied differ. For instance—due to different history, institutions and culture—Russians and Westerners look at politics very differently.

When looking at the apparently astonishing levels of welfare fraud in Minnesota, the Somalis involved were just acting like, well, Somalis—people from a highly clannish and collectivist culture who sharply differentiate between in-group and out-group. There is a reason there is such a striking correlation (0.91) between how collectivist a culture is and how corrupt the state is.

The problem in Minnesota was—as it so often is in the contemporary West—the systematic mismanagement of mass immigration by the resident political, media and bureaucratic elite, leading to the undermining and corrupting of American institutions by people with an incompatible culture.

The wider patterns of mismanagement of mass immigration are aided by the tendency of mainstream Economics—with its utility-maximising, complete-rationality paradigm—to default to treating people as interchangeable widgets, as “social particles”, thereby ignoring or trivialising cultural differences.

The biggest single failure of liberal universalism is to fail to understand how much liberal societies rest on evolved norms that are not remotely shared across cultural groups. Successful local adaptation is crucial to economic and other development: as China itself is a prime example of.

People do not become good liberal citizens merely by being translated to some “magic dirt” in liberal societies. Even less do they do so because occupying forces attempt to wave liberal policy-transformation wands and hand-outs.2

Understanding how patterns of connection and deference work in rural China to manage interactions without the involvement of the state does much to explain how peasants could de-collectivise and commercialise from below once the Cultural Revolution had disrupted CCP control of the countryside. That long history of avoiding entanglement with the organs of the state, and using accepted conventions to manage interactions, mattered. The ubiquity of the conventions of property and exchange interacted with Chinese traditions, and the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, to produce expanding functional commercialisation well before the shift to formally-recognised commercialisation even began.

Prospects

As discussed in the second post, command economies—given their profound incentive and information problems—tend to generate both grey and black markets. Such adjustments to, and exploitation of, the limitations of command economies readily emerge via the conventions of acknowledged possession.

It turns out, that if you have a Cultural Revolution that massively disrupts the local reach of the Party-State, new social and economic possibilities emerge. A Leninist state can then preside over a massive surge in commercialisation. It remains unclear how stable a political equilibrium a Leninist Party-State with mass commercialisation is.

What is a little startling is how much China is currently replicating Japan after the c.1990 collapse of Japan’s “bubble” economy. Both Japan and China had dramatic growth surges. Both had an interestingly pragmatic—even exploitive—approach to foreign investment. Both became the second-largest economy in the world. Both Japan and China fuelled that with centrally managed financial repression (suppressing interest rates and directing lending). Both had massive property bubbles that collapsed. Japan lost a bundle on its overseas investments. China has the dubiously performing assets of its Belt and Road Initiative. Both had huge debt overhangs. Both had fertility collapses.

Japan then went into the “lost decades” of economic stagnation. But Japan did that as an already a highly developed, wealthy, mass-prosperity country with a political system that has strong feedback mechanisms. China is still a middle-income country and Xi Jinping has been busy doing the autocrat thing of suppressing feedbacks and having no clear succession mechanism. This in a China where there is already considerable scepticism about the reliability of its statistics and so how large its economy actually is.

You look at a very populous country of highly educated people, adopting learning-by-experiment at scale, able to pull off a massive surge in commercialisation, building up huge cheap energy capacity, with considerable cultural confidence, and the positives are clear. And yet, even Japan slid into economic stagnation. It is unclear that the CCP Party-State can do better, even with the technological dynamism it is now displaying (which, btw, Japan still displays).

The trap of Communism

It is precisely because Marxist Theory does not value the coordination, discovery and risk-management roles of commerce—and that command economies have serious information and incentive problems—that the Communist attempts to replace commerce have been such failures. Conversely, Communist Parties that have let commerce happen have presided over dramatic economic take-offs.

Geopolitically, Communism—that is, Marxism as operationalised by Lenin—was the best thing that ever happened to the US, as it crippled the two countries which had the most potential to rival the US: Russia and China.

That Marxism was a disaster for Russia and China is obvious from the historical record. Apart from the demographic, cultural and scientific devastation that Marxist regimes have unleashed on their own countries, the comparative prosperity experiment has been run repeatedly: East Germany to West Germany; North Korea to South Korea; Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan to pre-1978 China.

Both Russia and China would be more populous, more prosperous, more scientifically and culturally dynamic, if they had never had Marxism inflicted upon them. Yet ideas, derived in large part from Marxism, are now more influential in the US than they have ever been—remembering that “woke” is the popularisation of Critical Theory, and Critical Theory is derivative from Marxism.

Moreover, in their updated form and mode of operation via networks of activism—rather than via some centrally-directed Party—these ideas are increasingly institutionally degrading the US and the other Western democracies via the mad ambition to redistribute status. So, such networks are doing a new version of cultural, discourse and institutional degradation that Marxist ideas had previously done to Russia and China.

If you think that is overstated, networked Zhadonivism has been creating a vicious conformity in the arts and literary fields. Such intolerant zealotry has been spreading: into comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies … . Activist Lysenkoism has been corrupting science publishing in service of genderwoo and other Critical Theory spinoffs.

The first three states to adopt some version of DEI were the Soviet Korenizatsiya program; Mao’s so-called Black and Red identities; and North Korea’s Songbun system. Activist DEI commissars (aka diversity officers, bias response teams, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants …) have been operating on the inquisitorial principle that error has no rights and they can determine error while generating “training” that is often not much more than struggle sessions. Diversity statements are used as norm-loyalty recruitment-screening devices. The US, and the West generally, has been afflicted by activist-networked versions of classic Leninist—i.e. operationalised Marxism—social control mechanisms, justified by Critical Theory derivatives of Marxism.

Elite vetoes

As we have seen, the key thing in Britain’s original economic take-off—and China’s post-1978 economic take-off—was that no-one was able to veto the take-off. In both cases, mass access to cheap energy was central to the take-off, mattering way more than, say, free trade. Though, as with the Asian Tigers, access to the US consumer market was central to the Japanese, and Chinese, export surges.

In the contemporary US—and across Western democracies generally—there are a whole set of elite-vetoing networks. We see elite networks vetoing cheap energy; vetoing employing people based on competence and capacity; vetoing the expression of inconvenient concerns, especially on immigration.

Commentator Douglas Murray’s acid observation applies:

0:30 Do the students on American campuses realize that, whilst they are being expensively educated into idiocy and uselessness, for each of them, there’s a dozen students in China working their socks off to get a lifestyle that these kids in America seem to think is their birthright. It ain’t their birthright. It’s not inevitable.

The centre-left political Parties are increasingly the Parties of the unaccountable classes—the classes of people paid to turn up, not for their performance: including our increasingly disastrous universities. They are the classes whose claims on authority and resources both fuel—and are fuelled by—these elite-veto networks. If you vote for centre-left Parties, you are—with very few exceptions, such as the Danish Social Democrats on immigration—voting for the entrenchment and expansion of such elite-veto networks.

You are voting for the self-righteous politics of no you can’t. For the politics of the blue-haired HR scolds. For public discourse shifted away from words as mechanisms of information and persuasion to words as control-and-status “magic spells”: uttering the right words to signal and raise one’s status; uttering the right moral abuse control words to make others do what you want; uttering the right curses to cast wrongthinkers out.

Yet, if one votes for conventional centre-right Parties, you are not voting for the lifting of those elite vetoes. On the contrary, at best you are simply not voting for their further expansion and entrenchment. Often, not even that is true.

These elite-vetoes are, to put it mildly, toxic. All the formal property rights and rule of law in the world will not save us from their effects.

Even less so when such elite vetoes are used to defy the law—as we see with “diversity hiring” in the US and pro-Trans defiance of the UK Supreme Court sex-means-biology ruling in the UK. For if you believe you and yours own morality—with all the sense of righteous authority that entails—then such constraints, legal or otherwise, are an insult to righteousness. The rule of law also rests on conventions.

But property rests on conventions of mutual acknowledgement. You don’t own morality, if others refuse to defer to your pretensions. The question then arises: why have conventional centre-right Parties within Western democracies deferred so much to these toxic vetoes?

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When we talk about the exit from mass poverty—as occurred in China after 1978—we are talking about achieving modern economic growth. This starts with what is often called The Industrial Revolution, but it is better thought of as The Great Enrichment: the rolling replacement of mass poverty with mass prosperity through compounding economic growth. It kicks off as a mass economic phenomenon with the application of steam power to transport (so to trade) via the development of steamships and railways in the 1820s.

The trouble with understanding the causes of the Industrial Revolution aka Great Enrichment is that it starts in precisely one country—Great Britain. A singular historical phenomenon is very hard to analyse successfully, as you cannot readily test different explanations.

This is also a separate question from why Europe developed a set of unusually effective (and adventurously imperial) states. It is easy to conflate the two together but they are quite separate.

By the 1820s, European states already dominated the globe for reasons that are entirely independent of the Industrial Revolution and which reach back into Europe’s medieval history. The great Homo sapien super power is non-kin cooperation, and the evolution of European Christendom had put non-kin cooperation on steroids.

As early as the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), great European wars were already world wars. Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay famously wrote of Frederick the Great of Prussia about the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748)

In order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

A quote which leaves out the extensive military operations in India.

When looking at the various explanations that have been offered for the Industrial Revolution, it is hard to see what is culturally and institutionally distinctive about C18th Great Britain compared to other European states—including England itself prior to the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland. Yes, the Glorious Revolution led to significant institutional changes—but they were based on adapting Dutch practices under a Dutch King. England-cum-Britain became institutionally more like the Dutch Republic, not less.

Parliamentarianism, family structures, the Scientific Revolution, central banking, relatively high wages, productive agriculture, being a highly mercantile society: none of these things were distinctive to C18th Britain compared to other European states while many applied to England well before the C18th. Just because both X and Y happened in Britain, it does not mean that X caused Y. This especially so if X also happened in countries where Y did not.

Moreover, there have been various economic “effervescences” across human history. None of them achieved modern economic take-off because none of them achieved technological take-off—specifically, access to new forms of energy at scale. Wind and water power were useful, but not transformative.

Without such technological take-off, Malthusian pressures were sufficient in themselves brought such outbreaks of economic growth to an end. Expanding population coming up against resource constraints would eventually “eat up” the economic growth. This regularly extended to some level of political collapse, due to shrinking social niches creating some combination of popular revolt and internecine elite struggle.

A key difference with modern economic growth is precisely the breaking through of Malthusian constraints—both through technological change expanding resources faster than population and falling human fertility.

The key modern economic take-off was the Energy Take-off: the adapting—starting with steam engines—of new forms of energy to economic activity at scale. The serious take-off was not from steam power in mines and factories—which affected specific goods and services—it was applying steam to transport, via steamships and railways, so touching all economic activity.

Why did that technological breakthrough happen in Britain and nowhere else? Because Britain was the first society to move systematically from learning-by-experience to learning-by-experiment at scale. Even more specifically, it commercially motivated and exploited that learning.

China dominated invention from c.450BC to c.1450AD because it was the most populous civilisation—apart from India—and it was far more meritocratic and culturally unified than India. China therefore dominated learning-by-experience, so invention.

By the mid C15th, Europe had already become better at innovating from learning-by-experience than China. The intense competition between European states clearly had much to do with this, but so did Europe’s unusually empowered merchant elites. By the high medieval period, Europe had already become a place where application of technology to commercial problems had become increasingly prevalent.

Starting around 1500, Europe took the printing press (and paper), the compass and gunpowder—all originally Chinese inventions—and transformed the world with them in a way China did not. Apart from the printing press, these were all tech-transfers from China. The same technology operated dramatically differently in different institutional environments.

None of this operated distinctively in Britain until the C18th, when there was an explosion in jobbing artisans using learning-by-experiment to solve commercial problems via organisational and technological innovation. Why did this happen then, in that place? Because of Sir Isaac Newton and his example and achievement being extolled by the Anglican Church.

Newtonian mechanics were an incredible intellectual and scientific achievement. The visible world could be explained—and predicted—by mathematically expressed scientific principles.

Most European Churches were not thrilled by Newton’s achievement. They preferred a vision of a personal, active in the universe, God. A God you needed to talk to your priest or pastor to know how to keep on the right side of. Newton’s Clockwork Universe was not helpful to this.

The Anglican Church took a very different view. Anglican vicars regularly sermonised on the genius of a God who could create the complexities we saw around us through such elegant principles. Schools took up this idea. Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph expressed this sentiment:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Newtonian mechanics were not merely elegant principles mapping the structure of the observable world. They were principles found by, and the useful application thereof could be discovered by, experiment.

So people did. Jobbing artisans experimented to find technological solutions to commercial problems, which you could then make money from. This generated a society that—for the first time in human history—was applying learning-by-experiment at scale. This has become known in the literature as broad adoption of engine science, but it is better understood more broadly as learning-by-experiment.

That created the technological take-off, the energy take-off, that we call the Industrial Revolution. Unlike other explanations for the Industrial Revolution, this has a direct connection to the discovery process that led to the energy take-off. As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

The availability of cheap energy is the single most important thing in economic take-off and mass prosperity. (It is much more important than, for example, free trade.) It is also the indicator that most suggests that the US will lose out to China.

Central to the current economic travails of the UK and Germany is ludicrously expensive energy. Which brings us to the other crucial aspect of Britain’s economic take-off.

No interest group proved powerful enough and motivated enough to block it.

If you want to identify a key feature of Britain’s institutional arrangements, that was it. No one vetoed the take-off.

On the contrary, the British elite increasingly went out of its way to facilitate it. Britain moved from notoriously corrupt politics c.1740 to notoriously honest government c.1880 because the UK Parliament systematically abolished official discretions—by doing what we now, rather clumsily, call “de-regulation”. The British state abolished licensing, monopolies and other regulatory barriers. It thereby systematically reduced the transaction friction that it imposed on economic actors. It also thereby systematically gutted the market for official discretions, so corruption.

The consequence was that the British economy became productive at a scale unprecedented in human history. That gave the British state flows of revenue at rates unprecedented in human history. At the time of the first Opium War (1839-1842), the British state had four times the revenue of the Qing Empire’s central government, despite the Qing Emperor presiding over approaching a third of both humanity and world GDP.

If you want to judge how important it was to have no one able to veto the take-off, I direct you to how the EU—whose Eurocrats have precisely two powers: the power of No and to subsidise—has presided over a striking failure by Europe to match the technological dynamism of the US and China, or sustain the same level of economic activity as the US.

People can find the processes of exploration, experimentation and discovery confronting, especially if it challenges their sense of already knowing. The resistance to even the concept of prediction markets seems to have an element of this.

There is a far more dramatic historical example of vetoing advancement than the EU. Within fifty years of the invention of the printing press around 1440, printing presses had spread all over Latin Christendom. The appeal of having books printed at two per cent of the cost of a hand-written book was obvious.

The first North African printing press for Muslims was established in the 1830s in Cairo. It took almost four centuries for the printing press to move from the Christian north of the Mediterranean to the Muslim south.

Think what Europe did with the printing press across those centuries. Think what Islam did not do.

If you want to understand how the civilisation right next to Europe could fall so far behind it, that’s how. The religious scholars, the ulama, were able to veto the key technology of the printing press for Muslims. Their entire civilisation fell catastrophically behind as a result.

A China that adopts—as it has—learning-by-experiment, has access to cheap energy and has reliable mechanisms to turn discovery into applied technology, can be expected to go back to dominating human invention, as it did from c.450BC to c.1450AD. If India, now even more populous, can overcome its long-term drags on doing so, it may eventually move into first place.

That is the other question to ask—which civilisation currently has the more toxic veto-coalitions: the US, the rest of the West, or China? But that leads us to the next post.

References

Books

Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Business, 2012.

Douglas Allen, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Yoram Barzel, Economic Analysis of Property Rights, Cambridge University Press, [1989] 1997.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, [1983] 2005.

Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, Pimlico, [1976] 1992.

Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge University Press, [1981] 2003.

Eric L. Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History, University of Michigan Press, [1988] 2000.

Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, Princeton University Press, 2013.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume I, Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge University Press, [2003] 2010.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands, Cambridge University Press, [2009] 2013.

Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, (trans.) Gerard Chapple, University of Chicago Press, [2003] 2010.

Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures), Princeton University Press, 2016.

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Harvard University Press, [1965] 1982.

Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities, Yale University Press, 1982.

Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, Basic Books, 2000.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton University Press, 2000.

John P. Powelson, Centuries of Economic Endeavor: Parallel Paths in Japan and Europe and Their Contrast with the Third World, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Jared Rubin, Rulers, Religion & Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Edward Peter Stringham, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, Oxford University Press, 2015.

Articles, essays, etc.

Stephen Broadberry, ‘Accounting for the Great Divergence: Recent findings from historical national accounting.’ Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers, Number 187, March 2021. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/accounting-great-divergence-recent-findings-historical-national-accounting

Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” and the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of World History, (2002) Vol. 13, No. 2, 323-389. https://culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/goldstone-efflorescences.pdf

Meir Kohn, ‘Money, Trade, and Payments in Preindustrial Europe,’ in S. Battilossi et al. (eds.), Handbook of the History of Money and Currency, Spring, 2018. https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-981-10-0622-7_15-1

Meir Kohn, ‘An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Economics,’ Cato Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2021). https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2021/alternative-theoretical-framework-economics

Paul Lunde, John M. Munro, Caroline Stone, ‘Arabic and the Art of Printing,’ Aramco World [now Saudi Aramco World], issue March/April 1981, 20-35, http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198102/arabic.and.the.art.of.printing-a.special.section.htm

Debin Ma, ‘Rock, scissors, paper: the problem of incentives and information in traditional Chinese state and the origin of Great Divergence,’ Economic History Working Papers 37569, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History, 2011. https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2011/WP152.pdf

Joel Mokyr and John V.C. Nye, ‘Distributional Coalitions, the Industrial Revolution, and the Origins of Economic Growth in Britain,’ Southern Economic Journal, (2007), 74: 50-70. https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jmokyr/Charleston-Olson-8.PDF

Mieke Molthiff, ‘The Industrial Revolution and a Newtonian Culture,’ Aug 24 2011. https://www.e-ir.info/2011/08/24/the-industrial-revolution-and-a-newtonian-culture/

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Coevolving institutions and the paradox of informal constraints,’ Journal of Institutional Economics, 2021, 1–20. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/CE95D185B7EA557C5D0066FA7D785BCB/S1744137420000600a.pdf/div-class-title-coevolving-institutions-and-the-paradox-of-informal-constraints-div.pdf

Jan Luiten van Zanden, Eltjo Buringh, and Maarten Bosker, ‘The rise and decline of European parliaments, 1188–1789,’ The Economic History Review, 2012, 65, 3, 835–861. https://www.academia.edu/20611214/The_rise_and_decline_of_European_parliaments_1188_17891

The first post established that property predates the state or the law. The second post examined how property could operate outside—or even against—the law. The third post looked how pervasive conventions are, the uses of law, pacification, and different institutional paths. This post covers owning people and animals plus regulation as control of attributes.

Property as relationships between people and claims on people …

So, if property-as-a-thing-people-do is based on convention, as it is, then that means that property is not a relationship between people and things. It is a series of relationships between people about things: specifically, rights-to-decide. Things being anything that can be acknowledged by others as being owned, so extends to living things: including, in the case of slavery, other humans.

For if black markets—property not merely outside but against the state—are one boundary case of property-as-convention then slavery, the ownership of another human being, is another. To say, however, that a slave is owned is not to say that ownership of another is the central fact of the slavery. On the contrary, ownership is a legal way of expressing the relationship of domination by one human being over another that we call slavery. Slavery represents turning a human into something that not only can be, but is, owned.

Humans can have all sorts of claims on another. Spouses have claims in each other that may extend past the dissolution of the marriage: hence alimony. A sporting team has a claim over the use of the skills of its contracted players. The holder of the estate to which a serf or similar bonded labour is bound has rights over the labour of said bondsperson. They all operate, to varying degrees, as forms of property—even to able be sold or transferred as such.

Kin-groups have typically operated on the basis of having property in the wombs of their daughters. (Dis)honour killings represent murdering daughters for failing to conform to the conventions of such womb-ownership, with the inciting (often female) and killing (usually male) family members murderously signalling commitment to the kin-group or community and the norms thereof. One of the ways that Christianity is corrosive of kin-groups is by insisting on mutual consent for marriage.

Human resource-use operates in five basic social modes: common-access, sharing, exchange, gifts and coercion. Connections operate across these social modes. Gifts are investments in connection. They are ways of signalling commitment to the connection. Contracts, or any transaction that extends across time periods (such as employment), generate connections that have to be managed. Sharing involves active contribution—as with food, especially hunted food, within a foraging band. Public spaces are shared, but in a much more passive sense.

These resources-and-risk forms interact with modes of status-interaction famously described by anthropologist Alan Page Fiske:

In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Fiske, (1992).

Fiske’s schema ties the mode of resource interaction too closely with specific norms of social interaction. So, in a foraging band, food may be shared by a presumption of equivalence. In a feast, however, there may be a very clear hierarchical ordering. Participation in a common activity may depend on contribution but different types of contribution may be weighted in different ways: effort, risk, scale, value. Sharing can be structured in different ways. All these status-interaction modes come with associated conventions and social norms.

Active-sharing and common-access both work better if they are structured, so do not have to be continually renegotiated. We use conventions and norms to negotiate and navigate common spaces (parks, walkways, corridors, lifts, foyers …). Structured-sharing, common-access, gifts and exchange are all regularly embedded in, and interact with, social connections.

Thus, in social exchange, the exchange is embedded within a web of connections. In commercial exchange, any connections are a consequence of the exchange. These are all aided by the gain of signalling your value as a social interlocutor.

Many cultures recognise the guest-host relationship as one of particular significance. Such hosted-feeding is a gifting, embedded in, and strengthening, connection. Selling a restaurant meal also involves hosted feeding but is a commercial exchange, that has no inherent connection implications.

A commercial exchange is balanced, a matter of an intersection of valuations. Gift-transfer networks operate via imbalances that shift back and forth with each gifting, swapping back and forth the signalling of continuing commitment to the connection. (Gifts can also signal a permanent imbalance in the relationship.)

While we currently do not hold that spousal claims can be sold, sale of such claims has happened in the past, as has sale of concubines and daughters. Societies with some form of bride-price typically have seen them as a form of exchange. Though they were usually social exchanges rather than commercial ones, as they were embedded in, and often sought to create or strengthen, social connections. Indeed, the sole feature common to marriage across all cultures—beyond creating the social role of father—is that it creates in-laws, kin-by-marriage.

Slavery as domination

As sociologist Orlando Patterson (b.1940) has observed:

It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)

What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.

This is not to say slaves have no legal personality—all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.

Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.

Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.

Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.

All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)

None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.

While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.

The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.

In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.

To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:

without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)

Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:

All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)

In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.

In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master—hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.

The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions—rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.

Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance—officials could not be assigned to their home counties [province]—and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)

Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.

So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.

For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.

The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)

Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.

The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.

Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.

The Greeks also had citizenship and—particularly in the case of Athens—mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.

Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.

Aristotle—as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism—came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.

The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)

Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.

Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour—labour bondage—on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China—infamously of the Uyghurs—and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.

… and animals

Legally, animals are usually classed as wild or tame or domesticated. Wild animals are animals one can only exercise control over by killing or trapping. Claims over such animals are typically by-products of other claims: for instance, to land, or to the achievements of one’s labour (notably hunting or fishing). That is, the claims follow from already existing conventions of acknowledged possession.

A tame animal is an animal over which some continuing level of (physical) control is being exercised and which the animal, for whatever reason, is “going along with”. For instance, they return to be fed. This could at least appear to create a level of control such that, for as long as said control continues to be displayed, it makes sense to apply the conventions of acknowledged possession directly to the animal. In this case, physical control enables the right-to-decide of ownership, which is lost when such control is lost.

Acknowledged possession clearly works much more cleanly with domesticated animals: species that have been habituated to human control across generations. While identification of ownership by some mechanism (e.g., branding or tagging) is likely to be needed to enable a robust clarity in case of disputes, the presumption of control usually means that the conventions of acknowledged possession will readily apply.

Where things get awkward is that some wild animals might be somewhat tame, and some domesticated animals might go wild, while control can have nuances. For instance, bees are clearly not domesticated, are not controlled as individuals, and may swarm quite independently. On the other hand, a certain amount of control can be exercised over a hive, and its products.

As humans have always highly prized honey—it is one of the few forms of gathering that is reliably male—folk have been making laws about bees ever since we began to have laws. This was especially so once land became owned.

So, while living beings may generate some complexities due to having the capacity for action on their own behalf, nevertheless, living-things-as-property fit within, and are created by, the conventions of acknowledged possession. They do, however, show how notions of control interact with conventions of property—having enough control that it can be yours! and so accepted as generating a right-to-decide.

Regulation as control over attributes

Law can state what will be recognised as property and what you can do with what is recognised as property. As we have seen, none of this is necessary for there to be property but, done in ways that reduce transaction friction, law can make property much more secure and more productive. Law can do so even beyond the basic value of pacification by the state, that reduces the salience of the trade-or-take choice.

Law can also regulate property through the exercise of various official discretions. At the most basic level, official discretion can never be entirely eliminated, as officials of the state often have considerable functional choice over whether and how they enforce the law. Indeed, much of the effort into creating a well-organised state is to set up structures that make law enforcement their default choice.

One of the major problems with black markets is generating sufficient wealth to motivate (and fund) paying officials not to enforce the law. As noted previously, corruption is essentially the market for official discretion and will tend to be worse the more pervasive official discretions are and the more profit is to be had from purchasing such discretion.

If official permission is required to engage in some transactions—so that regulation goes well beyond setting general rules—then the relevant official is being given control over that attribute of some owned thing. As noted previously, that is a form of property right, a right-to-decide. Hence the elevated potential for corruption: to purchase how they exercise that control.

The presumption behind such regulation is that official will exercise their discretion according to the declared purpose of the regulation, thereby achieving said purpose. This is often, however, a very dubious presumption. There is both an information problem—how well can the official judge the consequences of what they do?—and the difficulty of what incentives are actually operating on the official. It is, for instance, quite likely that the incentive structure will favour one sort of decision rather than another, due to the way bureaucratic and political structures work. Beyond failing to incorporate relevant information, regulation can also distort or suppress relevant information.

The information and incentive burden is such that it is rare for such discretionary regulation to act in the interests of the wider society. It is much more likely to act in the interests of the better organised, the better connected and to generate a general status quo bias in favour of incumbent firms, owners, etc. Hence the recurrent tendency for elimination of such official discretions to be beneficial. Such benefits can come from reducing corruption (the experience of Britain from c.1750 to c.1850) or in promoting an increase, even a dramatic increase, in commercial activity (also the experience of Britain in said period; of postwar Germany; of post-1983 Antipodes, etc.).

So, general rules can be very beneficial due to reducing transaction friction and harms to third parties (i.e. negative externalities). Requiring official permissions can be not so, due to increasing transaction friction, having inherent knowledge problems, and creating misaligned incentives, including for corruption. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong positive association between economic freedom and economic development.

What is needed and what is useful

So, to summarise this multi-post exploration of property as acknowledged possession generating rights-to-decide, conventions develop to handle our interactions because we are so much a social, imitative and normative species, regularly engaging in mutual signalling, and seeking to benefit from interactions by aligning our expectations. Conventions work because they create win-win interactions.

It is very useful for interacting parties to have expectation-aligning conventions about who decides about what. Agreed signals of possession, by what has reliably common information salience, provide the basis for the mutual acknowledgment of rights-to-decide that establishes and sustains the conventions of property. Hence, we can go into markets or bazaars all over the world and understand what is going on.

Even command economies have to delegate rights-to-decide. They also regularly end up generating (black and grey) markets. More generally, if the state generates too much transaction friction, the conventions of property based on mutual acknowledgement allows exchange to shift to informal markets.

You don’t need the state to have property or exchange networks (or money). You don’t even need law to have property and commerce (and money). But a responsively pacifying state with good rule of law is an excellent thing to have. A large part of why that is so, is that the conventions of acknowledged possession can work that much more smoothly. (This particularly includes killing each other much less.)

The conventions of acknowledged possession may not require the state, but they operate much more felicitously within its realms of pacification and even more felicitously where the laws of the state work with, rather than against, the signalling simplicity of such win-win conventions.

The fifth and last post in the series examines how post-1978 China managed to have a commercial take-off well before it legalised commercial property in 2004. But, before that, there will be an interlude post on understanding the Great Enrichment—the shift from mass poverty to mass prosperity—that began in the 1820s.

References

Books

Katy Barnett & Jeremy Gans, Guilty Pigs: The Weird and Wonderful History of Animal Law, La Trobe University Press, 2022.

Yoram Barzel, Economic Analysis of Property Rights, Cambridge University Press, [1989], 1997.

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Catherine M. Cameron, Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World, University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Penguin, [2005] (2006).

Michael J. R. Crawford, An Expressive Theory of Possession, Hart Publishing, 2020.

Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev (eds), The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag, Hoover Institution Press, 2003.

Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Cosimo, [1921] 2005.

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, trans. W.D.Halls, W W Norton, [1925] 1990.

Robert Neuworth, The Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Pantheon Books, 2011.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press, [1982] 2018 [SaSD].

John P. Powelson, Centuries of Economic Endeavor: Parallel Paths in Japan and Europe and Their Contrast with the Third World, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, [1980] 1996.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Edward Peter Stringham, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, Oxford University Press, 2015.

Articles, essays, etc.

Plamen Akaliyski, Vivian L. Vignoles, Christian Welzel, and Michael Minkov, ‘Individualism–collectivism: Reconstructing Hofstede’s dimension of cultural differences,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2025) Advance online publication. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2027-01517-001.html

Sean P. Alvarez, Vincent Geloso, Macy Scheck, ‘Economic Freedom Matters A Lot More for Economic Development Than You Think!,’ GMU Working Paper No. 23-14, February 23, 2023. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4368623

Arthur L. Corbin, ‘Legal Analysis and Terminology,’ The Yale Law Journal , Vol. 29, No. 2, Dec., 1919, 163-173. https://openyls.law.yale.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/9effd79b-398b-4935-aff7-45394cde96e8/content

Harold Demsetz, ‘Towards a Theory of Property Rights’, American Economic Review, Volume 57, Issue 2, May 1967, 347-359. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/38c0/4ebc14c2f5fc70a61f4521f6568522413a92.pdf

Alan Page Fiske, ‘The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations,’ Psychological Review, 1992, Vol. 99, No. 4, 689-723. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/21700623_The_four_elementary_forms_of_sociality_Framework_for_a_unified_theory_of_social_relations

Meir Kohn, ‘An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Economics,’ Cato Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2021). https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2021/alternative-theoretical-framework-economics

Pierre-Guillaume Méon, Laurent Weill, ‘Is corruption an efficient grease?,’ BOFIT Discussion Papers, (2008) No. 20/2008, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition (BOFIT), Helsinki. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/212633/1/bofit-dp2008-020.pdf

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

Michael T. Rock, Heidi Bonnett, ‘The Comparative Politics of Corruption: Accounting for the East Asian Paradox in Empirical Studies of Corruption, Growth and Investment,’ World Development, Volume 32, Issue 6, 2004, 999-1017. https://afca.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Rock-Bonnett-2004-The-comparative-politics-of-corruption-Accounting-for-the-East-Asian-paradox-in-empirical-studies-of-corruption-1.pdf

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Coevolving institutions and the paradox of informal constraints,’ Journal of Institutional Economics, 2021, 1–20. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/CE95D185B7EA557C5D0066FA7D785BCB/S1744137420000600a.pdf/div-class-title-coevolving-institutions-and-the-paradox-of-informal-constraints-div.pdf

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32008953/

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw, & Marcus W. Feldman, “Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck”, Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6