Is the Semi-Permanent “Gunpowder Empire” Historical Scenario Plausible?

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/the-gunpowder-empire-scenario-incomplete-draft.html

by bootload • 10 years ago

44 34 10 years ago

narrator2• 10 years ago

I'm more of a fan of anthropologist Joseph Tainter's theories from Collapse of Complex Societies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexi...). Civilizations are problem solving entities that have some sort of trick they've developed for solving civilizational problems. They exploit that trick with ever increasing levels of complexity until it doesn't work anymore and starts delivering negative marginal returns. They usually fail to realize that the downward spiral has begun and that leads to the collapse as they keep trying to use the strategies that no longer work.

Sometimes a technological breakthrough, like the development of the steam engine in Britain, will reverse the decline and lead to a whole new civilizational development curve.

The theory is independent of population levels and so is not a Malthusian derivative, like most of the popular ones that have been in fashion since the 1970s. I think Tainter's approach is different and unique because he's an anthropologist and not an economist. For example, the total collapse of Rome, the historic civilization most similar to our own, was not caused by environmental factors, but by diminishing marginal returns that eventually went negative of the "conquer and extract tribute" methodology of the Roman empire.

enkid• 10 years ago

"Conquer and extract tribute" wasn't really the Empires M.O. at all, that was more a republic thing. The empire's expansion was really slow once it, you know, became an Empire and stopped after Trajan.

icegreentea• 10 years ago

Its also interesting to think about how the Eastern Empire plays into this. Certainly it was the richer half.

Retric• 10 years ago

People tend to think in terms of an oversimplified narrative around the fall of the Roman empire in ways that really don't fit the data.

Romes decline related to the rate information traveled and the need for several people at the top. The eastern roman empire lasted well after the sacking of Rome. But, Rome had fallen several times before this it just being called Rome. The difference is we equate the city with the empire, but the US for example moved it's capital and nobody thinks in terms of the fall of Philadelphia or even fall of the US in 1814 when DC burned.

The Byzantine Empire aka Eastern Roman Empire even covered "Rome" ~550 growing and falling at various points until 1,400.

IMO, it's not really the empires decline we are talking about so much as the city's decline.

narrator2• 10 years ago

Tainter talks a lot about the Eastern Roman Empire and why it survived. He talks about how they were able to radically simplify their civilization to save it.

For example: they got rid of the entire centralized military bureaucracy and replaced it with the Theme system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(Byzantine_district)#Org... ) which was basically a sort of farmer's military club franchise where farmers where also in the military and bought their own weapons and also conducted civil affairs. This held off invading muslim hordes for hundreds of years. They also replaced the massive central administration with a very minimalist king and court. They basically did a massive corporate re-org and decentralization to save the empire. It's a pattern that not many civilizations have pulled off.

einhverfr• 10 years ago

Someone once defined history as "Argument from the past." I think it is worth noting that all perspectives are incomplete. Tainter does talk about why the Eastern Empire survived longer but another interesting perspective on that (and one more relevant to the article) was put forth by Herwig Wolfram in his book "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples."

Wolfram points out that before the Migration Age began in earnest, the Eastern Empire was spending more in the military (and that was only 30% of the budget) than the Western Empire was collecting in taxes, and the issue was, in the West, that the Senatorial families had achieved such a monopoly on wealth and power that they both couldn't be effectively taxed and controlled the economy. Some families had a budget that was as high as a third of the whole Western Empire's budget (suggesting it is likely that some families had businesses which were consuming more than the Western Roman military). According to Wolfram, this was not the same in the East.

Nonetheless, the East found its military too expensive during the Arab wars and that's where the Theme System came from.

The perspectives of Tainter and Wolfram are not unrelated. Complexity usually does concentrate power and resources in coordinator roles, and that concentration itself cannot be maintained without complexity -- remember that the fall of Rome effectively meant the transition of the role of slave into a role of peasant simply because central enforcement of slavery could no longer really occur. But at the same time the Ostrogoths could not challenge the powerful families enough to hold Italy for more than a couple of centuries before the Eastern Empire invaded and the Goths fell for the same reasons (according to Wolfram) that the Romans did.

Regarding the article, one of the problems not discussed is the issue of economic concentration. These breakthroughs usually demand that. The industrial revolution wasn't caused by population, but by concentration of economic power in a few hands and the quite intentional efforts to evict peasants from their lands and make them destitute factory workers.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

I wonder if future historians looking back with a much longer timescale will end up lumping this era in as part of the same civilization as the Roman empire.

mc32• 10 years ago

While not a consideration here, I'd imagine the English diaspora establishing a follow the sun presence around the world and the emergence of English as a lingua franca helped in managing stability in the world in the face of adversaries and competitors.

Imagine, if instead of Britain, we'd have had a different power guiding the direction of the world --different philosophies and priorities. As well as a different language for thinking.

simonb• 10 years ago

English has become lingua franca beyond the colonies only after WW2.

liamconnell• 10 years ago

Anyone have an argument (or the argument Tainter provides) for whether the "trick" that a civilization exploits has to be (1) singular, (2) original, or (3) not exploitable by contemporary civilizations?

And who wants to chime in their two cents about what the USA's "trick" is in maintaining its global pre-eminence?

dredmorbius4• 10 years ago

The trick isn't necessarily singular. Tainter's argument is actually that what happens is complexity (roughly: technology, though it's a bit more involved than that -- enumerable parts with distinct structures is a good first approximation) increases because it solves problems. The second order problem is that that complexity itself has a cost, and perhaps an accruing technical debt. When you reach the point of not being able to pay those, not only do you lose the complexity incurred but its capabilities -- you're in a worse hole than you started from.

On the question of whether there's a singular trick that's exploited, I'm not aware of anything in Tainter's writing that suggests this at all. There is the concept of Leibig's Law of the Minimum -- the idea that for any system (Leibig is speaking of ecosystems or populations) there's some one factor which imposes a constraint on the system. In that regard, you could could likely look at a single technology which is the operative constraint. But if you're looking at a complex system with multiple modes of failure, you'd be arguing precisely the opposite: that there are multiple technological tricks which aren't presently binding constraints but which, if any one of them failed, would rapidly become one.

There's no basis that the trick need be unique. I'd argue that they're anything but. Basic modalities include agriculture, construction, fire, transport, arms or weapons, and control over hygiene factors.

The United States' trick was in large part massive overwhelming self-sufficiency in resources, most especially energy.

See Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History, Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power: How energy forges human history, or Robert Ayres, The Economic Growth Engine: How energy and work drive material prosperity.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/3...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-fo...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-growth-engine-how-ene...

bkohlmann2• 10 years ago

I've always wondered if accelerating technological growth is associated with increased population due to a simple statistical effect: if we assume human ingenuity and intelligence is distributed normally, then with larger populations, humanity gets more right tail geniuses. Which creates more innovation. Which allows more humans to exist on a resource constrained planet. It's a virtuous cycle. If this is true, then what happens to tech growth in the next few decades when global population flattens?

axlee• 10 years ago

larger populations more right tail geniuses. more innovation

Only in the right environment. That's why the modern scientific contribution of, let's say, Israel, is an order of magnitude larger than Nigeria's despite being 20 times smaller.

I am also dubious about the implied direct link between "geniuses" and innovation. Is scientific innovation really driven by "geniuses"?

bkohlmann2• 10 years ago

That's fair. I suppose genius is anybody with a unique insight that takes action - but that last part may require pre existing societal frameworks. Furthermore, my definition may be so broad as to render it meaningless.

vkou• 10 years ago

It's not a larger population, it's a larger population of people who can afford to be idle. (Or at least, not spend all of their time working on their day-to-day survival.)

It doesn't matter how smart he is, if Einstein grew up to be a subsistence farmer, in a society with low social mobility, he'd die as one.

jabl• 10 years ago

Well yes, provided those smart people have the opportunity to pursue their intellect.

If the vast majority of the people are serfs barely scraping by, and the only people with "idle time" are inbred dunces hanging out at various courts, progress will be very slow (see Europe during the dark ages..).

dredmorbius4• 10 years ago

Short answer: probably not. Mean matters far more than n.

You're reminding me of an article which circulated some months back about where the question was: Where do you find the most of the world's tallest people -- in a small country with a tall average population (like Norway or the Netherlands) or in a very large country with a short average population.

I don't recall the references and they're not turning up in my archives. It turns out that when you're multiple standard deviations above average, x-bar (mean) matters far more than n (population).

Which would suggest that in the race to breed intelligence, you'd do better at raising the mean rather than the n. Another hole punched in the "grow the planet to increase total intelligence" argument.

dredmorbius4• 10 years ago

There are several large populations which aren't particularly associated with accelerating technological growth.

I'm suspecting an inverted causality arrow here. At best a confounded one.

tunesmith• 10 years ago

It's crazy to think of how our currently state of technology could have been reached five hundred years ago, or five hundred years from now. I can't offhand think of anything truly external that has gated our technological advancements, like some event where aliens visit us and we advance quickly by analyzing their tech. Is there an argument that external events might have been real dependencies? I'm thinking of things like volcano eruptions, or certain astronomical patterns, etc.

gonvaled• 10 years ago

Sure, if you consider the "lack of external event" to also be an external event: we have been not been thrown back to the stone age, or pushed to the brink of extinction, because no big asteroid has impacted the Earth in recent time, and hopefully next time it does we'll be ready to deal with it with modern technology.

dredmorbius4• 10 years ago

Why the Industrial Revolution occurred when and where it did, and not earlier (see Joseph Needham's question regarding China, which was vastly more technologically advanced) or afterward, or possibly not even at all, is one of the Great Questions.

T0T0R0• 10 years ago

People frequently discuss exponential population growth, but rarely mention the terrestial confines of such thinking.

Then they say, oh but technology will continue to advance, and yet never mention pioneering space travel.

I feel like economists that extrapolate numbers into the future, but fail to consider space travel are like holy men, refusing to consider that the earth is round, and rather than the imaginary center of a flat universe; doomsayers, warning that we'll sail over the edge, if we venture too far out to sea.

johnnyhillbilly2• 10 years ago

Who are these holy men, of which you speak, that refused to consider Earth round?

Nzen• 10 years ago

He or she is probably conflating the Catholic inquisitors who convicted Galileo for a heliocentric heresy and the popular myth that the experts who dissuaded King Ferdinand from supporting Columbus thought the earth flat, rather than too wide to cross with contemporary technology. It's just a rhetorical device intended to diminish the otherwise learned. <edit for wording>

aidenn0• 10 years ago

Space colonization doesn't help much with exponential growth.

Lets say the population grows at 1.4% per year, and that, on average, there is one earth's worth of habitable space per star in the galaxy. That buys less than two millenia of time to figure out how to colonize the next galaxy, and doing so would only buy us 50 years of time to colonize another.

Going by energy rather than space, you need to move up a level of the Kardashev scale every 2000 years to sustain a 1.4% growth in energy usage.

In the real world, if you think you have an exponential curve, you just haven't looked far enough to the right yet.

rayiner• 10 years ago

It's highly unlikely that space colonization will happen soon enough to matter to demographers.

Is the Semi-Permanent “Gunpowder Empire” Historical Scenario Plausible?

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