When I was living in DC--in the summer of 2012--the book that was all the rage in development policy circles was Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail. In fact, I had first encountered it right after it came out, when a classmate was bemoaning that it had only appeared as he was finishing up his thesis on some related topics. Still, I didn't read it at that time. Instead, I read another new book on politics and inclusion, called The Origins of Political Order, Volume 1, by Francis Fukuyama.
Why Nations Fail, the book I would only read later, turned out to have a few interesting historical tidbits. But when I did eventually get to it, it struck me as a pretty banal argument in favor of liberal democracy, repackaged as "inclusive institutions": these (relatively ill-defined) "inclusive institutions" were the key pre-conditions for economic prosperity.
But the book by Fukuyama--whose name has become a byword for the kind of liberal democratic triumphalism embodied by Why Nations Fail--had real substance. In a nutshell: the main challenge throughout history to the durability of political regimes has been the family. The professionalism and efficiency of states or other political structures tends to weaken as the people who wield power and wealth seek to accumulate it and pass it down to their progeny. Eventually efficient empires and bureaucracies "decay" (Fukuyama's word) into tribes and fiefdoms.
The Origins of Political Order is largely a fascinating survey of the mechanisms employed by various regimes to resist political decay: it goes over the Catholic church's rules on lineage and cousin marriage, the Turkish institution of the Janissaries, and ... well, those are the ones I remember. Probably also the Chinese civil service. Underlying that, though, it has a powerful thesis, whose relevance for our time is perhaps debatable but which seems to have a lot more to say about what "inclusive institutions" really are than Acemoglu and Robinson. I never understood why they got all the attention and Fukuyuma got none. The public discourse missed out on a powerful historiographical concept as a result.
This is on my mind today as I listened to an In Our Time episode. This is the BBC's terrific hour-long history podcast that gets three historians from UK universities together on a subject of their expertise and tosses in a well-read host who asks hard questions. The particular episode that had me thinking about political order (and my frustration that Fukuyama hasn't gotten enough credit for the great thinking he's doing now that history is over) was titled "The Eunuch."
There should be a pretty visible straight line from Fukuyama as I've summarized him to "The Eunuch." You want eunuchs running your empire and your empire's army because they aren't going to try to take over a chunk of it and hand it down to their sons. And you will be partly wrong, because they may start adopting children in large numbers and creating the same kinds of problems you had with your intact civil servants. Fukuyama describes a similar process among the Janissaries, who were originally prevented from passing their status to their children (they may have even been prevented from marrying--I can't recall).
Bizarrely, these brilliant historians didn't really seem to talk about it in this way. One was asked, for instance, where the idea of the giving the eunuchs greater authority for managing the state in Assyria in the 8th century BC had come from, and she could say only that it was one of many creative reforms the Assyrians implemented at that time as their best and brightest considered how to strengthen the empire's institutions. Yet to me, there is a very clear logic explaining why a king would endorse something like this.
I like to think I give historical contingency its due. Things happen for plenty of reasons, and if you've ever tried to run a regression on a social science dataset, it's very easy to be skeptical of all-encompassing theories of history. However, when a historical institution re-creates itself again and again, there may be a general principle at work. I think the political decay dynamic is pretty likely to be a real one.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Working hard is hardly working
It's survey time at Farmers' Skills, and that means the last month or so has been demanding. More demanding, actually, than anything I've faced before. Zoomed out far enough, that's exactly what I would have wanted from my sojourn here -- why put my lovely Boston life aside for something less -- but boy is it tough.
"Tough" means I frequently -- constantly -- feel like I've screwed up something important. Maybe I've forgotten about something that needed to happen, or I just can't remember how a problem was dealt with, or I am not focusing on the most important tasks, or maybe I just haven't worked efficiently and now I've run out of time. This feeling, needless to say, is not pleasant.
In the midst of all this, I end up spending a lot of mental energy on trying to assess if I am doing OK. (In fact I once saw a therapist who concluded that this was the heaviest weight on my happiness, which continues to seem wholly plausible to me). Putting aside the fact that this is a fool's errand, figuring it out means I need a yardstick or a standard, and the conventional wisdom on this, though wise, is trite: don't compare yourself to other people, just compare yourself to yourself and what you want to be. Some people may know the story of the Rat and the Ox (or is it the Elephant? Nope, that's not the point).
Maybe "trite" is too strong. But I am writing about this because I've had an idea here that I think could be useful, at least for me. The insight between the statement "Just try to be better than you are now, don't worry about other people" is that everyone is starting from a different place, with different endowments and different experiences, and so comparisons are dominated by those factors, and thus they are worthless. (The other insight is that it's impossible to know what is really going on for someone else, so the comparison is even more worthless). We right-thinking advocates of human freedom and fulfillment are more interested in how far someone gets in their journey, not necessarily where they end up.
Another way of saying that is that we see will as the great virtue. At least, we are only really interested in accomplishments that can be attributed to a person's "own doing". We moderns aren't really impressed with you for winning the lottery. A medieval or an ancient might see things differently, but that's not the audience I'm writing for.
We hvae some confused ideas about will, and they make "Be better than X" a tough prescription to follow. Take the naive interpretation of will, think of grit and gumption and sticktoitiveness, think of Protestants and their work ethic, and "Be better" easily degrades into "Try harder".
"Try harder" certainly matters sometimes. If you're running track, trying harder--not just at the time of the race, but every day of your life up until the race as well--matters. And it also matters for what some may consider loftier affairs: academics are infamously hard workers, yada yada. (Relatedly: I think Scott Alexander's practical symposium on the subject of innate ability vs. grit is interesting)
But sometimes "Try harder" is a distraction. When I am frustrated at myself for not keeping track of which field officer did the cost/benefit exercise in which village, I promise to myself to be better organized. But I'm already trying to better organized, and to write more things down, and every time I don't it's because that promise is competing with other promises of the same nature. It's obviously even more apparently useless when I say to myself, "man, I just need to pay more attention and remember things better." That obviously is not something in my power to do.
I can add that this isn't only something that comes up in moments of frustration. I can just as easily be feeling inspired when I say to myself, "Man, I'm feeling good, the next few months I'm going to be keeping my head on straight and just staying laser-focused on every task I'm doing when I am doing it." Again, utterly useless.
These things are useless because they aren't actionable (jargon-retch). Sometimes you actually know how to act on them: which new technology or technique to use to focus or remember or organize better. The rest of the time, you probably have some idea how you could find out about the right things to do to improve.
Now the issue has shifted subtly. It's no longer a question of trying harder, it's a question of figuring out the right thing to try. In other words, we're concerned with a decision. And the ability to make good decisions itself depends on what you know or know how to find out: one of these things like focus or memory or organization that you can't improve, willfully, at the drop of the hat.
Yet it also depends on something else, and this is where I think we can broaden the concept of will productively. That "something else" is the ability to overcome internal obstacles to making good use of what we know or know how to find out. And speaking for myself, I can attest that those internal obstacles are often significant and numerous. Every time I say "That's just not the way I do things," one of them is rearing its ugly head. When I decide to keep banging my head against the wall instead of asking for help or switching gears to another task, there is a nasty internal obstacle at work.
I don't have a choice between "be well organized" and "be disorganized". But I do have a choice between "try putting everything in Google Calendar for a week" and "keep making haphazard lists because that's what I know". Or, probably more meaningfully, between "try to figure it out on my own" and "make a habit of asking people to show me how they keep track of what they need to do". And I think this choice can be every bit as meaningful as the choice between, on the one hand, giving into the dearest desire of your burning calves and your rising nausea as you round the last bend in a race and, on the other, gritting your teeth and driving yourself forward by pumping your arms because your legs hurt too much to think about.
Both categories of choices really are choices--regardless of your situation, you have the ability to choose. That means that we, as individualistic freedom-loving moderns, should give them (and them alone) moral weight. And they are really the only determinants I can see of whether I do "better" or my counter-factual does--that's the Rat and the Ox standard.
I call the ability to overcome one's hostility to learning "openness", but there may be a better term for it. It's sort of surprising to me to find myself placing openness, something I would typically label a hippie virtue, alongside grit and stick-to-it-iveness, but it seems like that is where it belongs.
"Tough" means I frequently -- constantly -- feel like I've screwed up something important. Maybe I've forgotten about something that needed to happen, or I just can't remember how a problem was dealt with, or I am not focusing on the most important tasks, or maybe I just haven't worked efficiently and now I've run out of time. This feeling, needless to say, is not pleasant.
In the midst of all this, I end up spending a lot of mental energy on trying to assess if I am doing OK. (In fact I once saw a therapist who concluded that this was the heaviest weight on my happiness, which continues to seem wholly plausible to me). Putting aside the fact that this is a fool's errand, figuring it out means I need a yardstick or a standard, and the conventional wisdom on this, though wise, is trite: don't compare yourself to other people, just compare yourself to yourself and what you want to be. Some people may know the story of the Rat and the Ox (or is it the Elephant? Nope, that's not the point).
Maybe "trite" is too strong. But I am writing about this because I've had an idea here that I think could be useful, at least for me. The insight between the statement "Just try to be better than you are now, don't worry about other people" is that everyone is starting from a different place, with different endowments and different experiences, and so comparisons are dominated by those factors, and thus they are worthless. (The other insight is that it's impossible to know what is really going on for someone else, so the comparison is even more worthless). We right-thinking advocates of human freedom and fulfillment are more interested in how far someone gets in their journey, not necessarily where they end up.
Another way of saying that is that we see will as the great virtue. At least, we are only really interested in accomplishments that can be attributed to a person's "own doing". We moderns aren't really impressed with you for winning the lottery. A medieval or an ancient might see things differently, but that's not the audience I'm writing for.
We hvae some confused ideas about will, and they make "Be better than X" a tough prescription to follow. Take the naive interpretation of will, think of grit and gumption and sticktoitiveness, think of Protestants and their work ethic, and "Be better" easily degrades into "Try harder".
 |
| A propos of nothing, on my trip to Nairobi I learned that I am not the only person in East to come up with this terrible pun. |
"Try harder" certainly matters sometimes. If you're running track, trying harder--not just at the time of the race, but every day of your life up until the race as well--matters. And it also matters for what some may consider loftier affairs: academics are infamously hard workers, yada yada. (Relatedly: I think Scott Alexander's practical symposium on the subject of innate ability vs. grit is interesting)
But sometimes "Try harder" is a distraction. When I am frustrated at myself for not keeping track of which field officer did the cost/benefit exercise in which village, I promise to myself to be better organized. But I'm already trying to better organized, and to write more things down, and every time I don't it's because that promise is competing with other promises of the same nature. It's obviously even more apparently useless when I say to myself, "man, I just need to pay more attention and remember things better." That obviously is not something in my power to do.
I can add that this isn't only something that comes up in moments of frustration. I can just as easily be feeling inspired when I say to myself, "Man, I'm feeling good, the next few months I'm going to be keeping my head on straight and just staying laser-focused on every task I'm doing when I am doing it." Again, utterly useless.
These things are useless because they aren't actionable (jargon-retch). Sometimes you actually know how to act on them: which new technology or technique to use to focus or remember or organize better. The rest of the time, you probably have some idea how you could find out about the right things to do to improve.
Now the issue has shifted subtly. It's no longer a question of trying harder, it's a question of figuring out the right thing to try. In other words, we're concerned with a decision. And the ability to make good decisions itself depends on what you know or know how to find out: one of these things like focus or memory or organization that you can't improve, willfully, at the drop of the hat.
Yet it also depends on something else, and this is where I think we can broaden the concept of will productively. That "something else" is the ability to overcome internal obstacles to making good use of what we know or know how to find out. And speaking for myself, I can attest that those internal obstacles are often significant and numerous. Every time I say "That's just not the way I do things," one of them is rearing its ugly head. When I decide to keep banging my head against the wall instead of asking for help or switching gears to another task, there is a nasty internal obstacle at work.
 |
| Also a propos of nothing, I mentioned Nairobi--did I mention the elephant orphanage? |
Both categories of choices really are choices--regardless of your situation, you have the ability to choose. That means that we, as individualistic freedom-loving moderns, should give them (and them alone) moral weight. And they are really the only determinants I can see of whether I do "better" or my counter-factual does--that's the Rat and the Ox standard.
I call the ability to overcome one's hostility to learning "openness", but there may be a better term for it. It's sort of surprising to me to find myself placing openness, something I would typically label a hippie virtue, alongside grit and stick-to-it-iveness, but it seems like that is where it belongs.
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