"Coercive" States, & Judging Among þe Nations

In which, from half the world away, I feel like arguing with a sentence written by Alice Evans…

Alice Evans’s sentence is “States were often coercive, so should not be celebrated as more ‘advanced civilisations’.”

And my response is: not quite:

• High cultures really are worth something.

• And the interaction between taxation by an élite and living standards of typical non-élite members of society is not straightforward—at least not in the days back before 1500? 1770? 1870? when humanity was under the harrow of Malthus.

Yes, states were (and are) more than often highly, highly coercive. But so, often, were not-states. A strong state can mobilize more power to coerce. But a strong state can also mobilize more power to protect non-élite individuals from roving bandits and the stationary bandits who are local notables. A state has an interest in an imperial peace, a sophisticated division of labor, and a social climate that boosts investment—all so that there is stuff it can tax—on a scale that local notables and roving bandits definitely do not.

Thus I think it is difficult to make the argument that it is in general worse to be under the hegemony of a state than to be under the hegemony of a local powerful lineage. Is one’s life more constrained by hegemony in Edinburgh, near Rosneath Castle, or around Castle Hill Henge?

Now it is true that there is a very strong, indeed irrefutable, argument that where mercantile (and later industrial) capitalism get tied to staple plantation production for the market and with slavery things get very, very bad indeed.

But there is also a powerful argument that it was better to be a free farmer in the Seine or the Thames valleys under the Dominate of the successors of Diocletian in the 300s than to be a thrall of some Saxon or a serf of some Norman adventurer-thug 250 or 600 years later.

Let me hasten to say that I am only picking at that one sentence by Alice Evans. Let me show you it in context:

Alice Evans: Why was Ancient Nubia less controlling than Ancient Egypt?: ‘There is a fantastic new book on the kingdoms of Ancient Africa, including Egypt, Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Yoruba, Asante, Kongo, Buganda and Zulu. Great Kingdoms of Africa begins with a very important premise. States were often coercive, so should not be celebrated as more ‘advanced civilisations’. I think this is a really important mentality. While grandiose palaces are aesthetically impressive, surplus was usually extracted from labourers who lived in squalor. This is a useful corrective to narratives that dismiss or denigrate small-scale societies, as well as to those who defensively hype-up small kingdoms…

That is a very smart paragraph, with which I agree.

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Let me start thinking, as I do, as a card-carrying Malthusian economist.

Suppose that it is in the range between -3000 and 1500—the Bronze and Iron Ages—that it is a typical century, and that your society is not atypical of terms of how it is under the Malthusian harrow. Then your technological competence is growing at about 5% per century, but your typical standard-of-living—not the standard of living of the élite, and not the standard of living of some average including the élite, but of the typical non-élite member of your society—is roughly constant across time. Technology is improving, but the population is growing at an average rate of 10% per century, and so greater resource scarcity offsets better technology—at least as far as the the consumption of necessities relevant to one’s success at reproducing and then raising children to adulthood to continue the cycle is concerned.

That population in your society is growing at 10% tells you what the consumption of reproduction-relevant “necessities” by the typical non-élite member of your society is going to be. Take “subsistence” necessities consumption y^{sub}—the level at which the population is constant. Boost that level up by a small wedge: whatever is necessary to provide enough extra nutrition, warmth, dryness, and safety that infants die less often and women ovulate more regularly so that population grows by 10% per century. If we say that β is the responsiveness of population to greater necessities consumption, ɣ is the salience of ideas relative to resources in production, and h is rate of underlying technological progress, then we can calculate the Malthusian-equilibrium level of necessities consumption for the non-elite typical member of society. And we then need to gross that up by a wedge φ determined by how much of non-elite consumption is of not reproduction-relevant necessities but rather utility-boosting conveniences, and can thus raise standards of living without inducing the additional offspring, population growth, and resource scarcity that undoes that utility boost.

So we arrive at a piece of algebra:

\(y^{mal} = \phi y^{sub} \left(1+h\gamma/\beta\right)\)

Here we have a counterintuitive fact about Malthusian economies. Condition on:

• the rate of technological progress h,

• the salience of ideas relative to resources in production ɣ,

• the responsiveness of population growth to necessities consumption β,

• the taste of the non-elite population for conveniences as opposed to necessities φ, and

• on the level of necessities consumption at which there is zero average population growth y^{sub}.

Then the standard of living of the typical non-élite individual is unaffected by the rate of extraction by the elite.

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Now this should not be too far.

How much non-élite typical people are brutalized by the elite in the process of the élite’s extracting their ill-gotten wealth affects the well-being of typical non-elite individuals even though it does not affect average non-elite necessities-and-conveniences consumption.

And there are many jokers in the deck hidden in the “condition on…” sentence above.

The levels of the rate of technological progress, the taste of the non-elite population for conveniences as opposed to necessities, and of necessities consumption at which there is zero average population growth—those are all themselves as much sociological as techno-economic, and are profoundly effected by the form of the state, the extent of its coercion, the form and extent of an ‘advanced’ civilization’s high culture, the taste of the élite for urban living and thus the extra mortality thereby induced, and so on.

But the size of these effects, and even their direction, is unclear. It is wrong to take the wealth and sophistication of the lifestyle of an empire and the rest of his elite coalition—the thugs-with spears, plus their tame accountants, propagandists, and bureaucrats—as a measure of a culture. Mayfair is not what counts. But the Scottish Highland critique of London is similarly inadequate as the final word.

Plus there is the fact that even for those close to subsistence, with hard lives and little leisure and little energy to enjoy it, a society’s high culture is worth something. High civilizations can and often do provide spectacle, a measure of insurance, and a framework in which people can feel that their lives make sense and are purposeful in a way that cultures in which low-level local elites focus their energy on “not being governed” cannot. And in the context of a Malthusian equilibrium the simple claim that

(social well being) = - (rate of elite exploitation)

fails.

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So I think we need to evaluate:

• The quality of life in the Malthusian equilibrium for typical non-élite members of society

• The value—for the élite and for us their legatees—of the high culture the thugs-with-spears plus their tame accountants, propagandists, and bureaucrats produced.

• The value for the typical non-élite members of the high culture in which they semi-participate.

We need to properly weigh and then average these three.

Only if we do that can we properly judge among the nations.