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The throughpoint I notice in a lot of these conversations against western ideas like markets, democracy, or decadence is that none of them can explain why the west keeps winning if that is so bad.
If communism is better than capitalism, why did the USSR fall and not the US? Why is China the poorest per capita of the Chinese majority countries (who have embraced capitalism) and only making up for it by sheer numbers?
If democracy is so bad and monarchy/empires are so good, then why are pretty much all the dictatorships shitholes while the democracies are rich and powerful? The only meaningful counter example is Singapore and that's more of a blend between dictatorship and democracy. A single mixed winner out of dozens and dozens of failures is not a good strategy. It's also so much an obvious good thing that North Korea and Russia and China even hold fake elections. Why do they dress up as democracies while democracies don't often dress up as them?
And if decadence and "good times" was so bad, then like you point out, why do nations like North Korea continue to suck so much while the US has such untouchable supreme power? And yes we failed in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but name other nations that are even able to do wars like that. Name another nation that can do multiple massive wars abroad against a coalition of multiple countries pushing back trying to regime change them while barely even lifting much of a finger back home. You can't, because even with our failures we're still one of the only nations with that ability. The dictators and "hard men" are struggling to even handle their own nations too much to be involved in what happens halfway around the world.
This isn't a theoretical discussion, we have a real trial right there in the real world. And the west, with its markets, democracy and "weak men" decadence are the winners over and over again.
City states and micro states (and frequently, Ireland) should always be ignored when discussing macroeconomics or other society level human trends
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The only contemporary counter example. Both the German Empire and Imperial Japan performed respectably in the late 18th and early 19th century, both economically and militarily.
The German Empire doubled GDP per capita between 1870 and 1914, surpassing (democratic) France and slowly closing the gap towards both the (also democratic) British Empire and the US - and they did that without having access to a vast colonial empire or an entire continent absolutely full of natural resources, respectively. The details are a bit more complicated, of course, because the Emperor was kept in check by a democratically elected parliament, but they really didn't have all that much power (mostly some fiscal control, but the Emperor chose the Chancellor and could disband parliament at any time, which he frequently threatened). Also, Wilhelm II was a
bumbling idiotmostly ineffective ruler.Imperial Japan went through the Meiji Restoration during the same period, industrializing even faster than Germany and successfully using its new industrial might to absolutely crush China and Russia on the battlefield. Again, a centralized monarchy with power concentrated mostly in the Emperor, but some checks (council of elder statesmen doing some heavy advising - but nobody said a dictator couldn't have some competent experts to make some decisions). And yes, both monarchies extensively relied on market economies - with a lot of guiding industrial policy from their Emperors.
Would have been interesting how far those centralized monarchies could have taken their people (in absentia of a catastrophic loss in a World War they started putting an end to the experiment) - or if the monarchy would have been abolished/disempowered/constitutionalized by the people anyway, even without the wars.
Why is there only one good contemporary example? If it's such a great and effective strategy, we should see it more. It's like with evolution, we don't have to theorize about what works in nature, we can simply see what exists and know that must be pretty good by the very fact it exists and is succeeding.
There might be some imperial niches that work fine, but they do seem to be a niche.
Exactly, they lost. There was a real world test and they lost it. The empires flunked the exam. Maybe the allies didn't get an A+, but they did get a passing grade.
It's more complicated than that, right? By that logic, you could pick 1985 and argue that communism was better for Eastern Germany than centralized monarchy and market economy. Which is wrong, in my opinion - even a bumbling idiot as the King of Prussia would have done his people better than the commies ever did. Same for Belgian Congo - just because they don't have a King and his Governor anymore doesn't mean that... whatever the fuck it is they are doing there today is better for the Congolese than monarchy was (not saying that the monarchy was working out particularly well for the Congolese, either, but life was certainly better in the '50s than it is today). Just because you can destroy something doesn't mean what comes after is actually necessarily working better. And sure, eventually the commies failed in Eastern Germany and something more effective took over. But that doesn't just happen automatically.
I'm not a fan of single shot experiments. Wilhelm II was an idiot. Run the story again with Bismark as emperor, and western civilization might be speaking German for the next 400 years. And of course, democracy doesn't automatically select for the most effective leaders for the majority of voters. American voters elected and reelected G.W. Bush, which arguably was both unnecessary and a strict loss for the majority of Americans.
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Perhaps it's a little bit more complicated than this, given how many of the successful Western European states are literal monarchies?
In a technical sense sure, but it's hard to say countries like Sweden or Canada or the UK now are meaningfully a monarchy. Just like with the dictatorships, that the most successful examples are drastically different from the archetype is not a coincidence.
Isn't this also true of democracies?
Not that I am a fan of dictatorships or monarchies. But there is a lot of bad governance out there to go around, and the fact that democracies eclipsed monarchies once doesn't, in my mind, assume that the question is settled forever for all time (my own sense is that democracies and monarchies decay in different ways and thus can feed into each other.) The fact that a lot of those democracies are still functioning monarchies in at least a nominal sense can definitely be interpreted as a L for monarchies...but I think it could also be taken as a W.
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All of them are liberal constitutional democracies, however.
Does that make them not a monarchy? (Does a democracy that is not liberal become not a democracy?)
If the first goal of a state is to perpetuate itself, then perhaps monarchies are more successful than commonly believed.
The unreasonable success of constitutional monarchies is under-studied - probably because increasingly many of the people who might study it are either Americans or trying to get jobs in American universities, where it is taken for granted that the American system is superior because it produced America.
[FWIW, America is an outlier and parliamentary democracy has a much better track record than presidential democracy. I suspect the overperformance of constitutional monarchies is driven by them all being parliamentary]
Yeah I've been noodling on that a bit - I don't have a ranking of all countries best to worst, but it seems to me you could argue that constitutional monarchies outperform the average democracy, at least in certain respects, which would be interesting.
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Germany performed respectably during the war and lost because it was facing multiple peer adversaries simultaneously+the British naval blockade.
There are also multiple contemporary examples; aside from Singapore there's Liechtenstein(the only country in the world to vote to go back to an absolute monarchy, outcomes very similar to neighboring Switzerland), the gulf monarchies(and if you insist on saying resource wealth is cheating, I will point out that the UAE does not make most of its money from oil), and partially Andorra(which is technically a Catholic theocracy, although in practice that mostly comes into play in setting its abortion policy). Monarchies generally are places to live that are pretty average for their neighborhood; life in Morocco is a lot like life in Algeria. They hate each other, but that's also pretty normal for the neighborhood. In the recent past there were a number of other examples, most notably South Korea.
Ah so one notable disadvantage here is the tendency to make multiple enemies.
So they're not particularly stand out compared to the other shit systems in their local area. Like aside from Singapore, would you want to live in Andorra or the Gulf monachies, or would you want Germany/France/Nordic Countries/US/Canada etc?
That the immigration issue is towards the West and not from the west is a pretty big sign of what people's preference is.
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I think you are ignoring a large part of war competency if your definition excludes the lead up to wars such as the when, how, who, and why you are starting a war. A competent country does not start wars against multiple peers at opposite ends of its country at the same time. Same reason I wouldn't consider someone a great fighter if they keep picking fights with opponents that outnumber or outmatch them then get thrashed. Doesn't matter if they can throw a perfect right hook, they are not good fighters.
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Why did Germany end up facing multiple peer adversaries, including the world's greatest naval and industrial powers?
I don't think you can shrug it off as mere coincidence. The German approach to diplomacy in the decades leading up to WWI was aggressive and confrontational, they very much set this strategic situation up for themselves.
I think this is a more general pattern. I would, only slightly snarkily, say that the greatest weakness of countries ran entirely by warriors is that they have a persistent tendency to underestimate the threat posed by Anglosphere countries and start wars of choice in which we have no choice but to wipe the floor with them.
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You could ask these sort of questions about Rome, and every other empire, right up until the point of it's collapse. The one about democracy could be, and was, asked in reverse right up until the 20th century.
Unless you're actively saying America is not in decline, and will not collapse if it stays on it's current trajectory, you're not even addressing the issue with these questions.
It's better to think about concepts like democracy and capitalism as a form of technology in and of themselves, they're an idealogical technology that people had to bring about and work to optimize. But like the car beat the horse, the free market beat the mercantalists and central economic control, and democracy beat the dictators.
We're on the cutting edge of creating a machine god, if anything we're on the upswing for decades to come. Unless AI does turn out to be a bubble, but it sure seems like we're getting something major at least even if not full AGI. Or I suppose the machine god destroys us all, sure that would be a failure state then.
I have no idea how this addresses my response.
Welp, I guess that leaves us at "agree to disagree". You're not. You're not anywhere close. We might get some fairly radical changes out of it, like a total surveillance state, but nothing like "machine god" from rationalist fanfics.
Because saying "well what about pre car history, horses won then" as a pro horse argument against cars is silly. The same way, talking about history before the modern western ideas took hold doesn't really work out.
Look I don't know what we're gonna get but even if it's not AGI it does seem to be some sort of radical surge in productivity at the very least. Scientists and companies are already exploring AI's potential to improve research and market output, and progress doesn't seem to be slowing down much.
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Singapore, Liechtenstein, and the UAE are not democracies and all outpace neighboring countries in being nice places to live. Notably they have more civil freedom than a typical dictatorship, but they’re still not democracies. Andorra is arguably a partial example as well.
And the typical monarchy is pretty average for its neighborhood; they do, however, seem to avoid the dumbest mistakes very reliably, like communism or retarded foreign policy. Notably thé monarchy/dictatorship distinction is pretty core to the definition of both; you can reject the distinction, but it does seem to predict real trends in the real world. You can find past examples of benevolent dictatorships, if you look. You have to do a similar degree of looking to find terrible monarchs.
Singapore is the interesting mix that I already mentioned, I don't know anything about Liechtenstein so no comment but the UAE borders Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Oman is a monarchy, Qatar is a monarchy and so is SA, so any success you can attribute to the UAE there relative to the neighbors is not from having a monarchy, the neighbors do too!
Yeah, in the same way that China notably has a more open market than the traditional communist state and not a coincidence is better off than most of them (even if not at the Singapore/Taiwan/Hong Kong per capita levels). It's also not a coincidence that the more successful dictatorships and monarcies tend to be the weaker examples of the archetype!
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman are also very nice places for citizens to live, by global standards, Nevermind Arab or middle eastern ones.
As far as civil freedom goes, people don’t like horrendous oppression. It makes places a less nice place to live, and enlightened despots were seen as excellent rulers for it in their own day- but the history of enlightened despotism indicates that this is not an impossible concept(there’s currently four examples- the UAE, Singapore, Andorra, and Liechtenstein. To explain the paucity I would point to the tendency to democratize being very pronounced). It is also difficult to achieve a high income economy without economic freedom, which is in turn very difficult to maintain without economic freedom.
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