How people become a polity
3 authors set me on the path to studying political science: Robert Sapolsky, Jill Lepore, and Steven Pinker. I started reading Robert Sapolsky's Behave in mid-2021, and was fascinated by the merging of biology, neuroscience, and anthropology to understand the causes of human behavior. That interest continued with Jill Lepore's political history of the United States and Steven Pinker's statistical, political, & psychological history of the global decline in violence. I didn't always agree with all of these authors (and they clashed on a number of points), but they got me into studying human political systems in all their variety and strangeness.
The Narrow Corridor by Acemoglu & Robinson
Reading & notes
To start off, I scanned through the local library for good, thorough books like the ones that had gotten me into the study. I eventually found The Narrow Corridor, a theory of why some places have liberty (the practical freedom to do what you want with your person and your belongings, without waiting upon the whims of anybody else) and others do not, despite highly varied environments, government structure, economies, and all the rest.
It's a great book (though not a masterwork like Behave or These Truths), and I've been going through and taking brief notes on each section (notes for the first two chapters were a little messier, but I found a style I liked by Chapter 2). I spent most of the first semester just reading and breaking down their theory. Narrow Corridor notes & analysis |
Critique & modification
Narrow corridor theory is a pretty good framework for understanding liberty—it properly deals with government power sometimes implying despotism and sometimes implying freedom, when paper constitutions do or don't matter, and the difference between violent & stable anarchies.
But it's not without its flaws and blind spots. Every model is wrong, but some are useful. I spent a while developing a thorough critique in hopes of improving it… then realized that what was missing was much more complex than I'd bargained for. (See the "collaboration without conformity" project below.) Narrow Corridor Theory - a critique |
Sidebar: agent-based modeling
I'd had a lot of fun with agent-based modeling (simulations that involve virtual actors making choices & interacting with each other) in my econ study, so I started messing with one for Narrow Corridor theory. Agents can chose whether to increase/decrease state or society power, for the good of everyone—or whether to increase state power to take a larger share for yourself. (The graph on the left is the narrow corridor graph in 3 dimensions, with the z-axis as the benefit for everyone.)
Then I did some math and realized this problem was an almost exact duplicate of the prisoner's dilemma, which I'd studied extensively before. So probably not going to pursue this particular simulation much further. But! I still did write a lot of code & figure out how I was going to do it, so you can see my annotated & explained code if you're interested. |
The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow
Reading & notes
The standard account of human inequality runs: in the beginning, humans lived in small, egalitarian bands scattered around the world. But as we took up farming and began to develop technology, inequalities emerged as a consequence of our new surplus. Hierarchy is the price we pay for technological and economic progress; we must choose between being unequally rich, or equally poor. At best, we can hope for redistributive taxation.
Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow don't believe it. If you turn to the evidence, there's a lot wrong with that story, and it's limiting our possibilities for today. I've read this book before, but over the holidays, I decided to return to it in more detail, as question & answer notes that could be directly ported to Anki for memorization. It's more a personal project, but as long as I've got some good thinking done, I thought I'd let you see it! Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 |
Critique & analysis
Some of G&W's analysis is brilliant. Some of it is useful. And some is baseless conjecture or flimsy reasoning.
In these first few chapters, there were a couple segments where I noticed some pretty sketchy logic. So I wrote a few short critiques on those to break them down in more detail: "Lovingly" fashioned? The "window of consciousness" |
New research question: collaboration without conformity?
Critiquing narrow corridor theory in depth revealed its biggest flaw: that one troublesome "society power" axis.
Sometimes "society power" means liberation from conformity: collective action to demand new rights, break old expectations, and protect each other through mutual aid in disasters. Sometimes it means absolute bondage to society: rules, traditions, norms, and customs that create a very cooperative, loyal, and "efficient" group by locking everyone into rigid cultural roles. It seemed very important to figure out how you can achieve the first without the second. And unless liberation is a direct consequence of state intervention (which it usually isn't, by Acemoglu & Robinson's admission) narrow corridor theory has no answer. Time for me to figure it out. Very much a work in progress. |
Research process
I started researching collective action, social capital, and tribalism. Some of the evidence I pulled together was from books I'd already read; others required new reading. Below are the notes I took from those new sources, and a link to the mind map I made to piece the evidence together.
Notes on "We Are Power" Notes from early presentation (given to librarian Meg Allison & history teacher Kevin Richards) Notes on "Bowling Alone" Notes on "The Upswing" Final mind map |
Conclusions
I haven't totally gotten to the bottom of cooperation and conformity yet. But I think I've found the biggest piece of the puzzle that Acemoglu & Robinson were missing, and the next area is to study the dynamics of that third factor. Here's a document with the summary of what I've found.
Cooperation & Conformity Conclusions
Bibliography
Cooperation & Conformity Conclusions
Bibliography