91–100 of 119 posts
Reading this review - and others - I was reminded of Ralph Peters essay 'Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States' http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/Articles/98spr... Which doesn't really explain 'why' but does set out in concise form 'what failure looks like'.
This is the kind of thinking that got the US stuck in Iraq for a decade. "We'll change the country by killing this one guy".
If a nation's leader is a failure it's because the nation itself is a big pile of fail, not the other way around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will look into it. There is also the elephant in the room with this subject, which is when you look which cultures might be at risk from collapse in the future. Or perhaps I have just read Snowcrash too many times.
That's specifically the question Diamond is looking for an answer to. We're staring down several of his modes of failure.
Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse Of Complex Societies is a bit academic but very good study of civilizational collapse. It has a lot of data, studies many different civilizations and examines all popular theories of civilizational collapse. It points to diminshing marginal returns on increasing complexity in civilizations as the mechanism of collapse. It's far better than the trendy Jared Diamond writing. IMHO, Jared…
Really? I found _Collapse_ to be much more boring than I expected. One of the major reasons he claims that a society collapses is a lack of trading partners. Not very sexy at all, and not leftist.
Once again Occam's butterknife is spotted in the wild. Richard Lynn, call your office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse Of Complex Societies is a bit academic but very good study of civilizational collapse. It has a lot of data, studies many different civilizations and examines all popular theories of civilizational collapse. It points to diminshing marginal returns on increasing complexity in civilizations as the mechanism of collapse. It's far better than the trendy Jared Diamond writing. IMHO, Jared…
The author's key argument is that extractive institutions lead to state failure. Like most theories of state failure, there's some good examples but enough weak or counter examples to discredit it as 'the' answer. At best, I'd argue that extractive institutions are a block to success: countries with them have one fewer barrier to overcome. I recently researched the thorny issue of what consititutes art, and the leadi…
You can try to use history to add some data, but on the other hand, many smallish states will have similar criteria (history, culture, geography,...) so that diminishes you data set.
In addition, while you could try to use this to make predictions, the time scale is so big that I don't think the whole endeavor is very useful.
There is fundamentally sound economics behind the authors theory, but there's also really easy to understand logic: IF you have a strong state that controls the economy, then everything that is done must be authorized by the state. This is necessary if the purpose of the state is to extract the nations wealth to profit an elite few. If you have a weak state, then experiments can be tried, and while many experiments w…
Reading this review - and others - I was reminded of Ralph Peters essay 'Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States' http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/Articles/98spr... Which doesn't really explain 'why' but does set out in concise form 'what failure looks like'.