ON SOCIETAL ASCENDANCE AND COLLAPSE: AN AUSTRIAN CHALLENGE TO JARED DIAMOND’S EXPLICATIONS by John Brätland (US Department of the Interior)
In his 1997 book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond seeks to explain the ascendancy and triumphs of certain societies — certain European societies, as examples. For Diamond, geographical and environmental differences are a principal determinant of societal destiny. In his 2005 book, Collapse, Diamond attributes the demise of societies such as Easter Island principally to environmental degradation and destruction. Diamond uses Easter Island as a metaphor in warning of global collapse. For Diamond, societies are entities that act independent of the actions of individuals. He sees societal ascent or collapse as being contingent upon the extent to which societies embrace a centralized structure and management. But in so doing, he ignores institutions critical to peaceful, prosperous social interaction and the formation of society: (1) private property rights and (2) human action leading to division of labor and emergence of cooperative monetary exchange. With these institutions, individuals are able to avoid conflict and rationally reckon both scarcity and capital. Without these institutions, societies such as the Soviet Union and Easter Island are seen to have a common fate in that scarcity implies conflict, chaos, ‘waste’ and eventual collapse.
See all working papers.
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He may ignore institutions required for peaceful social interaction, but those don’t seem to arise spontaneously. Nor can they address every problem.
His case of Greenland is on point. The climate changed and the choice ended up being turn into innuit and do what they did or die. I don’t think there was any active prohibition on change. Then there is the problem of asymetrical effects of disaster. If the volcano blows and your trees are gone, you are now poor and have no capital (your savings might be under 20 feet of hot basalt) so must beg – and you can’t even rebuild your business. Surviving tree owners now command a premium. Then there is the choice of selling the trees now (and maybe not replanting) or taking a chance the volcano will get you next year.
Even now, there is a huge debate over “peak oil”, and it has serious economic consequences – where should we invest? Why build a new refinery if there won’t be enough to supply it?
But instead of rationally analyzing it, we get the media chorus with the strophe of shortage and the anti-strophe of denials by the various producers. Same with many scientific questions (e.g. bans from “Ozone holes” caused not by volcanoes shooting chlorine into the stratosphere, but by CFCs which sink into the soil and are digested by bacteria).
Instead of entrepenuers making rational bets based on good information, they either are about as good as playing roulette, or are based on optimistic or pessimistic frauds that are what the person wants to hear. You are rewarded for being right, but being right is based more on chance than reason.
I forget the name of that bond company located in the upper floors in the WTC. It doesn’t exist now. Aside from being in the wrong geographic location, what did they do wrong? Did they make trading mistakes like LTCM? Did they do Enron like fraud? No, they were physically destroyed and could not rebuild.
More liberty won’t stop hurricanes (nor the generational myopia – they run in cycles, so the 1930s-40s had a lot hit florida, so it was “a bad place to build” until the atlantic cycle changed to a period with few hurricans, so florida became ideal – but now the other part of the cycle has returned). Nor volcanoes nor earthquakes. California still seems idyllic, but another 1906 style earthquake is due and might scare people away again. The there’s the New Madrid fault.
You can say “the market is the answer”, but not to everything. It may provide more just outcomes, but then there will be a larger number of impoverished or dead fools – as well as a large number of people who get the same fate because they are simply unlucky.
If you have a tinhorn dictator who is the only rich man, but he is responsible for 1/2 the GDP of a country (with the rest poor and starving), and the dictator’s income doubles, the country’s GDP will go up by 50%. Or the poor could double their income. Economically the outcomes show equal growth. But socially things are different.
Our economy has shown growing GDP, but a lot of that has moved from manufacturing to “virtual” things – services like finance – moving papers or electrons representing what was on papers around.
tz post a good point, particularly about US loosing manufacturing strenght in favour of so-called service (moving papers and options in financial market “industry”(sic!)). Private property and human action are not sufficient to explain anything. They are a priori methodologically explaining economic and social events egual to Kant a priori cause-effect but ineffective. Manufacturing are LONG TERM investment used by Germany or Japan, now China, with social cohesion, family help etc. Service au contraire are SHORT TERM investment typical of anglosaxons societies where individual is more alone and aggregate person TO THE society. germany France, japan may afford 10% unenployment for the help of cohesion and family, UK and USA cannot do so. The same may be said about some confidence in statistic like GDP like tz as explained. the environment is also important not only for economic but for quality of life. Humans are not here to be considered ONLY under their economic way of conduct via theoretically a priori ground of explanations. Accumulation of capital its not an END in se, as an individual, have to be shared with someone: family friends solidarity etc. This may underline a sense of human action and the same life in larger meaning. The mantra of a priori behaviour of homus economicus ONLY come to explain nothing more than the mantra itself, far from any economic understanding, a part some aficionados to reiterate the mantra like in Austrians.
Let me clarify that for the things the market does well – allocate resources – it ought to be unregulated.
The problem is how to address the externality and public goods problems. Government tends to be corrupt and corrupt whatever it touches, so it ought to stay away from the market. Yet even collectively, fools and their money (or capital) will soon be parted, and even the brightest capitalist cannot succeed where everyone is starving and trying to obtain food instead of even the best widget.
The market provided auctions for slaves in the first years of the American Republic – that was a market success but a moral failure.
In all cases I would prefer to educate and persuade people to virtue, so that they would use the very powerful force we call the market properly and for good.
Eternal life is not of this earth, but the market is. If we don’t worry for our grandchildren or even value them, we will act differently – if we won’t be around 50-100 years from now and don’t care about those that will be here, we may as well turn the earth into a burnt out cinder, as long as it is delayed past any probable lifespan.
Conservation v.s. consumption is a matter for the virtues of temperance, prudence, justice and fortitude.
tz, while what you say feels good, there is one fundamental error: Where the market is unregulated, necessities are taken care of first because that’s the stuff a supplier can make the most profits from.
You’re right that no one is going to be deciding between nylon or silk stockings when there’s no food, and the smart entrepreneur knows this. Competition among food providers then brings down prices, until it *is* profitable to try to sell the masses something other than necessities.
When I was working at NASA, there were several visits by Russian rocket scientists. These were not stupid people by any means, but during their first trip to the US they were simply unable to grasp that we weren’t trying to put something over on them. The grocery stores were everywhere, and they were full of stuff! All of them! This blew their minds.
If competition really were a Hobsian “war of all against all”, or if cartels could maintain themselves without government intervention, then you would have a point. But so long as there isn’t any forced “public goods”, that is as long as private individuals are allowed to deal with their property as private property, everyone looks out for the quality of their own stuff. There simply isn’t any “problem of externalities of public goods” to deal with, because there are no public goods other than what people voluntarily provide.
Speaking of “working papers”… I have one of those that I actually need to be finishing right now, quite overdue for my history course. Coincidentally, this is the same course where we looked at Jared Diamond’s famous book; I had mentioned this at one of Paul Musgrave’s older blog entries (I have taken that class before…), and when I saw it again a few hours ago at In the Agora, I should have known that Paul was the writer of that entry.
I actually never got around to reading that famous book… I had dropped the course in which it was assigned, and the new class only requires us to read a small part of it – that was done in connection to “Materialist Historiography” and Marxism. Perhaps the fact that it was assigned in this course should suggest that Jared Diamond’s thesis is one that would be opposed by the Mises scholars… but then again, that is such a famous book. Is Diamond a liberal historian?
The Easter Island example is one that we’ve used in this class; I’m not sure if we went over Jared Diamond’s view of this, but we did read this piece, which is probably along the same lines. I wasn’t aware that Diamond has a new book this year; has it already been published? I don’t know if it will do as well as the previous one, but it should be an interesting read (regardless of how many – or how few – of his points we agree with).
I thought you might be interested in seeing my review of the PBS program in July 8 Science. You can access a text version on my Web site at:
http://www.michaelbalter.com/NeolithicNews/07_25_2005|Review_of_Guns_Germs_and_Steel.php
all best, Michael Balter, Science
http://www.michaelbalter.com
Mises Institute,
You seem to have a lot of knowledge about the book. I have personally skimmed through half of the chapters that were assigned to us but what I read about, was mostly on Australia. I was wondering if you could help me find a topic or thesis for my paper that has something to do with Australia’s environmental problems and how they can be solved perhaps?
Sincerely,
BR
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