War and peace and war, p.31
War and Peace and War, page 31
WHEREAS FRANCE BEGAN ITS CLIMB out of the medieval depression c.1450, in England the time of troubles dragged on for another half century. In fact, in the second half of the fifteenth century, England saw the worst period of instability in its history. The period opened with Cade’s rebellion of 30,000 men in Kent and Sussex in 1450. A dreary civil war between the Lancastrians and Yorkists dragged on between 1455 and 1485. Henry VII Tudor (1485-1509) had to deal with a series of revolts, conspiracies, and pretenders. Only after the last pretender, Perkin Warbeck, was defeated in 1497 had England finally become pacified.
The divergence between the French and English trajectories can be traced to the middle of the fourteenth century. The Great Famine and the Black Death had the same effect on both countries: a disproportionate die-off of the producing population leading to a dangerous disbalance between too few peasants and too many lords. However, in 1356, the English won the victory at Poitiers and captured the French king. On the eve of the battle, the finances of the English crown were on the verge of collapse. Edward III imposed heavy taxes, causing widespread resentment, and borrowed like a fiend. His default on the loans from the Lombards caused the collapse of several Italian banks. The great victory at Poitiers brought with it increased legitimacy, which helped to quiet the grumbling over taxation, and, more importantly, a windfall of ransoms from the French king and nobles. Thus, precisely the same event that tipped France into the tailspin allowed the English a respite from their own troubles. During the next century, England continued shipping off the excess of its nobility to France, where they plundered with the free companies, or carved temporary domains for themselves, or simply were killed. The surplus noble thugs contributed to the chaos in France, but their absence from England allowed preservation of fragile balance within the island. This export of instability, however, did not solve the root causes that generated it. England experienced a great peasant rebellion and a change of dynasty at the end of the fourteenth century. But these upheavals were not enough to solve the problem of elite overproduction.
As soon as the French regained their social cohesion, England lost its outlet for venting steam. In 1453, the English were expelled from France, and practically immediately, just two years later, England went into its own tailspin. The struggle during the Wars of the Roses was extremely bitter and bloody. Kings were deposed and quietly murdered in prison or killed on the battlefield. Princes were strangled in the Tower of London. After a battle, the peers of the realm from the losing faction were made to kneel in the mud, and their heads were lopped off. Lesser nobility and gentry enthusiastically slaughtered each other in a host of small-scale feuds that broke out all over the country. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the English ruling class was pruned to the point where stability could gradually begin to reassert itself.
It is interesting that after the English and French trajectories diverged during the fourteenth century, these two societies continued to oscillate with a phase shift. For example, the next period of instability in France began with the religious wars and ended with the Fronde. In England, instability began with the Great Revolution, continued with the Glorious Revolution, and ended with two aftershocks of Jacobite rebellions in Scotland. Therefore, the instability phase in France was a century between 1560 and 1660, whereas in England it occurred later, roughly between 1640 and 1740. This observation drives the final nail in the coffin of the climatic explanation of secular cycles. The cores of the two states, southern England and northern France, have very similar climates, and if it was climate change that was responsible for decline and collapse, then the two societies should have experienced it at the same time. Yet they did not. On the other hand, if cycles are generated internally, preservation of phase shift is precisely what we should expect.
WE HAVE THUS SEEN THAT THE very stability and internal peace that strong empires impose contain within it the seeds of chaos. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity; prosperity causes population increase. Demographic growth leads to overpopulation; overpopulation causes lower wages, higher land rents, and falling per-capita incomes for the commoners. At first, low wages and high rents bring unparalleled wealth to the upper classes, but as their numbers and appetites grow, they too begin to suffer from falling incomes. Declining standards of life breed discontent and strife. The elites turn to the state for employment and additional income, and drive up its expenditures at the same time that the tax revenues decline because of the impoverished state of the population. When the state’s finances collapse, it loses control of the army and police. Freed from all restraints, strife among the upper classes escalates into civil war, and the discontent among the lower classes explodes into popular rebellions.
The collapse of order brings in its wake the four horsemen of apocalypse—famine, war, pestilence, and death. Population declines, and wages increase, while rents decrease. As incomes of commoners recover, the fortunes of the upper classes hit the bottom. Economic distress of the elites and lack of effective government feed the continuing internecine wars. But civil wars thin the ranks of the elites. Some die in factional fighting, others succumb to feuds with neighbors, and many just give up on trying to maintain their noble status and quietly slip into the ranks of commoners. Intra-elite competition subsides, allowing order to be restored. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and another secular cycle begins. “So peace brings warre and warre brings peace.”
Empires, therefore, go through an alternation of roughly century-long integrative and disintegrative phases as a result of their inner workings. But this does not mean that external factors are unimportant—as noted previously, although they do not cause secular cycles, they can influence them. Suppose that the population has already grown to the point where all potentially cultivable lands are cultivated, so that the capacity of land to feed the people is already under strain. A global cooling of the climate, causing a decline in crop production, will tip the society over the edge of sustainability. The resulting population decline will mainly affect the lower classes, making for a top-heavy society and that, as we know, rapidly leads to increasing social instability and collapse. If not for the temperature change, this society would enjoy internal peace for a while longer (although disintegration phase cannot be postponed forever).
In this theoretical example, the onset of instability was still due to internal causes (elite-commoner balance getting out of whack, causing intense intra-elite competition, and so on), but the timing of collapse was advanced by inclement climate. Again, external factors do not explain the secular cycle, but can influence it. Suppose the global cooling occurs earlier, when the population is sparse, and there is plenty of uncultivated land. A decline in crop productivity will impose some hardship, because peasants will need to increase the amount of land they cultivate to make up for poorer harvests. Perhaps population growth will be slower because of harsh winters. But there will be no population decline, no elite-commoner disbalance, and stability will be preserved. Climate worsening, thus, may or may not bring about the society collapse, depending on what stage of the cycle the society is in when it hits. This is why no strong association exists between climatic change and decentralization phases.
Other external factors can advance or delay the onset of crisis. States do not exist in isolation; they are surrounded by potential enemies or prey. External warfare can have a large effect on how the secular cycle develops. We saw how the loss of French territories in 1453 immediately precipitated crisis in England. Territorial gain, on the other hand, can postpone the crisis very substantially. During the Romanov dynasty (1613-1917), Russia enormously expanded its territory. The newly conquered steppe regions were sparsely populated and could accept massive inflows of colonizers, which relieved population pressure in the core regions. Nobles also profited from this colonization, by acquiring estates in the new lands. The nobility numbers expanded, but slower than the numbers of peasants. As a result, during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Russian society had a tiny ruling class—only about 1 percent of the total population, which explains the extremely long period, over two centuries, of internal stability. There were peasant uprisings, which were handily suppressed, and palace coups when the upper nobility wanted to change an emperor, but nothing like the time of troubles before the Romanov era. Only in the nineteenth century, after the colonization of the new lands was over, did the usual trends toward overpopulation and, particularly, elite overproduction assert themselves again. The result was the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the civil war, and Stalin’s purges.
When cycles are generated internally within a dynamical system, we should not expect rises and falls to succeed each other with a high degree of regularity, for the same reason that weather systems—and forest fires—are so difficult to predict. First, there is the curious property of nonlinear dynamical systems that mathematicians call chaos. Chaotic systems oscillate in a seemingly erratic but nevertheless completely deterministic fashion. Second, and more important, is that societies are not closed systems—they are affected and afflicted with a variety of external forces, such as climatic change, the arrival of a pandemic, or the invasion of an army. As a result, some cycles will take longer to complete, and others will run their course faster. Sometimes a cycle might even be completely aborted, if a Chinggis Khan or a Timur arrives with a huge army and piles the heads, of commoner and noble alike, in a huge pyramid.
Chapter 10
The Matthew Principle
Why the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer
Secular cycles are one of the most pervasive rhythms of history. They affect practically all facets of social life, from homicide rates to the styles of architecture. The phase of the secular cycle also determines the trend in social and economic inequality—whether it increases or decreases. This aspect is of particular interest because of the corrosive effect that glaring inequality has on the willingness of people to cooperate, which in turn underlies the capacity of societies for collective action. The effect of growing inequality is not limited to the escalation of “class warfare” between the poor and the rich. Increasing inequality within classes also leads to intense conflict of commoner versus commoner and aristocrat versus aristocrat. Growing inequality, thus, is an important part of imperiopathosis-the process by which imperial nations lose their high asabiya. What are the social forces that cause inequality to grow, and how does inequality affect societies?
Social scientists have debated this question for centuries, indeed for millennia. (The great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, for example, devoted much thought to inequality and its effect on politics.) One interesting idea is that increased wealth inequality can result from just economic exchange—trade. This was theoretically demonstrated by Robert Axtell and Joshua Epstein of the Brookings Institution. Axtell and Epstein devised a complex computer model that they call Sugarscape. Sugarscape is a virtual landscape within which certain resources are distributed, such as “sugar” and “spice.” Agents run around within this landscape, collecting, storing, and consuming sugar and spice. When Epstein and Axtell added to their model an ability to trade, agents immediately began exchanging sugar for spice and vice versa, and learned to set exchange rates (prices) for these two commodities depending on their supply and demand. What is particularly interesting to us is that, as time went by, wealth (stores of sugar or spice controlled by an agent) began to be distributed more and more unequally. Soon the great majority of the agents became very poor, while a small minority accumulated great riches.
Although the model of Axtell and Epstein might seem to have little relation to reality (it is not much more than a computer game), its results illustrate a profound principle. The poorer agents are at a disadvantage, compared to the richer ones, and, as a result, tend to lose ground. By contrast, the richer agents tend to increase their stores of resources with time. In the language of dynamical sciences, this is called a “positive feedback loop”—the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Social scientists came up with another name for it, the “Matthew principle,” because the New Testament says: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Mathew 13:12).
The Matthew principle operates not only on wealth distribution among the merchants, it is also a general mechanism by which all kinds of inequality can arise. In fact, the name for this principle was coined by the sociologist Robert K. Merton in the context of “accumulation” of peer recognition by scientists, as measured for example, by who gets cited. All this is very interesting, but how does it relate to premodern agrarian societies, which is the main subject of interest to us? The main form of wealth in agrarian societies is land, because one needs land to grow crops and raise livestock, the chief products in agrarian economy. How does inequality of land ownership develop?
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I decided to answer this question. I wanted to gain a very detailed, intimate understanding of this process. This meant that I needed an explicit mathematical model.
Models are simplified descriptions of reality that strip away all of its complexity except for a few features thought to be critical to the understanding of the phenomenon under study. Mathematical models are such descriptions translated into a very precise language that, unlike natural human languages, does not allow for any double (or triple) meanings. The great strength of mathematics is that, after we have framed a problem in mathematical language, we can deduce precisely what are the consequences of the assumptions we made—no more, no less. Mathematics, thus, is an indispensable tool in true science; a branch of science can lay a claim to theoretical maturity only after it has developed a body of mathematical theory, which typically consists of an interrelated set of specific, narrowly focused models.
Although mathematics is indispensable in developing theory, it does not mean that here I have to inflict the equations on the reader to explain what the theory tells us. The Princeton economist Paul Krugman once wrote, “The equations and diagrams of formal economics are, more often than not, no more than the scaffolding used to help construct an intellectual edifice. Once that edifice has been built to a certain point, the scaffolding can be stripped away, leaving only plain English behind.” Here is the story in plain English.
As is usual with such investigations, I started with a simple model. Imagine an idealized society, in which peace and the rule of law reign—there is no violence or theft. Property can only be inherited or sold and bought. Because we are interested in agrarian societies, land is the main type of property. Initially, each family has the same amount of it. You might wonder why I bothered with such a simple model. Surely it has nothing in common with any real society? The point of this model, however, was not to provide a description of any specific situation, but to lay bare the logic of how inequality develops. The connection to the messy reality comes later, after we have finished building the theoretical framework within which this reality can be conceptualized.
So we start with an absolutely egalitarian distribution of wealth. Will this equality persist into the next generation? For one thing, different families will have different numbers of children. Children from larger families will inherit smaller portions, whereas in a family with a single child, that child will get the whole inheritance. In one generation, the wealth distribution will cease to be egalitarian. In the next generation, things will become worse, because again there will be variation in the number of children, and some of the already small plots will be subdivided further. As a result, inequality will grow with time. Ironically, the very conditions of social peace and lawful transmission of property between generations create the conditions under which the society gradually separates into the poor and the rich.
In this first-cut model, I assumed that property is divided equally among all children. How do other methods of inheritance affect the results? If only one child inherits, for example, the oldest son (this rule of inheritance is called “primogeniture”), all the rest of his brothers and sisters are dispossessed. In one generation, a whole class of propertyless people is suddenly created. Primogeniture, therefore, creates inequality even faster than equal division. If the first son gets half, and the other half is divided equally among the rest of the heirs, inequality will grow at the rate that is intermediate between that for equal division and primogeniture. Thus, unequal division of property only makes things worse.
We also need to consider what happens when a man and a woman form a family, and join their inheritances together. In my simple model, I assumed that couples are formed without paying attention to the wealth of the partner (the “love conquers all” assumption). However, it is more likely that wealthier men will tend to choose as brides wealthier women (or their parents will arrange such unions). When I added such a “materialistic” tendency to the model, I saw, as expected, a much faster rate of inequality increase.
So far I have focused exclusively on the distribution of wealth. Another important aspect of the model is income. Does wealth inequality translate into income inequality? To answer this question, I had to add to the model a productive component. Land by itself does not generate income; it has to be worked by somebody to produce food (one also needs seed, agricultural implements, and so on; but let’s ignore such complications—again, progress in theory building is made by adding one thing at a time, not by jumping into the messy reality with all of its glorious complexities). It turns out that whether wealth inequality gets translated into income inequality, or not, depends on the population density—the size of potential workforce in relation to the amount of land that can be cultivated.
