This is an intended as a provocation to think outside your box. I hope you take it in the spirit intended.
If you are really brainstorming around the risk of a collapse of civilization due to some catastrophe, it is really hard to think outside your own political preferences. I say this from experience because I shy away from certain solutions (and even from acknowledging the problem). So allow me to suggest that your own limitations are making you avoid what I’d call ugly choices.
You suggest international cooperation as a way to prevent widespread destruction. Well, maybe. But there are two to four countries that have developed or are developing nuclear weapons and missile systems and that the rest of the world seems to treat as unstable. So one solution to that problem is invade them, destroy their facilities for nuclear and missile research, remove their leadership, and remove their relevant scientists and technical personnel. Why neither that problem nor that solution on your list? There is at least one recent example of a country invading another country after taking a public position that the second country had weapons of mass destruction. Was your omission because of that experience?
Many of your proposals seem oriented towards saving as many people as possible, rather than saving civilization. If civilization falls, the resulting economy will probably not produce enough food quickly enough to feed everyone. (Me? I’ll starve in year 1 , if I survive that long.) Why propose to spend resources on things that do not actually improve civilization’s robustness (like widely distributed gas masks when their recipients starve in the following winter)?
Economic growth creates more resources that can be used for resilience. Our current laws reduce both the maximum potential growth rate and the growth rate we actually have. For example, abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy. Why does your list not embrace whatever political policies induce the fastest economic growth?
Relatedly, one major civilization that fell due to its own laws was probably the Roman empire. It choked off its own economic growth through regulations intended to support its taxation structure, until it could not sustain its own weight. Why does your list not include that kind of threat to civilization?
I think there is commonality in these items, but that might be in the eye of the beholder.
abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy
[citation needed], as the saying goes.
Why does your list not embrace whatever political policies induce the fastest economic growth?
I agree that the list should include something like “Pursuing rapid economic growth”. But (1) it would probably be a mistake for the list to pick specific economic policies on the basis that they produce the fastest economic growth, since then the discussion would be in danger of being politicized by, say, an advocate of some particular economic/political policy that happens to differ from the one assumed in the list. (Of course that would never happen if the OP declined to pick favourites in this fashion.) And (2) fastest economic growth should not be the only criterion, unless that really is the only thing that influences robustness, which it may well not be. E.g., a policy might produce faster growth but also greater danger of violent and destructive revolution. Or it might produce faster growth but also introduce more single points of failure where one asteroid strike or serious outbreak of illness or terrorist act could bring everything down.
To take an example you already gave: laws restricting how unpleasant employers can make their employees’ lives may reduce economic growth but also make it less likely that there’s a violent uprising by workers fed up of their unpleasant lives.
one major civilization that feel due to its own laws [...] Why does your list not include that kind of threat to civilization?
As I understand it, RyanCarey is interested in threats to human civilization as a whole rather than to individual human civilizations. Human civilization as a whole doesn’t have laws, regulations, taxation, etc. If one nation collapses under the weight of its own regulatory burden then others will presumably take note.
(How widely held, and how well supported, is the theory that the Roman empire failed because of overregulation and overtaxation? It’s not a claim I’ve heard before, but I am about as far from being an expert in late Roman history as it is possible to be. In particular, how widely accepted is this theory outside circles in which everything is blamed on overregulation and overtaxation?)
Interesting; thanks. Of course it would be surprising if a document from the Mercatus Center didn’t conclude that regulation is economically disastrous, even in a hypothetical world where regulation is purely beneficial :-). (And their analysis is complicated enough that “how much do I trust the authors?” does seem like as important a question as “does it seem like they’re doing the right thing?”, when trying to figure out whether their results are likely to have much to do with the real world.)
abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy
[citation needed], as the saying goes.
I kind of doubt it. There are virtually no serious non-Marxist economists who believe that artificially raising the cost of labor, capital, or any other economic input diminishes output. The real debate is over whether it is appropriate to do so for other reasons, like fairness, justice, equality, and so on. So, if you really need a citation, I’d say that any first-year economics textbook would do it.
it would probably be a mistake for the list to pick specific economic policies on the basis that they produce the fastest economic growth, since then the discussion would be in danger of being politicized
My main point was about the mental process that generated the list. It a constraint on the process that generates the list is that it must be 100% de-politicized, then I wouldn’t put much faith in the list. And it reads to me like it has been.
fastest economic growth should not be the only criterion, unless that really is the only thing that influences robustness
Sure, but that main point again was about the process that led to the list. There’s a cost to everything on the list. Just because taxes pay for some item on it doesn’t make it free, even in terms of robustness.
As I understand it, RyanCarey is interested in threats to human civilization as a whole rather than to individual human civilizations. Human civilization as a whole doesn’t have laws, regulations, taxation, etc. If one nation collapses under the weight of its own regulatory burden then others will presumably take note.
One would hope, but they seem to be moving together for the past 20 years or so toward greater regulation, and hence greater fragility. If you can point me to a country whose published laws and regulations are shorter now than they were 10 years ago, I will happily retract the point (and consider buying a second home there).
And I would say that there are some legal jurisdictions that, if they failed quickly enough, could bring down the entirety of civilization. The US and EU are the two that come to mind. Two EMP devices, or two large enough asteroids, might do it.
How widely held, and how well supported, is the theory that the Roman empire failed because of overregulation and overtaxation?
It was the orthodox explanation in my economic history class that I took in 1988. I sometimes return to the subject to see if anyone has overturned that theory, and have never seen anything along those lines. The regulation was mainly driven by taxation,. The state raised revenues to the point that avoidance was really problematic, then instituted heavy controls on individuals to ensure payment. For example, in the late empire, most taxes were levied in kind; the regulatory response was that the law positively required the eldest son to succeed to his father’s profession, property, and station—so that the authorities could ensure that they were getting the right in-kind taxation. Some Roman citizens abandoned their property in order to avoid taxation, like runaway slaves. There is a theory that this is where serfdom originated, though I suspect the reality was more culturally mixed. The regulation had vast cost beyond the taxes being paid, because it prevented the movement of resources to more productive uses, either by changing jobs or by moving locations.
In any case, the point is that the regulatory structure created civilizational fragility. It didn’t take much after that for Rome to fall. I mean seriously—barbarian invaders? Rome had dealt with that for a thousand years and had always recovered from any reverses. It’s like the signature of the Roman Republic that they lost battles, won wars, and came back stronger than before. But the empire became a different thing.
You didn’t say “the first-order effect of abolishing labor laws would almost certainly be some increase in economic output”, you said “abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy”. There are two differences here.
First-order effect according to Economics 101 versus overall effect in the complicated real world.
Some unspecified, perhaps small, increase versus “vastly increase”.
Either would suffice to make your proposal to settle the issue by consulting “any first-year economics textbook” worthless. Would you like to make a more serious response?
I[f] a constraint on the process that generates the list is that it must be 100% de-politicized, then I wouldn’t put much faith in the list.
Noted. Personally it wouldn’t bother me at all, unless the list purported to be a complete list of everything that could or should be done. If completeness is the goal, then I agree that even politically incendiary proposals might belong in the list—but they should be flagged as such, to avoid unnecessary political firefights.
Just because taxes pay for some item on it doesn’t make it free
So far as I can tell, no one has said or implied anything even slightly resembling “these items are free because they are paid for by taxes”. You need to stop rounding everything off to the nearest thing there’s a libertarian talking point about.
(Lest I be misunderstood, I should add that I hope I would say the same thing if there were someone doing the same thing from the other side and rounding everything off to the nearest thing there’s, say, a Marxist talking point about. It happens that no one here is doing that.)
greater regulation, and hence greater fragility
[citation needed], again. It seems obvious to me that some regulation has the intention of reducing fragility, and I don’t see any grounds for assuming that it never succeeds. (Building codes make earthquakes etc. less disastrous. Labour laws make violent revolution less likely. Environmental legislation makes “natural” disasters less likely. Regulation of hazardous materials makes it less likely that we all get made stupid by lead poisoning—you may recall that that’s been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire too. Do all these actually work? I dunno. Do you know that they don’t?)
Two EMP devices, or two large enough asteroids
One large enough asteroid could put an end to life on earth, so I can’t disagree there. But if you really think two EMP devices could bring down the world’s civilization then I think you’re out of your mind.
the orthodox explanation in my economic history class
Noted. The picture I get from the bit of reading I’ve just done doesn’t quite match yours. It suggests that a more fundamental problem was that late Roman taxation was dominated by a land-tax which hit peasant farmers hardest, and which incentivized them to abandon land, so that productivity plummeted. That doesn’t seem like overregulation exactly; it seems like a damagingly regressive and ill-designed tax system. (The total tax burden even in the late empire seems to have been somewhat less as a fraction of gross product than in, say, the present-day US.)
Also apparently commonly blamed for late Roman economic problems: concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest of the senatorial class, and large transfers of wealth to the Christian church.
Nothing I’ve read—admittedly, this is just wandering through what I can find online—says anything about overregulation being the (or even a) source of the late empire’s problems. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but I’m finding it hard to believe that it’s “the orthodox explanation” in any context much wider than your economic history class :-).
The real debate is over whether it is appropriate to do so for other reasons, like fairness, justice, equality, and so on.
As gjm pointed out, one of those “other reasons” is survival. A mob with torches and pitchforks can easily put an end to your fine economic experiment of maximising growth.
How widely held, and how well supported, is the theory that the Roman empire failed because of overregulation and overtaxation? It’s not a claim I’ve heard before, but I am about as far from being an expert in late Roman history as it is possible to be. In particular, how widely accepted is this theory outside circles in which everything is blamed on overregulation and overtaxation?
Overtaxation is a standard reason given for the fall of the Roman Empire, and I’m surprised you haven’t heard of that before. I’ve never heard of overregulation being a reason; I’ve never looked into the Roman regulatory state, and have no idea how burdensome it was, or even if it substantively existed.
This is an intended as a provocation to think outside your box. I hope you take it in the spirit intended.
If you are really brainstorming around the risk of a collapse of civilization due to some catastrophe, it is really hard to think outside your own political preferences. I say this from experience because I shy away from certain solutions (and even from acknowledging the problem). So allow me to suggest that your own limitations are making you avoid what I’d call ugly choices.
You suggest international cooperation as a way to prevent widespread destruction. Well, maybe. But there are two to four countries that have developed or are developing nuclear weapons and missile systems and that the rest of the world seems to treat as unstable. So one solution to that problem is invade them, destroy their facilities for nuclear and missile research, remove their leadership, and remove their relevant scientists and technical personnel. Why neither that problem nor that solution on your list? There is at least one recent example of a country invading another country after taking a public position that the second country had weapons of mass destruction. Was your omission because of that experience?
Many of your proposals seem oriented towards saving as many people as possible, rather than saving civilization. If civilization falls, the resulting economy will probably not produce enough food quickly enough to feed everyone. (Me? I’ll starve in year 1 , if I survive that long.) Why propose to spend resources on things that do not actually improve civilization’s robustness (like widely distributed gas masks when their recipients starve in the following winter)?
Economic growth creates more resources that can be used for resilience. Our current laws reduce both the maximum potential growth rate and the growth rate we actually have. For example, abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy. Why does your list not embrace whatever political policies induce the fastest economic growth?
Relatedly, one major civilization that fell due to its own laws was probably the Roman empire. It choked off its own economic growth through regulations intended to support its taxation structure, until it could not sustain its own weight. Why does your list not include that kind of threat to civilization?
I think there is commonality in these items, but that might be in the eye of the beholder.
[citation needed], as the saying goes.
I agree that the list should include something like “Pursuing rapid economic growth”. But (1) it would probably be a mistake for the list to pick specific economic policies on the basis that they produce the fastest economic growth, since then the discussion would be in danger of being politicized by, say, an advocate of some particular economic/political policy that happens to differ from the one assumed in the list. (Of course that would never happen if the OP declined to pick favourites in this fashion.) And (2) fastest economic growth should not be the only criterion, unless that really is the only thing that influences robustness, which it may well not be. E.g., a policy might produce faster growth but also greater danger of violent and destructive revolution. Or it might produce faster growth but also introduce more single points of failure where one asteroid strike or serious outbreak of illness or terrorist act could bring everything down.
To take an example you already gave: laws restricting how unpleasant employers can make their employees’ lives may reduce economic growth but also make it less likely that there’s a violent uprising by workers fed up of their unpleasant lives.
As I understand it, RyanCarey is interested in threats to human civilization as a whole rather than to individual human civilizations. Human civilization as a whole doesn’t have laws, regulations, taxation, etc. If one nation collapses under the weight of its own regulatory burden then others will presumably take note.
(How widely held, and how well supported, is the theory that the Roman empire failed because of overregulation and overtaxation? It’s not a claim I’ve heard before, but I am about as far from being an expert in late Roman history as it is possible to be. In particular, how widely accepted is this theory outside circles in which everything is blamed on overregulation and overtaxation?)
Here is a start.
Interesting; thanks. Of course it would be surprising if a document from the Mercatus Center didn’t conclude that regulation is economically disastrous, even in a hypothetical world where regulation is purely beneficial :-). (And their analysis is complicated enough that “how much do I trust the authors?” does seem like as important a question as “does it seem like they’re doing the right thing?”, when trying to figure out whether their results are likely to have much to do with the real world.)
I kind of doubt it. There are virtually no serious non-Marxist economists who believe that artificially raising the cost of labor, capital, or any other economic input diminishes output. The real debate is over whether it is appropriate to do so for other reasons, like fairness, justice, equality, and so on. So, if you really need a citation, I’d say that any first-year economics textbook would do it.
My main point was about the mental process that generated the list. It a constraint on the process that generates the list is that it must be 100% de-politicized, then I wouldn’t put much faith in the list. And it reads to me like it has been.
Sure, but that main point again was about the process that led to the list. There’s a cost to everything on the list. Just because taxes pay for some item on it doesn’t make it free, even in terms of robustness.
One would hope, but they seem to be moving together for the past 20 years or so toward greater regulation, and hence greater fragility. If you can point me to a country whose published laws and regulations are shorter now than they were 10 years ago, I will happily retract the point (and consider buying a second home there).
And I would say that there are some legal jurisdictions that, if they failed quickly enough, could bring down the entirety of civilization. The US and EU are the two that come to mind. Two EMP devices, or two large enough asteroids, might do it.
It was the orthodox explanation in my economic history class that I took in 1988. I sometimes return to the subject to see if anyone has overturned that theory, and have never seen anything along those lines. The regulation was mainly driven by taxation,. The state raised revenues to the point that avoidance was really problematic, then instituted heavy controls on individuals to ensure payment. For example, in the late empire, most taxes were levied in kind; the regulatory response was that the law positively required the eldest son to succeed to his father’s profession, property, and station—so that the authorities could ensure that they were getting the right in-kind taxation. Some Roman citizens abandoned their property in order to avoid taxation, like runaway slaves. There is a theory that this is where serfdom originated, though I suspect the reality was more culturally mixed. The regulation had vast cost beyond the taxes being paid, because it prevented the movement of resources to more productive uses, either by changing jobs or by moving locations.
In any case, the point is that the regulatory structure created civilizational fragility. It didn’t take much after that for Rome to fall. I mean seriously—barbarian invaders? Rome had dealt with that for a thousand years and had always recovered from any reverses. It’s like the signature of the Roman Republic that they lost battles, won wars, and came back stronger than before. But the empire became a different thing.
You didn’t say “the first-order effect of abolishing labor laws would almost certainly be some increase in economic output”, you said “abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy”. There are two differences here.
First-order effect according to Economics 101 versus overall effect in the complicated real world.
Some unspecified, perhaps small, increase versus “vastly increase”.
Either would suffice to make your proposal to settle the issue by consulting “any first-year economics textbook” worthless. Would you like to make a more serious response?
Noted. Personally it wouldn’t bother me at all, unless the list purported to be a complete list of everything that could or should be done. If completeness is the goal, then I agree that even politically incendiary proposals might belong in the list—but they should be flagged as such, to avoid unnecessary political firefights.
So far as I can tell, no one has said or implied anything even slightly resembling “these items are free because they are paid for by taxes”. You need to stop rounding everything off to the nearest thing there’s a libertarian talking point about.
(Lest I be misunderstood, I should add that I hope I would say the same thing if there were someone doing the same thing from the other side and rounding everything off to the nearest thing there’s, say, a Marxist talking point about. It happens that no one here is doing that.)
[citation needed], again. It seems obvious to me that some regulation has the intention of reducing fragility, and I don’t see any grounds for assuming that it never succeeds. (Building codes make earthquakes etc. less disastrous. Labour laws make violent revolution less likely. Environmental legislation makes “natural” disasters less likely. Regulation of hazardous materials makes it less likely that we all get made stupid by lead poisoning—you may recall that that’s been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire too. Do all these actually work? I dunno. Do you know that they don’t?)
One large enough asteroid could put an end to life on earth, so I can’t disagree there. But if you really think two EMP devices could bring down the world’s civilization then I think you’re out of your mind.
Noted. The picture I get from the bit of reading I’ve just done doesn’t quite match yours. It suggests that a more fundamental problem was that late Roman taxation was dominated by a land-tax which hit peasant farmers hardest, and which incentivized them to abandon land, so that productivity plummeted. That doesn’t seem like overregulation exactly; it seems like a damagingly regressive and ill-designed tax system. (The total tax burden even in the late empire seems to have been somewhat less as a fraction of gross product than in, say, the present-day US.)
Also apparently commonly blamed for late Roman economic problems: concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest of the senatorial class, and large transfers of wealth to the Christian church.
Nothing I’ve read—admittedly, this is just wandering through what I can find online—says anything about overregulation being the (or even a) source of the late empire’s problems. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but I’m finding it hard to believe that it’s “the orthodox explanation” in any context much wider than your economic history class :-).
As gjm pointed out, one of those “other reasons” is survival. A mob with torches and pitchforks can easily put an end to your fine economic experiment of maximising growth.
Overtaxation is a standard reason given for the fall of the Roman Empire, and I’m surprised you haven’t heard of that before. I’ve never heard of overregulation being a reason; I’ve never looked into the Roman regulatory state, and have no idea how burdensome it was, or even if it substantively existed.