The allocation of land is, as far as I’m aware, a bit of an unsolved problem in schemes like this, and it is assuredly something you need to solve. Others have pointed out that voting with one’s feet is not necessarily going to put pressure on a government to change. In fact, with territory size kept constant, many of the people in positions of power might welcome emigration for the increase in land availability. The enforcing body of natural selection needs to take deliberate steps to ensure that dissatisfying nations actually go away eventually, and by sturgeons law, unless their borders are shrinking, pick any section of land at random, and there will be a 90% chance that the government tasked with optimizing its use for the maximization of human flourishing is shit.
Any solution to the allocation of land will have to deal with constantly shifting borders.
Neighboring governments will have to find ways to agree to border movement.
Anyone on the border ends up being faced with a choice between moving to a neighboring country or losing their home to it. Since the event of a border advancing over one’s home will usually go in lockstep with population decreases somewhere else in your nation, a government will often be able to set up some kind of exchange deal, though this will not be a complete solution. The land vacated by malcontented emmigrants/exiles is rarely going to be as valuable as the land being forbidden from a contented citizen who liked their place in the nation well enough to stay.
If you allocate land in proportion to the number of people in each nation, you lock in a certain way of life, precluding potentially valuable experimentation in the feasibility of lifestyles in dense populations or in the joy of lifestyles in sparse settlements. Maybe nations that optimize the joy of a few are, in total, preferable to nations with denser, merely satisfied people? Is it the place of the stewards of national selection to say? Maybe. I’d guess the LW community has probably thought about that moral question quite a lot, did we ever turn up an answer?
It does seem like it would be easiest to just allocate each nation total_habitable_land*(nation_population/total_population)*desired_proportion_of_natural_reserves. Though that does make overpopulation pretty much impossible to deal with. Reproduction booms becomes a problem for neighboring states, and the world at large, but leads to expansion for the states doing it. All the while no state has the authority to do anything about it.
In fact, with territory size kept constant, many of the people in positions of power might welcome emigration for the increase in land availability.
This is true for undeveloped countries where arable land and natural resources are still main economic assets.
It does seem like it would be easiest to just allocate each nation total_habitable_land(nation_population/total_population)desired_proportion_of_natural_reserves.
There is an old tradition of trying to settle territorial disputes based on general idealistic principles. “Legitimacy” was a very popular concept after the Congress of Vienna. “Self-determination” and “national sovereignty” are just as popular today. In practice, statesmen always interpret these principles in a way that serves their own interests.
In my opinion, any abstract solution to the problem of the land division, no matter how just and perfect in theory, has no real chance of working (at least in the foreseeable future). In most cases it would probably be better to work with the currently existing borders – for instance, by giving full internal autonomy to states or provinces within one country.
Unless you’ve chosen a poor sample of the evidence you’re familiar with, your opinion is not going to stop anyone from following their fatuous curiosity, here. The historical cases you refer to seem a couple orders of magnitude more fraught with the spooks of subjective indignation than anything anyone in this community would propose. When an analytic philosopher looks at these things they don’t see decision procedures that should have worked in theory but failed, they don’t see decision procedures at all, they see disagreements in waiting.
I agree that any morally loaded criterion for deciding land reallocations is going to trip over the subjectivity of morality as we know it, especially in a system that’s explicitly designed to support the sovereignty of diverse groups. I believe we can at least come up with a negotiation procedure that returns immediate, unambiguous results that do a pretty okay job of cleaning up vacated territories.
I’ll call this one Simultaneous Haggle Reallocation.
Let’s say that in each term, each state must submit a preference ordering on the areas just outside their border, in neighboring states, and an ordering on the areas just inside their border. The outside list describes the places they’ll take if their population increases in proportion to their neighbors, the inside list is the places they’ll lose if their population decreases, all in order of their desire to hold them. The top elements of the inside list will be the areas the state most wants to keep. The top of the outside list will be the areas they most want to take. If there is a mutually agreeable way forward to be made, an area they’re happy to lose that their neighbor very much wants, or an area they wont part with for cultural reasons that their neighbor doesn’t share, that is the trade that will be made.
Kind of unfortunate though.. Above, I provided a formula that assumes an objective(or at least shared) measure of what constitutes habitable land, or, in a more sophisticated implementation; a measure of the value of the land per acre. The more the archipelago agrees on the relative value of land, the more often the states’ preference orderings will mirror each other. Much of the time, then, Simplistic Simultanious Haggling as I’ve defined it would just revert “reallocate at the borders at random(possibly with smoothing) since there’s clearly no mutually agreeable way to settle this”.
It would be fun to run some simulations of this and see what kind of games emerge.
The allocation of land is, as far as I’m aware, a bit of an unsolved problem in schemes like this, and it is assuredly something you need to solve. Others have pointed out that voting with one’s feet is not necessarily going to put pressure on a government to change. In fact, with territory size kept constant, many of the people in positions of power might welcome emigration for the increase in land availability. The enforcing body of natural selection needs to take deliberate steps to ensure that dissatisfying nations actually go away eventually, and by sturgeons law, unless their borders are shrinking, pick any section of land at random, and there will be a 90% chance that the government tasked with optimizing its use for the maximization of human flourishing is shit.
Any solution to the allocation of land will have to deal with constantly shifting borders.
Neighboring governments will have to find ways to agree to border movement.
Anyone on the border ends up being faced with a choice between moving to a neighboring country or losing their home to it. Since the event of a border advancing over one’s home will usually go in lockstep with population decreases somewhere else in your nation, a government will often be able to set up some kind of exchange deal, though this will not be a complete solution. The land vacated by malcontented emmigrants/exiles is rarely going to be as valuable as the land being forbidden from a contented citizen who liked their place in the nation well enough to stay.
If you allocate land in proportion to the number of people in each nation, you lock in a certain way of life, precluding potentially valuable experimentation in the feasibility of lifestyles in dense populations or in the joy of lifestyles in sparse settlements. Maybe nations that optimize the joy of a few are, in total, preferable to nations with denser, merely satisfied people? Is it the place of the stewards of national selection to say? Maybe. I’d guess the LW community has probably thought about that moral question quite a lot, did we ever turn up an answer?
It does seem like it would be easiest to just allocate each nation total_habitable_land*(nation_population/total_population)*desired_proportion_of_natural_reserves. Though that does make overpopulation pretty much impossible to deal with. Reproduction booms becomes a problem for neighboring states, and the world at large, but leads to expansion for the states doing it. All the while no state has the authority to do anything about it.
This is true for undeveloped countries where arable land and natural resources are still main economic assets.
There is an old tradition of trying to settle territorial disputes based on general idealistic principles. “Legitimacy” was a very popular concept after the Congress of Vienna. “Self-determination” and “national sovereignty” are just as popular today. In practice, statesmen always interpret these principles in a way that serves their own interests.
In my opinion, any abstract solution to the problem of the land division, no matter how just and perfect in theory, has no real chance of working (at least in the foreseeable future). In most cases it would probably be better to work with the currently existing borders – for instance, by giving full internal autonomy to states or provinces within one country.
Unless you’ve chosen a poor sample of the evidence you’re familiar with, your opinion is not going to stop anyone from following their fatuous curiosity, here. The historical cases you refer to seem a couple orders of magnitude more fraught with the spooks of subjective indignation than anything anyone in this community would propose. When an analytic philosopher looks at these things they don’t see decision procedures that should have worked in theory but failed, they don’t see decision procedures at all, they see disagreements in waiting.
I agree that any morally loaded criterion for deciding land reallocations is going to trip over the subjectivity of morality as we know it, especially in a system that’s explicitly designed to support the sovereignty of diverse groups. I believe we can at least come up with a negotiation procedure that returns immediate, unambiguous results that do a pretty okay job of cleaning up vacated territories.
I’ll call this one Simultaneous Haggle Reallocation.
Let’s say that in each term, each state must submit a preference ordering on the areas just outside their border, in neighboring states, and an ordering on the areas just inside their border. The outside list describes the places they’ll take if their population increases in proportion to their neighbors, the inside list is the places they’ll lose if their population decreases, all in order of their desire to hold them. The top elements of the inside list will be the areas the state most wants to keep. The top of the outside list will be the areas they most want to take. If there is a mutually agreeable way forward to be made, an area they’re happy to lose that their neighbor very much wants, or an area they wont part with for cultural reasons that their neighbor doesn’t share, that is the trade that will be made.
Kind of unfortunate though.. Above, I provided a formula that assumes an objective(or at least shared) measure of what constitutes habitable land, or, in a more sophisticated implementation; a measure of the value of the land per acre. The more the archipelago agrees on the relative value of land, the more often the states’ preference orderings will mirror each other. Much of the time, then, Simplistic Simultanious Haggling as I’ve defined it would just revert “reallocate at the borders at random(possibly with smoothing) since there’s clearly no mutually agreeable way to settle this”.
It would be fun to run some simulations of this and see what kind of games emerge.