I ran into a political/sociological hypothesis was entirely new to me and strangely convincing although not rigorous. Maybe somebody can point me to relevant research?
It goes like this. After a revolutionary change of government, many things will be worse than before for ten to twenty years, and the rewards will only really outweigh this after. So revolutions are carried out by people who are young enough to live past that bad period and make a net gain. And industrialized societies don’t have revolutions because they’re too full of people who are too old to benefit from them.
I don’t see obvious counter-examples.
If that were true, wouldn’t it give governmental institutions an incentive against anti-aging research?
I don’t think this quite flies. There’s no particular reason to look for adaptations relating to national politics; that’s a scale we didn’t evolve to handle. (Interpersonal politics, sure, but young people aren’t known for playing long games there.) And putting this down to explicit planning doesn’t work either; we generally see shorter planning horizons among young people, e.g. in domains like finance, where we’d normally expect analogous arguments to apply. However, a youth bulge does seem to be correlated with social unrest.
So, what’s going on there? I’m not totally sure, but I’d start by looking at risk tolerance.
I think we had tribal politics. I don’t think they’re very relevant to revolutionary politics in the sense that you discuss above.
I don’t want to make any strong statements about how tribal politics in the EEA worked, since we honestly have very little information about social structure in that context. But I think we can make a few assumptions about them. For example, they’re likely to have been stable for timescales of many generations, which means that we’re not likely to have evolved intuitions about changing the form of government. Similarly, they’re likely to have worked on sub-Dunbar scales, not the scale of a modern nation.
I don’t think revolution has to be about the form of government. It is merely the removal of government without its consent. A military coup d’etat could be a revolution in that sense.
I’m confused. Are you assuming that the revolutionaries are altruistic, but only to people who live during their life? If they’re selfish then they wouldn’t care how things are for people at large, and if they’re altruistic they wouldn’t care about their lifespan.
I’d assume that much like everyone else, they care about the people inside their circle of empathy—family, friends, and when they become part of a movement, the people in that movement.
I’m not sure that the returns to direct participants in many revolutions have been net-positive (relative to a probability weighted sum of possible non-revolutionary outcomes), even many decades out. Certainly the initial pain that accompanies a revolution will dull, but that’s a quite different. At the very least, the accounting becomes difficult enough that a rational-choice theory of revolutions begins to look implausible, unless we modify the theory to assume that young participants are irrationally overconfident that the revolution is going to go well.
Consider the fairly small long term gains of fighter in the American Revolution, relative to a trend that favored the demands of the colonies anyway. Or the Russian Revolution, where the removal of the Czar was inevitable, but where fighting for the more revolutionary path afterwards was a terrible mistake. And also don’t forget the large number of thwarted revolutions.
I ran into a political/sociological hypothesis was entirely new to me and strangely convincing although not rigorous. Maybe somebody can point me to relevant research?
It goes like this. After a revolutionary change of government, many things will be worse than before for ten to twenty years, and the rewards will only really outweigh this after. So revolutions are carried out by people who are young enough to live past that bad period and make a net gain. And industrialized societies don’t have revolutions because they’re too full of people who are too old to benefit from them.
I don’t see obvious counter-examples.
If that were true, wouldn’t it give governmental institutions an incentive against anti-aging research?
I don’t think this quite flies. There’s no particular reason to look for adaptations relating to national politics; that’s a scale we didn’t evolve to handle. (Interpersonal politics, sure, but young people aren’t known for playing long games there.) And putting this down to explicit planning doesn’t work either; we generally see shorter planning horizons among young people, e.g. in domains like finance, where we’d normally expect analogous arguments to apply. However, a youth bulge does seem to be correlated with social unrest.
So, what’s going on there? I’m not totally sure, but I’d start by looking at risk tolerance.
You don’t think we had triibal politics in the ancestral environment? Chimps have them.
I think we had tribal politics. I don’t think they’re very relevant to revolutionary politics in the sense that you discuss above.
I don’t want to make any strong statements about how tribal politics in the EEA worked, since we honestly have very little information about social structure in that context. But I think we can make a few assumptions about them. For example, they’re likely to have been stable for timescales of many generations, which means that we’re not likely to have evolved intuitions about changing the form of government. Similarly, they’re likely to have worked on sub-Dunbar scales, not the scale of a modern nation.
I don’t think revolution has to be about the form of government. It is merely the removal of government without its consent. A military coup d’etat could be a revolution in that sense.
I’m confused. Are you assuming that the revolutionaries are altruistic, but only to people who live during their life? If they’re selfish then they wouldn’t care how things are for people at large, and if they’re altruistic they wouldn’t care about their lifespan.
I’d assume that much like everyone else, they care about the people inside their circle of empathy—family, friends, and when they become part of a movement, the people in that movement.
I’m not sure that the returns to direct participants in many revolutions have been net-positive (relative to a probability weighted sum of possible non-revolutionary outcomes), even many decades out. Certainly the initial pain that accompanies a revolution will dull, but that’s a quite different. At the very least, the accounting becomes difficult enough that a rational-choice theory of revolutions begins to look implausible, unless we modify the theory to assume that young participants are irrationally overconfident that the revolution is going to go well.
Consider the fairly small long term gains of fighter in the American Revolution, relative to a trend that favored the demands of the colonies anyway. Or the Russian Revolution, where the removal of the Czar was inevitable, but where fighting for the more revolutionary path afterwards was a terrible mistake. And also don’t forget the large number of thwarted revolutions.