Staving off the Cosmic Malthus

Robin Hanson has a good argument about the inevitability of Malthusian economics in our future -- here refined by Anders Sandberg. This Malthusian future is distant in human terms but an eyeblink in cosmic terms. Sandberg observes that that our cosmic environment, while very large, is finite and dispersed. Emigration beyond our solar system can expand these resources only polynomially, which can't keep up with exponential economic or population growth. Therefore, our current boom era of exponential economic growth, wherein manufacturing productivity has grown at about the same positive percentage rate per year starting in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, is historically very unique and must eventually come to an end. Furthermore, Hanson argues that the specter of Malthus, purged in the late 20th century by declining fertility, will return -- Darwinian genetic adaptation to modern fertility-reducing conditions and technologies will eventually bring population growth rates back to exponentially positive rates until once again resource limits are reached and most humans (or posthumans) live at subsistence levels -- very extreme poverty by the standards of modern developed countries.

The Darwinian argument may be overcome if culture keeps evolving faster than genes and thereby can keep overcoming future genetic adaptations. (Richard Dawkins argues that we can overcome our selfish genes). It may be rebutted that units of culture (what Dawkins calls "memes") themselves are Darwinian competitors and thus also face Malthusian limits, or that future computerized minds may reproduce very quickly and evolve as fast as culture. I won't elaborate on these arguments further here as Robin has got me into a hyper-futuristic mood and I'd like to suggest another way in which we might achieve more "room at the bottom".

Hanson counts atoms in order to estimate the density of information (or of minds) that might be created. But, just as Freeman Dyson, Gerard O'Neill, and others showed that planets are a waste of mass, so that technologically mature civilizations won't have planets, I'll argue here that atoms are a waste of mass-energy, and technologically mature civilizations may not have very many of them. Instead information may be stored in photons and collections of electrons and positrons (for example geonium) may handle most information processing and form the substrate of minds.

Given that a photon can come in a vast number of possibly distinguishable frequencies, the spectrum spanning more than 20 orders of magnitude, we may be able to store at least 10^30 bits per photon. One approach to creating photons is to simply capture the energy of solar nuclear fusions as photons, as we already know how to do -- this should give us about 10^95 bits worth of photons of average energy blue. But we'd have to either wait billions of years for all these fusion reactions to occur naturally in the sun or accelerate them somehow. More completely, the neutrons and protons in the sun, if converted into photons of average energy blue, would give us 10^97 bits and we may not have to wait billions of years if we can figure out how to bring about this hypothetical conversion. This is a fascinating but very speculative bit of physics which I will explore further.

Of course, we will still need some electrons or positrons around to actually process that information and recycle photons. And we still need some neutrons and protons around to fuse for energy to make up for the waste heat, to the extent that geonium computations will be less than perfectly reversible. Unless we are very clever and figure out how to make solid structures that don't blow up out of electrons and positrons, we will need some magnetic tanks made out of traditional heavy atoms to hold the geonium. Worse, the strong tendency for baryon number to be conserved makes cracking protons difficult and perhaps impossible. Protons are made out of three quarks, and while cracking quarks is quite possible (particles with two quarks but zero net baryon number decay spontaneously into particles with no quarks), the tendency for baryon numbers to be conserved at the energy levels used by current particle accelerators suggests that cracking the proton, if we can even figure out how to do it, may require vast amounts of energy, so that only a tiny fraction of the sun's neutrons and protons might be converted before we run out of energy from the fusion of the remaining nuclei. Right now we know how to crack the neutron into a proton and electron, but we don't know how to crack the proton. To be feasible we will have to discover a way to "catalyze" proton decay, by analogy to how the activation energies of chemical reactions can be lowered by catalysts.

If feasible, converting wasteful atoms into more useful photons would give us many orders of magnitude more room at the bottom. Staving off Malthus then becomes a question of how much information can be stored in a photon, and of how quickly electrons or positrons can process those photons.

We still face Heisenberg uncertainty as a limit on how quickly these photonic memories can be recalled. The product of the measured time of arrival of a photon and its measured energy (and thus the number of distinguishable frequencies) has a fixed uncertainty -- if we measure the time with greater precision, we can distinguish fewer frequencies, and vice versa. This sets a finite limit on the rate at which we can process the information stored in the photons. Seth Lloyd has calculated that 1 kilogram of mass converted into energy can perform at most 10^50 operations per second. So future civilizations could only stave off Malthus by going photonic -- Malthus will still eventually catch up, assuming Darwinian competition in reproduction remains.

In addition to classical bits stored as photon frequencies, an exponentially higher number of quantum bits (qubits) might be stored in the entangled states of these photons. However, to use some number of these qubits requires destroying an exponentially larger amount of them. Thus, against exponential population growth memory storage itself remains cheap, but recalling memories or thinking about things becomes exponentially expensive. Qubit minds might stave off Malthus by hibernating for exponentially longer periods of time, waking up only to observe an exponentially decreasing number of interesting events.

My argument that we may figure out how to crack three-quark particles like neutrons and protons into photons relies on the probability, due to the imbalance of protons and anti-protons (and neutrons and anti-neutrons) in the observable universe, that baryon number (a property of quarks) is not necessarily conserved, and is falsifiable in that sense: if for example we discover with better telescopes that the amount of antimatter in the universe is the same as the amount of matter, that will at least strongly suggest that even at Big Bang energies baryon number is conserved, rendering the possibility of ever converting the quarks which constitute most of the mass of neutrons and protons into non-quarkish things (like electrons, positrons or photons) extremely unlikely. It's also somewhat imminently testable insofar as if LHC and similar colliders continue to fail to crack the proton, that further dims prospects. Feasibility, however, is not so testable: one could argue that, even if baryon number was not conserved in the Big Bang, and even if we soon discover how to crack the proton in high-energy colliders, we may never figure out a method, analogous to catalysis in chemical reactions, to crack protons at economically low energies or to productively recycle the energies used to perform the conversions rather than it being dispersed as waste heat.

(h/t: the phrase "Cosmic Malthus" to describe Hanson's theory is from commenter Norman at Robin's blog).

Nondeterminism and legal procedure

Two of the most important characteristics of legal procedure are local coercion and nondeterminism. I've written plenty about coercion recently, so here I'll put forward some thoughts about its nondeterminism.

A deterministic process is one in which, for any state of the world -- a state being a theoretical description of everything that might change the future -- there is only one next state. The omniscient Laplace's daemon could in principle predict everything about the future if the universe were deterministic. In a nondeterministic process, there can be more than one future state, and not even Laplace's daemon can know for sure, and may not know at all, which one will happen. We can model simple processes as "state machines": in the present the process is in one state, in the next instant in the future the process may have transitioned to another state, and so on.

Here's a picture of a deterministic process -- one with only one possible future:

Here's a picture of a nondeterministic process:

If as in the picture above there are more than two possible future states, this can also be modeled as a sequence of binary events:

An event can be natural or a human act. If it's a human act, the decision to act often can or should be based on good estimates of in which state(s) the world is or was in. In legal procedure, generally an arrest should only be made based on an estimate that the person arrested in fact committed a specific crime, for example.

If causally related nondeterministic processes repeat themselves often enough, we can develop a probabilistic model of them. Physicists have developed probability density models for very small-scale phenomena in quantum mechanics, for example.

Practical nondeterminism stems from at least four sources: (1) some of the physical world is inherently nondeterministic, (2) even where deterministic in principle, the configuration of physical states in the world is vastly more complex than we can completely describe -- nobody and no computer comes anywhere close to resembling Laplace's demon, (3) people are far, far more complex than we can mutually comprehend -- especially if you get more than a Dunbar number of us together, and (4) the words and phrases we communicate with are often ambiguous.

Most of the nondeterminism in legal procedure stems from questions of who did what when and where, and the legal consequences that should ensue based on codes and judicial opinions written in ambiguous language. Law summarizes this uncertainty with a number of qualitative probabilities often called "burdens of proof". The following list is sort of, but not necessarily (as they come from different legal domains and are not necessarily comparable), in order of lesser to greater burden of proof:

• Colorability
  
• Air of Reality
  
• Reasonable suspicion
  
• Prima facie case
  
• Probable cause
  
• Preponderance of the evidence
  
• Clear and convincing evidence
  
• Beyond reasonable doubt
  
• (To reverse a jury verdict) No reasonable jury could have reached the verdict
  

These label the probabilities -- not in the sense of numbers between 0 and 1, but in the sense of kinds of evidence and degrees of convincing argument -- required for various decisions of legal procedure to be made: for a search warrant to issue, for an arrest to be made, for property to be confiscated, for a legal motion to be accepted or denied, for liability to accrue in a civil trial, for a sentence of guilty in a criminal trial, for decisions about jurisdiction, and so on.

It's useful to look at these, not merely as classical probabilities, but in the style of quantum physics, as a superposition of states. When a nondeterministic event -- or a deterministic event for which we lack important knowledge -- has happened in the past, we can treat it as a superposition of all the possible events that might have happened. When a person or persons undertakes a procedural act -- arrests a person, issues a verdict, and so on -- under law they should be doing so based on a judgment, to some degree of certainty, that one particular set of facts occurred that justify the act. We can thus see a criminal defendant, for example, as in the state "guilty or not guilty" until a jury "collapses" this probability distribution to a verdict (which collapse, however, unlike quantum mechanics, can sometimes be reversed by an appeals court if deemed erroneous). A suspect is in the state "beyond reasonable suspicion" or "not beyond reasonable suspicion" until a police officer acts, for example to pull over your car on the highway, in a way that requires reasonable suspicion. In principle, at least, this decision too shoul dbe reversible (for example, if the officer pulled over your car without reasonable suspicion and noticed an open beer bottle, that evidence could be thrown out of court based on the lack of reasonable suspicion in the original stop).

Legal procedure needs to control nondeterminism so that people can operate in an environment of reasonably reliable legal rights. Think, for example, about how inefficient the economy would be if most property was in imminent danger of being taken from one owner and given to another due to frequent decisions reversing old court cases, or how full of worry our lives would be if we could be taken off the street and put in jail at random. Thus there is, for example, a strong presumption in English-law countries that a jury's decision is final: and this effected by putting the burden of proof on the court reversing the decision high: "no reasonable jury could have reached the verdict", a burden of proof in a criminal case much higher than the jury's own "beyond reasonable doubt."

The Coase Theorem in action

A nice illustration of the major flaw I have described in the Coase Theorem. Much of what is valuable in the above link I actually wrote in the comments and will now foreground with some minor edits:

A music store is next door to a doctor's office. The music store would prefer (if the office of a rich doctor who wants quiet for his patients did not exist next door) to let its customers test its electric guitars at volume VM1 > 0. The doctor prefers it to be quieter (VD < VM1). Coase theory assumes that the only possible choices are within the range {VM1, VD}, i.e. any volume of electric guitar testing in between or including these two preferences. In the absence of transaction costs and given only this range, one can indeed conclude that the music store and the doctor will bargain to an efficient outcome. But these aren't the only choices. The music store can, at additional cost to itself C, turn up the volume nobs on its amplifiers and play the music at volume VM2 > VM1. If the doctor is willing to pay the music store P1 to change the volume from VM1 to VD, and P2 > P1 + C to turn the volume down from VM2 to VD, the music store has an incentive to play the music at volume VM2 instead of VM1, or to threaten same, in order to extract for itself a greater benefit from the situation.

In other words, the same physical effect that produced the externality gives rise to an opportunity and incentive to play a negative-sum game. Here it changes the music store's prefered volume in the absence of a rich doctor next door from VM1, to VM2 > VM1, due to the opportunity to extort extra payments from the doctor by creating an even less bearable din, for which the doctor is willing to pay even more to avoid. The music store is willing to incur an extra cost C to itself in order to extract the greater payment P2 from the doctor. For the overall game the payment P2 is a wash and C makes it negative-sum. (In the music store example, cost C comes from the music store chasing away some of its own customers, albeit at a slower rate than it chases away the doctor's customers, by testing its guitars more noisly than it would prefer in the absence of the doctor).

If, as in reality, there are transaction costs causing bargains to sometimes not be reached, the outcome is even worse, as noise VM2 is costlier, perhaps far more costlier, to the doctor's practice than VM1: such outcomes are often far worse outcome under transaction costs than the range of possible outcomes that Coaseians contemplate.

Of course, more generally in the absence of proper prior legal allocations of rights the doctor and music store could threaten each other in other ways: the doctor could threaten to poison the guitar frets, the music store could call in the mob on the doctor, etc.

(Furthermore, even with tort law preventing these other negative-sum games the music store has an incentive to falsely "reveal" preference VM2 instead of VM1 to the doctor and to the judge -- a common problem that good tort law usually, but hardly with perfection, tackles).

The example of the music store and its amplifier volume shows that the externality itself contains potential or actual coercion -- the same physical effect that causes the externality often makes negative-sum games possible, and in the absence of any prior legal limits on the externality, opportunities and incentives for coercive negative-sum games are inherent in the externality -- so that analyses of such externalities with the Coase Theorem, which assumes such games don't exist, will often lead to misleading or false conclusions.

The game being played here by the music store is negative-sum for the same reason a tax is, firstly because the music store's coercion distorts the behavior of the doctor and his patients. Assuming the doctor is helpless to stop the noise without making the payoff (e.g. we artificially assume he can't order a mob hit on the music store, or poison its customers, or emit any other such "extreme" externality to avenge or deter the music store's excess externality) he will go golfing more, and see fewer patients, if he is paying P2 to the store instead of P1. Fewer patients will be healed, a net loss of welfare. Since we assume the music store is rational, it will demand only the Laffer-maximum amount of extortion, but Laffer-maximum taxes still have plenty of distoritve effects that produce inefficiencies compared to the no-taxation case. Secondly, the behavior of the music store is also distorted because it has excess profits to spend. It will invest its extra money in opening new music stores and concert halls next to other doctor's offices, nursing homes, and similar because that is a lucrative source of profit, and so other activities that would prefer quiet will be distorted in turn. It is often unreasonable to assume that Coaseian payees are spending their extra money efficiently. Interestingly, Gary Becker assumed the Coaseian payor's behavior was not distorted and that the Coaseian payee was spending its extra profits efficiently, and used this Coaseian reasoning to argue that governments themselves are efficient outcomes of Coaseian bargaining. Becker's argument is wrong for the same reason that [anarcho-capitalist David] Friedman's [Coaseian] argument is wrong for legal protection agencies: it doesn't account for the economic distortions caused by coercion.

To see where these negative-sum games lead, let's take the case of roving loudspeakers. Pickup trucks drive through the city, parking in front of every business in turn and demanding large payments to take their noise elsewhere. The optimal extortion for the extortors in this case is nearly 100% of all business wealth in the city (again assuming the victims are defenseless), because if extortor A doesn't extort any remaining wealth extortor B will be happy to come in and take it. The economy is so distorted that practically nothing gets produced or distributed and the city's economy collapses. This is the "roving bandit" case studied by Mancur Olson. Where two stores are next to each other and neither can move constitute "stationary bandits", as do gangs or governments with "monopolies of coercion" over fixed territories. As the roving loudspeakers case illustrates, rational stationary bandits collect a far lower percent of their victims' profits in taxes than do roving bandits. (But stationary bandits with the much lower rate than 100% end up collecting a far higher absolute amount -- recall the Laffer curve) . If on the other hand we assume the victims are not defenseless, we have negative-sum games like hawk/dove, negative tit-for-tat, etc. which again are paradigmatically very different from voluntary Coaseian bargains.

We can measure the effectiveness of an excess (or coercive) externality for extracting super-Coasiean payoffs by how great a harm the externality can produce for the least cost to the emitter. The ubiquity of technology that is very effective in producing the greatest harm for the least cost, i.e. weapons, in our world should be a very good clue that our world is not Coaseian. Music volume, spark emission, and so on beyond the "preferred" level Coaseians falsely assume to be maximal are logically weapons. Their harm/cost ratio is lower than guns, tanks, bombers, missiles, flamethrowers, herbicides, and so on, but they have an advantage in being physically hard to distinguish from merely Coaseian externalities, which would come in handy in a world where judges and other lawmakers actually based law on the Coase theorem (the good news is that they mostly don't).

Praying to Gliese 581d

COSMOS magazine of Australia is teaming up with the Australian national government and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA in the United States to send a ream of messages gathered from the public via the JPL-run Deep Space Network (on which I once worked) to the nearby star system of Gliese 581, which includes the recently discovered extrasolar planet Gliese 581d. The schedule is to send the messages on Friday, August 28th. According to COSMOS's editor, Wilson da Silva,

Yes, it is a "stunt": the purpose is to engage the public during Science Week in Australia and get them thinking about the big questions: are we alone, is life common in the universe, how often does intelligent life arise, how big is space, etc etc.

It will apparently also be good for COSMOS' advertising and subscription revenue:

So far, it has been very successful: more than 1,000 newspapers and other media have published online stories all over the world, it has been featured on 9,000 blogs and more than 1.17 million pages of the site have been read in the past 10 days.

I can't say whether it will hurt or harm the quests of the government agencies and contractors involved for more taxpayer money.

Alas, this admitted publicity stunt gets the public thinking about "the big questions" in a way that is rather prejudiced about the answers. The very act of sending a message to a specific star suggests to our newly attracted pupils that there is some substantial probability of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) at the other end, when astronomers have observed over 10 billion galaxies and have never seen any signs of ETI. The odds of even one other ETI civilization in our galaxy, much less specifically around one of the two hundred billion stars in our galaxy, Gliese 581, are rather remote. Just how remote we will now explore -- then we shall take a look at the prayers to Gliese 581d.

The mindset at work with the COSMOS transmission is similar to those behind the web calculator Drake Equations that I've seen. The Drake Equation supposedly brings together all the main probabilities relevant to calculating how many ETI we might expect to find in our galaxy: the expected number of habitable planets, the probability of the origin of life given a habitable planet, the probability of intelligence evolving given life, and so on. You are supposed to be able to input your own assumptions into these calculators and it spits out the expected number of ETI in our galaxy based on these assumptions. Real scientists actually observe the universe and fit their equations and parameters to what they see, rather than what they wish were true, but these "science education" sites invite the visitor to plug in what they wish -- unless it doesn't fit what the web site authors wish.

From these sites we learn something very interesting, not about how science should be done or what it has observed, but about the hopes and wishes of their authors. These calculators don't allow just any numbers to be placed in them, but only numbers within a range defined by the authors. They don't even allow numbers to be placed into them that are most consistent with what astronomers have actually observed in the universe, i.e. the ubiquitous naturalness and lack of artificiality everywhere they look. Let's use as an example the least pathological.

A reasonable guess, given the improbability of actually existential threats between the invention of printing (with the permanence it brings to civilization) and the end of the universe, is that most casually connected series of civilizations will achieve a substantially >1 billion years lifetime. (In other words, while many civilizations might rise and fall, and subsequent intelligent species might even replace prior ones, once a civilization achieves printing this causal chain of civilizations is unlikely to be permanently terminated, and will probably move beyond the home planet and within a few tens of millions of years spread across its home galaxy). The largest value this calculator allows for average civilization lifetime is 1 billion years, but even putting in this too small value makes it impossible to put in at least one other value consistent with our observations. (Update: since I wrote this section on the Drake calculator for a private list a few months ago, they've updated the calculator and it now supports lifetimes up to 5 billion years, but the other limitations remain).

Astronomers have looked far and wide in the skies, builders and miners and geologists and archaeologists have dug and examined millions of places on our own planet, and have seen neither any alien civilization, nor even their remains, on or near our planet or anywhere in our galaxy. They would likely have long since spread across our galaxy by now, a process that would take only a few tens of millions of years. They would have blotted out the stars to keep their energy from going to waste. Our observations of other galaxies -- with extremely few galaxies deeply moved into the infrared consistent with a space-faring civilization efficiently harvesting the energy of its stars -- strongly suggest that the number of civilizations is far less than 1 per galaxy. The naturally rare molecules used in the artificial surfaces of these massive constructions would also stand out in spectra against the naturally common molecules in dust clouds, planetary nebulae, etc. that astronomers actually observe.

But even sticking with the order of magnitude of between 0.1 and 1 per galaxy, this "model" does not allow the input of values consistent with both this order of magnitude and with what we observe about life on our own planet.

One has to put the minimum allowed for both the fraction of habitable planets with life the fraction of inhabited planets that achieve intelligent life to achieve this order of magnitude. Based on the commonality of near-intelligence life on our planet the latter number is probably much higher than the minimum allowed value 1/10^6. Based on the extremely improbable genetic complexity of even the simplest known self-sufficient microbial ecosystem, the former number is probably much lower than 1/10^6. But the program prevents input of these kinds of values most consistent with our observations.

Other Drake calculators I have looked at are far worse still in not allowing the most reasonable values to be placed into the Drake Equation. They are not teaching science -- numerology, or here we might call it Bayesiology, is not science -- they are selling a belief, the belief that our galaxy is filled with morally advanced beings that we can talk to. How are these grossly misleading "educational tools" and publicity stunts like COSMOS helpful in teaching the questions of "are we alone, is life common in the universe, how often does intelligent life arise, how big is space, etc."?

COSMOS An Enid News & Eagle piece republished by COSMOS invokes another prejudiced cliche of the SETI (Search for ETI) crowd: ETI living in a heavenly utopia:

Me [Human interviewer]: "... So you don’t elect leaders?
Then who keeps you safe?”

Bleem: “From what?”

Me: “From criminals, from other countries that declare
war on you.”

Bleem: “Explain criminals.”

Me: “People who steal other people’s things or hurt
them. Some even kill other people.”

Bleem: “Explain steal.”

Me: “Taking things that don’t belong to you.”

Bleem: “Explain kill.”

Me: “To terminate one’s existence.”

This nonsense neatly avoids an important question Drs. Jared Diamond and David Brin have raised -- if, per COSMOS' assumption that ETI is common, these creatures, likely far more ancient and powerful than humans, do receive our message and thereby discover us, may that not put humanity in severe danger? Instead of "shouting at the cosmos", shouldn't we put reasonable restrictions on the power, focus, and targets of transmissions until we learn whether and what kinds of threats might exist? (I realize Gliese 581 probably doesn't raise this issue, because being within about 20 light-years they would probably have already detected our oxygen spectra, our "I Love Lucy" and "Seinfeld" broadcasts, our nuclear tests, and much else, but the [update: COSMOS' own, as well as the EN&E's] article[s], supposedly an exercise in education, doesn't even raise the issue and explain this).

By blithely ignoring this issue while it sends the messages, COSMOS again answers the question with extreme prejudice by assuming it is safe. They even have a theological justification: ETI wouldn't harm a flea, because the only thing these innocents can understand is their seraphic utopia. Apparently no living thing up there in the heavens eats any other living thing -- our ETI are puzzled by the very concept of "kill". Our beatific interlocutors were apparently created by an onmniscient and omnibenevolent god to dwell together in heavenly communal bliss rather than evolved through Darwinian evolution. Children of Australia, there's your biology lesson for the day.

COSMOS has rejected "inappropriate" messages to Gliese 581d, but it does not describe what its criteria for "inappropriate" might be. How can any of us humans predict the reaction to any given message of a genetically completed unrelated creature, even assuming it exists, in a culture about which we know absolutely nothing? COSMOS has no basis for deciding that any stupid or insulting message, and there are plenty of stupid and insulting messages that they let through, is better than any other, besides their own particular human 21st century Australian reactions.

Many submitters are sending normal chatty messages, while some are quite properly treating the whole thing as a joke, but it is worth thinking abut how closely many of the messages in this "science" project resemble prayers (all errors in the original):

"I hope when you recieve these messages that you will come and visit and bring a new age to the human race. LIVE LONG AND PROSPER."

"All things work together for good."

"We're live in one universe,so we just like a family.We can share our happy with you."

"We are so small."

"Please help us to stop the obesity problem that haunts our world!"

"Please come visit us on Earth as soon as you can.We've been waiting a long time to see you.Don't make us wait any longer! LIVE LONG & PROSPER!!!"

"I know we are not alone.You are watching us."

"Don't let humans colonize habitable extrasolar planets, contact us before then please. Thanks for not colonizing Earth long ago and allowing humans to evolve."

"Bring some peace to the earth."

"I am told if you say something to the universe it may come true."

"We know that we are not alone,hope to hear from you."

"Your technologies must be advanced than humans by millons of years.let us share all good things and we shall be friends."

"Hello God, are you there?"

And that's just from the first page of messages. These interstellar tweets that COSMOS collected and NASA obligingly plans to send via its Deep Space Network to Gliese 581, the earlier "Teen Message" sent by Dr. Alexander Zaitsev and his team from the Evpatoria dish in the Ukraine, and the Drake calculators that invite you to believe that your wishes are scientifically true, unless they disagree with the authors', are exercises, not in science education, but in "educating" the public in the tenets of an often twisted faith.

Political lessons

I often get asked to provide an overview of my political ideas. There are so many elements to my ideas -- the importance of coercion and security and how to reconcile coercion with the substantive common law principle of non-initiation of force, the unique and crucial nature of procedural law, the role of low exit costs in enabling freedom and motivating the creation of good law, good vs. bad legal competition, the use (and intellectual recovery, where necessary) of highly-evolved or promising ideas such as political property rights, choice of law and forum, separation of duties with checks and balances, limits on delegation, "smart" (technologically codified and enforced) laws, and so on -- that it's impossible to write a summary article. Therefore this post is more in the "link farm" style.

There are hundreds of pages of reading material here. Which you should tackle depends on which areas you disagree with or don't understand.

Utopians -- those who think government is or could be an institution based on voluntary agreements or peace, or anarchists who think voluntary or peaceful interactions would dominate in the absence of legal procedure based on coercion -- and those who don't know how such utopianism is readily rebutted by real history, should first read my articles about the central role coercion has, does, and will play in human interaction:

Hampton Sides Sheds Light on Olson and Coase

The Coase Theorem is False -- Contracts Depend on Tort Law


The next set everybody should read, as you can't understand politics without understanding the crucial role of legal procedure, and especially jurisdiction (a way to quickly evaluate any proposed new form of government or legal system: ask the proposer how arrest is distinguished from kidnapping, and search and seizure from trespassing and theft -- if they can't give a good answer, the proposal is based on ignorance and you need not waste any more of your time on it):

Why Legal Procedure Is Central to Politics

Three Kinds of Jurisdiction

Exit and Freedom

Property In Everything

Jurisdiction as Property

Political Property and the Evolution of Liberty

Unbundled Jurisdiction and Exit Costs

Government for Profit

Semayne's Case: Liberty of the House


Next are some lessons from the Roman style of government -- based on agency rather than political property rights. (This kind of government has dominated Western political thought -- if you have not read the previous list of articles it is probably the only way you can imagine that legal systems can work):

Democracy as Regular Rebellion

The Principle of Least Authority

Separation of Powers and Credible Commitment

Executive Power and the Interpretation of Laws

Unpredictable Elections


Those interested in the United States Constitution -- whether you want to emulate it, interpret it, revise it, or trash it -- will find the following of use:

Corporate Origins of the United States

Charters and Judicial Review

Due Process Property Rights

Civil Liberties and the Forever War

Comments on the United States Constitution (i, ii, iii)


For those who want to explore the use of technology to help codify and enforce law:

Wet Code and Dry

Security and the Burden of Lawsuit

Smart Contracts

Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority

A Formal Legal Drafting Language

Devices for Controlling Property

Liar-Resistant Government


For those who want to explore some related ideas on philosophy and history:

The Irreducible Complexity of Society

Objective versus Intersubjective Truth

Hermeneutics

An Introduction to Algorithmic Information Theory

Book Consciousness

Security and the Origins of Agriculture

Patterns of Integrity

Origins of the Joint-Stock Corporation


Finally, some notes on political action:

Ten Ways to Make a Political Difference


Feel free to comment or ask questions about any of these or other of my writings here.

Ice rockets earthside

It pulls hundreds of times the g's over far less time than what I had in mind, but I do seem to have helped inspire Lenape Fire Turtle and friends. Their ice rocket is even reported to have stayed in one piece until it hit the pavement:



Next Fire Turtle tried to make a pulse jet motor out of ice injected with propane. Alas, the exhaust came out a hole melted in the side instead of the hole intended. If you look closely at the start of the side view portion of the video (the second half), you can already see the flaw in the casting where the ice is thin and the hole will appear:



Having looked ahead to a future when the economics and technologies become propitious, my own proposal was to take a grinder to an ice cylinder floating in space, melt the resulting ice flakes into water, and feed that liquid into a solar thermal rocket engine. The small snow-cone machine would gradually eat up most of the ice on the multi-year voyage from comet (or Ceres, or similar) to market. Alternatively, ammonia might be extracted from the comet and stored as a liquid inside a tank made from water ice, adding complication to the extraction process but greatly increasing the efficiency of the rocket motor and thus the mass of water ice, ammonia, or other comet stuff brought to market. More explanations of these icy and muddy daydreams lie here. When I was a kid in body as well as at heart I just stomped around in mudpuddles.

The ice rocket could in that future eliminate the need to launch from earth not just rocket propellant, but also propellant tanks -- or more precisely substitute a much lighter coat of sealing paint and sun shade for the tanks. A well-shaded vacuum can become extremely cold, preventing the ice from sublimating away. After propellant, tanks are by far the heaviest and bulkiest items that today must be launched out of our planet's deep gravity well, and ice rockets could substitute native materials for both.

Meanwhile, it's all just good clean terrestrial fun.

P.S. I also like the search engine.

The collectible premium

In the comments section of yet another economics professor's blog, Devin Finbarr makes some excellent observations regarding the collectible nature of most investment assets, starting with this nice classification:

There are only three types of goods in an economy:
1) goods providing direct utility ( a car, tv, chocolate )
2) collectibles ( a baseball card, diamonds, gold )
3) flows ( stocks, bonds )

The demand for every investment asset -- stocks, housing, commodities, etc. -- is a function of some combination of these factors. In housing all three demand factors are at work. Every asset that is not just a fixed monetary cash flow has a collectible premium that reflects, when rational, inflation expectations. (n.b. this is technical nomenclature that can have a slightly different meaning than the normal use of the words -- for example I, and presumably Devin, classify the enjoyment one can get from collecting baseball cards or wearing gold jewelry as part of their "utility" rather than their "collectible" nature, the latter being purely a matter of the asset's perceived or actual function as a store of value or medium of exchange).

It is often very difficult to guess what the factors of demand coming from direct consumption utility are (for example, is the sunny yet cool California coast and the wealthy and smart neighbors it attracts worth paying five times as much or is the coastal California price premium, as Devin suggests, primarily a collectible premium?). Sometimes it's also difficult to estimate cash flow. Thus it's often hard to estimate the collectible premium. Also, since the collectible (or inflation expectations) premium is little recognized, a wide variety of bogus explanations are often used to explain price movements that are actually due to changing inflation expectations: the most popular being dubious theories of changes in supply (e.g. "peak oil") or consumption demand, since demand for assets as inflation hedges is very under-recognized. Also common are theories that impute price changes due to changes in inflation expectations to purely irrational psychology, "technical", or "trend" factors based on the history of the price itself. (The history of housing prices from 1940 to 2005 made houses look like a lucrative and low-risk investment, for example).

Devin describes inflation expectations as causing a hunt for stores of value in which packs of investors irrationally change their focus from one market to another, causes bubbles and bursts. Since the collectible premium is often so hard to estimate, and is so little recognized, and so many investors do despite those warnings you hear invest based solely on past price history, I don't substantially disagree with this:

A stock market is in disequilibrium when people start trading stocks as collectibles rather than as flows. In other words, instead of buying a stock based on the hope of generating a return via dividends, they start buying a stock in order to sell it to someone else ( price appreciation)....

When the government dilutes the money supply, people start searching for a replacement collectible to serve as a store of value. People end up buying stocks not based on dividend yields, but in order to trade for later at a higher dollar price. People buy houses not based on direct utility or as an alternative to paying rent, but in order to sell for later at a higher price. These goods start trading as collectibles, and thus are subject to the whims of the herd.

In short, if long-term inflation expectations were zero, the prices of housing, stocks, commodities, etc. could be estimated from demand deriving solely from their cash flow plus consumption demand -- there would be no collectible premium. But since asset prices come with a difficult to estimate and fluctuating inflation expectations premium, this makes it far harder to judge whether an asset is over- or under-priced, leading to greater over- and under-pricing, i.e. seemingly irrational asset booms and busts.

A couple of caveats:

(1) It's important to observe in the context of stocks that their cash flows can come from share buybacks and takeovers as well as dividends, so even with zero inflation expectations people would rationally invest partly for expected price rises in addition to dividends.

(2) There are a number of other sources of high uncertainty in asset markets, e.g. uncertainty over credit conditions, so that bubbles and bursts would not completely go away with zero inflation expectations. However the contribution of changing inflation expectations has, I believe, been the largest factor in most asset price movements since the 1970s.

Bubbles and bursts are based on high degrees of uncertainty about the future far more than on genuine mass irrationality. Of course, things like the Internet bubble seem quite irrational in hindsight, but if you keep in mind what was going on in the late 1990s -- a huge increase in subjective value due to new (to the vast majority of investors) Internet services such as e-mail, Web, search engines, and on-line price quotes -- it was not, without hindsight, terribly irrational to suppose that most of this value would be monetized as profit for the innovating companies. It turned out to be mostly unmonetized -- instead we got most of the foregoing plus shared music, Wikipedia, blogs, and other things of great value for almost free -- so that the Internet bubble collapsed and seems irrational in hindsight.

Bubbles and bursts due to uncertainty over technological innovation will undoubtedly occur again, but the greatest ongoing source of uncertainty in our markets is not regarding technology and monetization of innovation, but rather uncertainties about currencies, credit, globalization, and related political factors, out of which the uncertainty over currencies is usually the greatest.

My takes on last summer's commodity hysteria as it was happening can be found via here.

Devin has put these theories to good use:

since inflation helps build the bubble, even a small amount of deflation can cause rapid price collapses. The fall in price will be much greater than the fall in dividends. Late last summer I was looking at numbers, and noticed that real estate, equities, oil, and gold had all been down for two months straight. The only thing those goods have in common is the currency they are priced in. So I said, “Holy deflation, Batman!” and sold half of the index funds that I owned.

I congratulate Devin and I do like the strategy suggested here, i.e. arbitrage between asset markets with irrationally different collectible premiums. This strategy does, however, assume that one can estimate the price derived from just supply and cash flow plus consumption demand, at least enough to be able to determine that there is a substantial collectible premium.

That said, I'd add (perhaps disagreeing with Devin) that in the large collapse in commodities since last summer, decreased expectations for future industrial consumption (due to rising expectations of a long-term worldwide recession) and probably a change in the rationality of the collectible premium of commodities were also major factors alongside the decrease in inflation expectations. Thus gold did not fall nearly as much as the industrial commodities. (It's also possible that this reflects some sort of security premium in a crisis of gold over other commodities, but despite all the gold coin ads to this effect I'm skeptical about that being a large factor). Of course, a change in consumption expectations will also tend to make stocks go down, due to the more direct cause of decreased profits leading to decreased cash flows from dividends etc. Commodities markets reflected informed expectations about future inflation and consumption more quickly than stocks, giving Devin his signal.

Gold and commodities prices have a good long-term correlation across business cycles. Industrial mineral prices do tend to vary more than gold within a business cycle due to changes in consumption expectation. (Of course these are not really predictable "cycles", but unpredictable effects of things like credit conditions, but "business cycle" is the unfortunate standard term in economics for this variation in overall credit and consumption). Another example of the collectible premium arbitrage strategy is to look at the oil/gold price ratio. Last summer this ratio was far too high (in hindsight, although at the time I was skeptical that this unprecedented ratio would last), reflecting a very high valuation of industrial commodities as collectibles. Recently it has much lower, reflecting much lower valuation as collectibles (probably irrationally too low), as well as lowered consumption expectations (the business cycle). In both cases one would have profited over the course of entire business cycle (and even in these two cases, luckily, over the short run) from betting against even more extreme deviations from the average historical ratio (or historical trend -- it's certainly plausible that oil and some other industrial minerals are being depleted faster than gold, or that there are long-term secular difference in their demand functions, but as the recent oil/gold ratio collapse to 1980 levels suggests, the secular depletion/demand gap between oil and gold is probably quite small, and almost certainly less than 2% per year over the long run).

Exceeding authority under a castle law

Here's a good video lesson on the difference between legal defense of people within a dwelling and murder in a castle doctrine state. The narration by the announcer here is not clear: the unarmed (it turns out) robber goes down because the pharmacist (the defendant) has shot him in the head. The armed robber flees without firing a shot. The prosecution claims the unarmed robber then lay there unconscious, which is plausible given that the defendant turned his back on him. The prosecutor argues (correctly, if we accept the prosecution's version of the facts) that the first shot to the head was proper self-defense, whereas the later five shots (the video is sped up) were not justifiable self-defense. The defense argues that the injured robber was getting back up and thus, even though not brandishing a weapon (and as it turns out unarmed), could have posed a danger justifying the five shots that killed the injured robber. From seeing on the video the pharmacist turn his back on that robber I'm skeptical of the defense's version of the facts, but that's up to the jury.



Note that calling the police immediately afterward, as here, is a very good idea -- not calling the police as soon is one safely can is a very bad idea, suggesting guilt -- but it probably won't be enough in this case to save this guy from some jail time.

Ignatius Piazza, a self-defense trainer, has a good collection of videos on this case. Local TV station KRMG has a version with the prosecutor narrating the surveillance video (a much better but obviously biased narration).

Not mentioned in these videos is that the armed robber who ran away was also and quite properly charged with murder -- what is called a felony murder, because he committed a felony that led to a death, even death caused by a victim of that felony as here.

Technically, all the Oklahoma statute does is shift from the defendant the burden of proving "a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm" when killing somebody who has forcefully entered a dwelling or vehicle -- instead the prosecutor must prove that the fear was not reasonable. Here, the burden of proof does shift to the prosecutor, but, again assuming the facts are as he claims, he should be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt either that the pharmacist in fact had no such fear, or that any such fear of harm from an unconscious man was unreasonable.

Even assuming the injured robber had regained consciousness, a much better course of action would have been to have the women at the back of the store call the police and to hold the gun to the robber's head until the police arrived.

I strongly second Ignatius' advice that if you own a gun that you may one day have to use for self-defense, that you take a good training course. Military training is not sufficient for this and indeed may have led this pharmacist, a military veteran, astray. Military doctrine is a very different thing than the civilian law of self-defense and the castle doctrine. I do take issue with Ignatius' simplistic description of a supposed "universal" rule for when self-defense is justified. Some jurisdictions allow far more defense of self, others, and persons within dwellings or vehicles than he describes (especially castle doctrine and stand-your-ground states), and some allow less. If you are going to have a gun around for self-defense, you should learn the laws of your own state, province, or country and you should train yourself accordingly. The laws vary widely. If you aren't willing to learn the laws and train accordingly, as this pharmacist apparently failed to do, you shouldn't keep a gun. By using a gun against criminals you are, morally speaking, deputizing yourself as a law enforcer -- a very good thing, since the police usually can't get there in time to protect victims, but a status that comes with a moral responsibility to train yourself in how to legally use a gun. Self-defense and castle laws give you this authority; misusing these rights is what the prosecutor properly (again assuming his version of the facts) calls "exceeding authority" and thus murder. Note that under the recent Heller Second Amendment case, self-defense and defense of others is a primary justification for our right to own a gun in the first place in the U.S.

The castle doctrine under common law, as well as the quite related knock-and-announce rule for law enforcement, comes from Semayne's case: "That the house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose...if thieves come to a man's house to rob him, or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defence of himself and his house it is not felony, and he shall lose nothing." Modern castle statutes, such as Oklahoma's, often also apply this doctrine to businesses and vehicles. The Wikipedia article on the U.S. castle doctrine has a list of states with stand-your-ground laws and castle laws, with links to the statutory texts.

By the way, political scientists who define governments as entities having a "monopoly of force" are idiots. I just thought I'd get in that shot of my own while I'm here.

Sotomayor, Calabresi, and the Chief Justice at our moot court

Our 2006 moot court competiton at The George Washington University featured Chief Justice John Roberts, law & economics guru Judge Guido Calabresi, and Judge Sonia Sotomayor (now a nominee to serve with Roberts on our highest court), and was replayed today on C-SPAN. I saw this in person when I was at GWU -- it was fun to watch my fellow law students arguing with these seasoned judges about whether subliminal ads can be banned under the First Amendment. H/T to GWU Professor Orin Kerr.

Futarchy: an experiment we'd learn a great deal from, but please don't try it on me

Mencius Moldbug and Robin Hanson are debating Robin's intriguing idea of "futarchy", which has attracted many fans. The basic idea of futarchy is "when a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law."

Robin and Mencius both make some great points in this debate -- for example, Mencius observes that GDP and similar estimates of "national welfare" are poor criteria for decision-making, analogous to a corporation making decisions to maximize revenue instead of profits. GDP in the United States, for example, rose dramatically during World War II, but its standard of living was probably significantly lower for most people than in the Great Depression due to rationing, death, and other traumas of war.

But both Mencius and Robin have misconstrued or vaguely glossed over two of the biggest problems with zero-sum decision markets, especially when applied to government decisions. First an observation: all prediction markets are decision markets unless the resulting prediction is so useless that nobody ever makes a decision based on it or some government somehow bans all possible kinds of decisions based on those markets. The distinction Robin and Mencius make between the two serves to obfuscate those issues that are problems with real decision markets rather than with theoretical or play prediction markets. Two of the biggest problems are:

1. The problem of "morons' money", deemed by Mencius to be the money of some less-informed fraction of players who are disincentivized to play the zero-sum prediction game, actually means the money of anybody with information worse than the best player's information. Since it's a zero-sum game, and much less entertaining than sports betting, any money that is stupider than the average money has a disincentive to play -- in sharp contrast to normal positive-sum markets. But when the less-informed half of the players leave the market, we have a new half of the market that has a disincentive to play, and so on. There's only one person left for whom it would be rational to play, if there were any market left. Prediction markets can work in an experiment only because students of the professor or fans of the idea feel they have a duty to play, or want to signal to fans that they like the idea, or because there are a few people who, like the much larger population of sports bettors, find it genuinely entertaining and thus worth wasting some time and/or money on. Robin I believe has tacitly recognized this problem in his proposals to goose these markets with subsidies. But how big subsidies are needed? It's a high-risk market, so you need to guarantee a high rate of positive return to the average player to compensate for the risk if you want good information entering the market.

2. Moral hazard: As I stated, prediction markets are also decision markets. We're right now going through major economic problems that stem from neglect of moral hazard. Selling securities, insurance, or betting without the investors/bettors or their agents or regulators exercising due diligence and control creates pathological incentives for people to do things like, as we've seen in the mortgage market, give cheap loans to bad credit risks because there were a bunch of number-crunchers with woefully incomplete models buying or insuring these loans who didn't understanding that most kinds of markets create additional risk by creating moral hazard, that this moral hazard must be well controlled if the market is to work, and that controlling moral hazard is usually far from straightforward.

In these betting markets, which are decision markets, people inside and outside government will make their own decisions based on the market. Coercive decisions will have an especially pathological effect: they turn the zero-sum market into an overall negative-sum game. For example, a market predicting the death of someone can, as Tim May long ago observed, readily be used as an assassination market. That's why, for example, PAM, a since-abandoned effort by the U.S. Department of Defense to try out Robin's ideas for prediction markets, had a market for predicting the death of Yasser Arafat but not of George W. Bush. Since these are markets for government decisions, the decisions it drives will, like assassinations, be primarily coercive in nature, for example to wage war on country X or to tax one group of people in order to subsidize another. If the decisions resulting from such a market were voluntary, you could just go onto a voluntary market to satisfy your needs instead of bothering with deciding that government must make some decision and then betting on its outcome. Furthermore, Mencius, although waxing entirely too rude behind his pseudonymous mask, is probably quite right that these markets will reflect the demand for desired decisions far more than a "supply" of information about how to best make that decision: per (1.), there is little to no incentive to supply such information without huge subsidies to give the markets an overall positive rate of return comparable to other high-risk markets.

For example the market for "if the U.S. gives $20 billion to GM the U.S. GDP will rise by 1.1% or more [instead of the expected consensus by some group of economists of 1.0%]" will be dominated by GM, its unions, its dealers and suppliers, and so forth goosing it to a "probably true" prediction, not by people betting on the extremely uncertain, practically lost in the random noise, outcome of the proposition. If GM thinks it can sway the odds of a decision in its favor by 5% by, increasingly as the time for decision approaches, investing up to nearly $1 billion in the market, it will do so. GM has far more to gain by the gift of other people's money than arbitragers making risky bets with their own money have to gain from arbitraging the market back down to whatever they believe to be the true odds of the GDP rising 1.1%. If GM is banned directly from participating in the market, there are numerous other parties with similar stakes in the outcome and they can't all be banned. GM and its allies also have much to gain by lobbying the government to set up this kind of market for direct subsidies instead of futarchic markets for more generic decisions you might find more useful, such as a "remove the President if the GDP doesn't rise 1.1% or more" market. Futarchy thus becomes little more than an auction for government favors, like the time the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder.

It would be interesting to try straightforward government-by-the-highest-bidder. We'd probably discover why historians have equated this kind of process with corruption, but it would be well worth the suffering of some hapless residents in some small county somewhere to try the experiment and learn from it. It would of course be interesting to try out futarchy in a similarly real but small scale, restricting the players as well as the victims of the market to our guinea pig jurisdiction since there are no big GM-subsidy stakes at play.

Of course, some would argue that we are living in this kind of experiment anyway, just under a blizzard of euphemisms instead of a straightforward honest auction. Others would argue that democratic voters bring no more information to governmental decisions than "moron money" would in these markets. I have no ready refutations for these arguments, but they don't prove futarchy is better than either what we have now or other possible alternative reforms.

In summary, fans of prediction markets in general, and futarchy in particular, need to actually specify how to deal with moral hazard, as insurance companies and their regulators have, rather than mysterious hand-waving about the supposed "several ways to deal with it", as well as to acknowledge the need to subsidize these markets and figure out how to fairly distribute these endowments.

What caused the birth of agriculture and the industrial revolution?

Robin Hanson asks, "what key features make this [human] growth groove possible?" -- two key events being the birth of agriculture and the industrial revolution. Commenter "gwern" is on the money in saying that (a) explaining why the IR happened when and where it did is hard, and (b) the explanation has to include something that China didn't have much sooner, which eliminates most of the usual explanations. I'd add that explaning the birth of agriculture is even harder -- we have vast amounts of historical data on the IR and only archaeological and comparative anthropological evidence about the birth of agriculture.

Indeed, the most important thing in explaing these two events is to be aware of enough facts from different fields, and have sufficient doses of skepticism and common sense, that you can eliminate the many theories that are popular but obviously, if you know enough such things, wrong. For example, be aware that hunter-gatherers were experts on botany and animal behavior. It's not plausible that the simple ideas that seeds can grow into plants that you can eat later, or that you can keep an animal tied or penned up and eat it later, were not discovered and known countless times during the c. 100,000 years between when our brains became modern-sized and agriculture developed. There has to have been some major barrier to benefitting from such obvious ideas to have kept agriculture from developing far sooner. I also don't find genetics plausible as a cause of agriculture, since agriculture ended up spreading to a number of human groups that had become genetically isolated long before the dawn of agriculture. (Genetic evolution caused by agriculture is another story -- Cochran and Harpending have some ideas very much worth thinking about). Also not plausible are climate explanations -- there were many local climates hospitable to agriculture throughout those 100,000 years -- just not necessarily at Mediterranean or higher lattitudes.

That said, going back to the IR there a number of likely-to-firm differences between China and Western Europe (or Great Britain in particular):

(1) Differences in political and legal culture. What differences, specifically, it's hard to say, because there is very little about, for example, Sung or Ming dynasty commercial law that has been translated into English: far too little to compare to English law in the 18th century, for example. We know some very general things, such as that Western Europe was (and still is) a far more legalistic culture than China. Also, we know that Western Europe (contrary to Gregory Clark's claim) radically changed its property law between the 16th and 19th centuries, from a feudal model of of hierarchy of tenures and bundled political property rights to a model based on old Roman law with flattened and purely economic ownership. There ensued movements such as the enclosure movement in England and an accompanying large increase in capital investments in land. But we don't know when or to what extent similar incentives to capital investment might have been present or missing in China.

(2) China never controlled the world's oceans and merchant marine, but the British just prior and during its IR did. If this explains the IR, then to explain our explanation (i.e. why did Britain come to control the world's ocean-going trade) we have to step back and solve the even more puzzling question of how a tiny country of fishing-folk and small-time crusaders, Portugal, and not an advanced superpower like China, was the first country to take over most of the world's oceanic trade routes (later to be beaten back by other Western European countries and eventually Great Britain).

(3) China had the printing press, but in contrast to Western Europe it did not lead to a rapid growth in literacy sustained over several centuries -- perhaps because of bureaucratic central control rather than the free-enterprise printing businesses that sprung up all over Western Europe, perhaps because the much greater number of symbols did not as efficiently lend itself to printing as the Roman alphabet, or a combination of these two factors.

(The Romans were not all good -- indeed they gave our culture something quite nasty which I will blog on in the near future).

Other interesting related phenomenon to explain, (and it would be nice per Occam's Razor if it was the same general explanation, but social life is rarely that simple) is why Japan industrialized well in advance of China and Britain was a few decades ahead of the rest of Western Europe during most of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century.

Robin: "If you wanted to attribute the industrial revolution to writing, you'd have to explain why there was a strong threshold effect, so that pre-1800 writing levels had weak growth rate effects, while post-1800 writing levels had strong effects."

Besides threshold effects, there could be delay effects: for example, the the rapid growth of books and literacy after the mid-15th century in Western Europe gave rise to a slow but accelerating series of innovations (most obviously scientific and technological advances, but perhaps also innovations in business or law), which in turn gave rise to the IR.