Natural Selection of Government Systems

cleonid

Historically, the evolution of government systems was mainly driven by violence, with invasions and revolutions being the principal agents of selection process. The rules of the game were predetermined by our environment - land was a limited resource, for which our ancestors had to compete, if only to ensure the survival of their descendants.

The 20^th century introduced a game changer. As agricultural productivity in developed countries rose by orders of magnitude and natural population growth practically came to a halt, possessing a large territory stopped being a necessity. Countries with little arable land, ultra-high population density and no natural resources can now not only feed their population, but also achieve top living standards. These changes may open a fundamentally different route for societal evolution – one that would not be based on violence or compulsion.

A small thought experiment - imagine what would happen if central governments cede most powers to smaller territorial units:

The initial result will be political divergence - with less interference from central authorities, policies of local communities will inevitably move away from the political center. The divergence will further increase as people gradually relocate to communities whose laws closely reflect their own preferences.
Eventually, successes and failures of each community will clearly demonstrate the consequences of their policies, and the process of political divergence will be reversed. Local governments that fail to emulate the best examples will simply lose their population, who will vote against them with their feet. Just like natural selection promotes survival of the fittest, competition between different communities will promote policies that maximize human wellbeing.
In the end, it is likely that a significant difference between communities will persist (after all, even siblings have different tastes). However, peculiar policies of each community will be a voluntary choice of its residents, and people with different ideologies will no longer have to impose their views on each other.

Unfortunately, there are serious obstacles to the successful implementation of this idea:

It is not clear how central governments can be made to cede any of their powers. Even politicians elected on the platform of curtailing government power would be strongly tempted to renege on their promises.
Several countries in the past were organized along somewhat similar principles – the city-states of the Ancient Greece, Northern Italy during the Renaissance period and the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age. Each achieved spectacular economic, technological and cultural development, but in all cases either the country itself or its political system eventually fell as a result of external aggression. This threat is still relevant, as many nations have not yet reached the economic or mental stage when they are no longer interested in territorial conquests.
Most importantly, it is not clear how people from fundamentally different political camps (e.g., socialists and libertarians) can be convinced to work together for a common purpose.

Do you think these problems are solvable?

A small thought experiment - imagine what would happen if central governments cede most powers to smaller territorial units:

The initial result will be political divergence - with less interference from central authorities, policies of local communities will inevitably move away from the political center. The divergence will further increase as people gradually relocate to communities whose laws closely reflect their own preferences.
Eventually, successes and failures of each community will clearly demonstrate the consequences of their policies, and the process of political divergence will be reversed. Local governments that fail to emulate the best examples will simply lose their population, who will vote against them with their feet. Just like natural selection promotes survival of the fittest, competition between different communities will promote policies that maximize human wellbeing.
In the end, it is likely that a significant difference between communities will persist (after all, even siblings have different tastes). However, peculiar policies of each community will be a voluntary choice of its residents, and people with different ideologies will no longer have to impose their views on each other.

Unfortunately, there are serious obstacles to the successful implementation of this idea:

It is not clear how central governments can be made to cede any of their powers. Even politicians elected on the platform of curtailing government power would be strongly tempted to renege on their promises.
Several countries in the past were organized along somewhat similar principles – the city-states of the Ancient Greece, Northern Italy during the Renaissance period and the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age. Each achieved spectacular economic, technological and cultural development, but in all cases either the country itself or its political system eventually fell as a result of external aggression. This threat is still relevant, as many nations have not yet reached the economic or mental stage when they are no longer interested in territorial conquests.
Most importantly, it is not clear how people from fundamentally different political camps (e.g., socialists and libertarians) can be convinced to work together for a common purpose.

Do you think these problems are solvable?

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 popu... (read more)

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Natural Selection of Government Systems

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