Maybe one could say the essence of our difference is this:
You see the dominance ranking as defined by the backing-off tendency and assume it to be mainly an evolutionary psychological artifact.
Meanwhile, I see the backing-off tendency as being the primary indicator of dominance, but the core interesting aspect of dominance to be the tendency to leverage credible threats, which of course causes but is not equivalent to the psychological tendency to back off.
Under my model, dominance would then be able to cause bargaining power (e.g. robbing someone by threatening to shoot them), but one could also use bargaining power to purchase dominance (e.g. spending money to purchase a gun).
This leaves dominance and bargaining power independent because on the one hand you have the weak-strong axis where both increase but on the other hand you have the merchant-king axis where they directly trade off.
Your link doesn't contain a detailed description of their methodology or intermediate results. I would have to do a lot of digging to make heads or tails of it.
I guess feel free to opt out of this conversation if you want but then ultimately I don't see you as having contributed any point that is relevant for me to respond to or update with.
I think John Wentworth and I are modelling it in different ways and that may be the root of your confusion. To me, dominance is something like the credible ability and willingness to impose costs targeted at particular agents, whereas John Wentworth is more using the submission signalling definition.
I didn't ask where the number is from, I asked how they came up with that number. Their official definition is "all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily", but taking that literally would seem to imply that additional work to pay taxes is slavery and therefore ~everyone is a slave. This is presumably not what they meant, and indeed it's inconsistent with their actual number, but it's unclear what they mean instead.
Can you expand on the methodology behind this number?
Slavery was abolished and remains abolished through dominance:
Throughout most of history, there has been excess labor, making the value of work fall down close to the cost of subsistence, being only sustainable because landowners see natural fluctuations in their production and therefore desire to keep people around even if it doesn't make short-term economic sense. This naturally creates serfdom and indentured servitude.
It's only really prisoners of war (e.g. African-American chattel slaves) who are slaves due to dominance; ordinary slavery is just poor bargaining power.
I guess to expand, the US military doctrine since the world war has been that there's a need to maintain dominance over countries focused on military strength to the disadvantage of their citizens. Hence while your statement is somewhat-true, it's directly and intentionally the result of a dominance hierarchy maintained by the US.
Ah. I would say human psychology is too epiphenomenal so I'm mainly modelling things that shape (dis)equillibria in complex ecologies.
Western states today use state violence to enforce high taxes and lots of government regulations. In my view they're probably more dominance-oriented than states which just leave rural farmers alone. At least some of this is part of a Keynesian policy to boost economic output, and economic output is closely related to military formidability (due to ability to afford raw resources and advanced technology for the military).
Hm, I guess you would see this as more closely related to bargaining power than to dominance, because in your model dominance is a human-psychology-thing and bargaining power isn't restricted to voluntary transactions?
Your sources are not very clear about that, and it contradicts what I've heard elsewhere, but yes I do admit at the boundaries of where society enforces laws, there do exist people who are forced to do things including prostitution via dominance.