The revolutionary status quo Power

Based on a comment I originally made here.

The US is at once both a revolutionary and a status quo Power.

It is a revolutionary Power in the straightforward sense that it is the only contemporary state seriously trying to export its revolution, apart from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is also a revolutionary Power in a somewhat more subtle sense, in that it produces so much of the technology that continues to transform the world. Which puts the US in a similar situation during its Pax Americana, as Britain during the Pax Britannica: being the premier source of transforming technology while trying to foster international stability.

But the US is also a status quo Power, in that the current arrangement of world affairs suits its interests--as the major economic, financial, trading and military Power. It tends to act as the central manager of the international system--its performance as such is very much affected by its own interests, because that's what Powers do. But precisely because the US has a bigger stake in international stability than any other polity, it tends to be more active in trying to maintain that stability.

But being a status quo Power is not very compatible with being a revolutionary Power. And even more so, vice versa. It would be hard to argue that its attempts to export its Revolution to Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush have been exactly stabilising, even as it sought to create a (new) stability.

A hardy perennial in (failed) US policies has been ignorance of history. Both the US as status quo Power and US as revolutionary Power tend to encourage history-fails. A status quo Power has a tendency to live in an eternal now. A revolutionary Power has a tendency to fixate on its own framing of social patterns and desirable outcomes. Add to that American exceptionalism, and you have a recipe for serial history-fails.

As has been particularly obvious in US interventions in the Middle East.

As Somaliland shows (the successful, formerly British, bit of the former Somalia), a House of Elders (in other words, a House of Lords) would very likely have been sensible policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as it would have connected government into traditional social structures. But hereditary and religious legislators, can't have that! Because we're Americans and we don't think like that! Our Revolution is explicitly about no hereditary government, and separation of church and state, so a House of Elders (or Shura Council, or whatever) becomes unthinkable and unthought.

And holding a vote on whether to restore the king in Afghanistan (pdf) would also have been sensible policy. But we're Americans and we don't think like that!

Yes, but those folk you're trying to help: they're not Americans and they don't think like you. Alas, American exceptionalism and the US-as-revolutionary-Power trumps trying to understand the local societies in their own terms and building something that might work for them.

Similarly, Iraq should have been divided into three, as any "Iraqi" identity was too shallow to survive any serious stress. But the US is a too much of a status quo power (and a little too ignorant of Middle Eastern history) to think like that either.

Being at the same time a status quo and a revolutionary power is a difficult double. Alas, it is also very well set up to create serial policy failure.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

That exporting revolution business

Afghanistan successfully held provincial and first-round presidential elections. Various folk are in the running for President. Part of building a viable democracy is building the habit of elections and change-through-elections. Since the incumbent is barred from running again (two-term limit), a new President must result. 

Afghan women register to vote.

The high turnout is encouraging, especially as the Taliban threatened to disrupt the election, and there were some killings. But more is required for a free political outcome than elections: a viable democracy requires a viable state which requires lots of day-to-day habits and expectations. Still, having a high turnout election successfully conducted is a positive sign, just not a definitive one. 

As an aside, we tend to forget that the US is a revolutionary state. It has proved to be still willing, if sufficiently provoked, to fight to export its revolution. Always an inherently tricky matter. One could argue, after all, that the late Soviet Empire's attempt to export its revolution managed, in the longer run, to actually export the American one. Not what was intended ...

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Norm failure

I have previously posted about how similar the failures in indigenous policy and development (particularly foreign aid) policy have been. Remarkably similar, indeed. They also show some distinct similarities to the more unfortunate effects of welfare provision. (By 'welfare provision' I do not mean the aged pension or health or education services; I am talking about income and other transfers to working-age-but-not-working people.)

Policy lowlights
That indigenous policy has a remarkably consistent dismal story of failure is its most striking feature. Whether it is Australian aborigines, Amerindians or Lapps, the record of broken communities mired in violence and sexual, drug, alcohol and child abuse, entrenched poverty and lower life expectancies is dismally similar. [Though comparison between Australian aborigines and Amerindians is complicated by the much greater range of the latter in their pre-conquest ways of life--from foragers through horse-peoples to agrarians--and that some Amerindian communities have parlayed treaty rights into profitable assets, such as casinos, which gets them "out from under" the more problematic features of indigenous policy.] No matter how much money is thrown at the issue, the problems never seem to get much better [within communities primarily dependant on indigenous policy]. Indeed, in Australia, outback Aboriginal communities were often more dysfunctional by the time of the Commonwealth Intervention than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The difficulties for indigenous peoples tend to be notably worse for former foragers (i.e. hunter-gatherer cultures) than farming peoples, but the latter are not exactly shining beacons of success.


Development policy--specifically foreign aid--has much the same record of failure as indigenous policy for farming peoples. Not the level of disaster that indigenous policy has been for former foragers, but still remarkably little return for huge expenditures (in total sumsover time).

Welfare recipients also show patterns of entrenched problems--broken homes, violence and crime, entrenched poverty. There is a cause-or-effect problem here, in that social dysfunction makes one more likely to qualify for welfare assistance. Still, being on welfare does not seem to do much to improve such patterns and there is some evidence it makes them worse. Though, in all this, one has to be careful to not to mis-characterise behaviour which may turn out to be rational responses to the constraints of poverty (pdf) that have little to do with the above forms of public policy.

Saints, knaves and moralisers
I was reading a typically excellent paper (pdf) by the late Elinor Ostrom (a fine appreciation is here) when I came across a passage that generated an "a ha!" moment:

Finally, the worst of all worlds may be one where external authorities impose rules but are only able to achieve weak monitoring and sanctioning, cooperation is enforced without any need for internal norms to develop. In a world of no external rules or monitoring, norms can evolve to support cooperation. But, in an in-between case, the mild degree of external monitoring discourages the formation of social norms, while also making it attractive for some players to deceive and defect and take the relatively low risk of being caught (Pp 147-8; Pp 12-3 in the pdf).

Clearly, welfarism, indigenous policy and foreign aid involve "weak monitoring and sanctioning" and a "mild degree of external monitoring". But the epiphany went deeper than that.

Ostrom starts her paper by putting the problem of collective action in context. The problem being that, on the assumption that folk are rational egoists, then there is a massive free riding problem for collective action which should make cooperative action effectively impossible. Yet, both in the wider world and in experimental economics, we observe a wide range of cooperative behaviour.

From the experimental and empirical evidence, Ostrom distills three basic types of human agents--rational egoists, conditional cooperators (presume cooperation and then respond to others actions) and willing punishers (keen on sanctioning those who free ride). This is a similar framing as founder of cliodynamics Peter Turchin's division of people into knaves (always self-interested), saints (always cooperate) and moralists (moral with punishment). Turchin characterisers his moralists as conditional cooperators, but he draws out folk at the high end of cooperation spectrum to form his saints category and puts those more willing to withdraw if cooperation is not forthcoming in with Ostrom's willing punishers: these are different ways of cutting up the same underlying patterns, they are inferring from the same general body of evidence. (I discuss Turchin's book War and Peace and War here; he also has a useful website.)

Norms evolve
We homo sapiens did the key part of our evolving in small foraging bands. So, results from game theory experiments that:

Only the trustworthy type would survive in an evolutionary process with complete information. ... Where a player's type is common knowledge, rational egoists would not survive. Full and accurate information about all players' types, however, is a very strong assumption and unlikely to be met in most real world settings (p.145; p.10 of the pdf)

suggest that there might have been strong evolutionary pressure for cooperators (saints and moralisers) and against rational egoists (knaves). More worrying for more complex social settings is that:

If there is no information about player types for a relatively large population, preferences will evolve so that only rational egoists survive (p.145; p.10 of the pdf).
This implies that, in a game where people know only their own payoffs and not the payoffs of others, they are more likely to behave like rational egoists. McCabe and Smith (1999) show that players tend to evolve towards the predicted, subgame perfect outcomes in experiments where they only have private information of their own payoffs and to cooperative outcomes when they have information about payoffs and the moves made by other players (n8, p.145; p.10 of the pdf).

Different social settings affect which norms evolve and some may favour rational egoism. While most people start off as cooperators (saints and moralisers):

... preferences based on these norms can be altered by bad experiences. ... In this setting, the norms supporting cooperation and reciprocity were diminished, but not eliminated, by experience (p.146; p.11 of pdf).

Somewhat more reassuringly:

... if there is a noisy signal about a player's type that is at least more accurate than random, trustworthy types will survive as a substantial proportion of the population. Noisy signals may result from seeing one another, face-to-face communication, and various mechanisms that humans have designed to monitor each other's behaviour (p.145; p.10 of the pdf).

So talking is good.[1]

The big, take-away point here is that social settings affect which norms evolve and public policy can create or influence social settings.

Pay-off delayed
If we consider the evolution of norms, it is not surprising that people from foraging cultures do worse than people from farming cultures in modern industrial (and post-industrial) society. Foragers do not develop norms encouraging long time-horizons since there is little time-lapse between acquisition of food and its consumption. Farmers have to develop such norms, or they starve, since they live off delayed consumption. This is particularly so for farmers in colder climates (like, say, Northern Europe, Northern China and Japan) where surviving winter takes extra preparation.


In societies where asset accumulation is crucial (starting with one's own human capital), a failure to develop longer time-horizons, and the associated and reinforcing norms, is going to be a bit of a problem. A recipe for social failure, indeed.

Nice middle class folk from farming-cum-industrial-cum-post-industrial societies may not "get" what a big deal this is, as they have so internalised longer time-horizons--and their supporting norms--that they do not "see" them, and so do not seriously consider their possible lack and the implications thereof. Consider yours, mine andours. In a foraging culture, food storage is not much of an option. All food is fresh food and has to be consumed pretty rapidly. So sharing is simply what you do (within your not-very-big band). Particularly with "big" items such as meat. There is an awful lot of ours, not so much yours and mine.


This does not work with farming. You have to engage in an annual cycle of effort for considerably delayed payoffs where food is stored to get you through the year and production of sufficient seed grain is crucial. If one is expected to share everything, the free rider problems become enormous. A farming community based on continuation of forager sharing typically collapses in starvation. (This experiment has been run repeatedly; notably in the very early North American colonies who attempted Christian sharing of all food: this was a complete disaster until the new governor re-imposed the evolved farming norm of your land, your effort, your food.  It also makes me wonder about the very high violence level of non-state farming communities, which might represent difficult transitions from foraging to farming norms.)


Forager sharing also does not work with, say, housing. Asset-use massively disconnected from asset-care is not good for asset preservation. And housing paid for by others does not encourage the development of asset-care norms. Are the notorious problems of indigenous public housing making more sense now?

But it gets worse. How do prospects for "human capital formation" (i.e. doing well at school) look if everything has to be shared, so quiet space to do homework rarely or never happens? Or anything which evolves delayed pay-offs in cultures which have never had much cause to evolve such norms? Now add in free, no-effort-required, "sit down money" to the free, no-effort-required, housing. Not only are the evolution of norms appropriate to an industrial/post-industrial society frustrated, it is worse than that. The original pay-off-for-effort norms of foraging society are undermined too.

What would one predict from that? Massive social dysfunction, tending to get worse as time marches on. A tendency for norms to (probably rapidly) evolve to rational egoism with short-time horizons since income and housing comes without cooperation or effort.

What we have is massive norm failure. Public policy creating social settings where the evolution of norms appropriate to modern society is blocked and existing effort-and-cooperation norms are undermined or directed to profoundly parasitical behaviour.

Even more basically, prosperous lives in functioning communities with stable families and good life expectancies in decent polities are not the result of material things. They are results of patterns of behaviour, and the underlying cognitive framings, that produce the behaviours which create those things. Said behaviours, and supporting norms, do not just "happen" if income-and-material-things are provided. Dropping the physical consequences of such patterns of behaviour on people do not induce the patterns of behaviour. Worse, since provision of such things creates incentives, the resulting incentives can actively militate against beneficial norms and behaviours; they can actively undermine their development. This has been expressed as Reynolds' Law:

Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them

from a comment by überblogger Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Referring to the matter as a problem of "character traits" may be great for conservative, middle class righteousness but it lacks social science support. Not to mention any sense of historical change or cultural evolution. Looking at the issue as one of which norms are likely to evolve, or not, and why, is much more productive and does have good social science behind it.

Ironically, talking in terms of "character traits" rather than norms actually tends to underestimate the damage that can be done by badly structured public policy. If it is a matter of character traits, then, at worse, poor public policy is subsidising poor traits and weakening the return from good ones. If, however, it is matter of norms, then the potential exists for public policy to both block things getting better and make things worse through its effect on cognitive framings and the behaviour that flow therefrom. Hence some calls from African economists to stop foreign aid to Africa.

Conspicuous signals
Welfare, indigenous and foreign aid are rather bedevilled by the politics of righteousness, largely due to being high-signalling-but-devalued-consequence policy areas. That is, in these areas good intentions have high salience but the policies are typically directed towards people with low participation in public debate. (Public policy generally has a problem with signalling--which is clear and simple--having greater public debate salience than consequences--which are often indirect and complex--but the imbalance is particularly intense in these issues; as it is in public policy areas affecting groups with diminished or no moral standing.) This makes welfare, indigenous and foreign aid excellent policies for signalling righteousness (or moral vanity, or conspicuous compassion) since the intentions of the policies are very public but their effects much less so. This creates an attractive simplicity: if you are in favour of (preferably) more spending on welfare, indigenous policy and foreign aid, you are a good (that is, righteous) person. If you criticise such policies as ineffectual or counterproductive you are a bad (that is unrighteous) person. After all, you are threatening to take the conspicuously compassionate's signalling toys away from them.


Or else, if you are playing to a different righteousness game, it is just subsidising laziness and other "bad character traits" and, as the late Jesse Helms' famously dismissed foreign aid, pouring money "down a rat hole".
But if we proceed on the basis that people actually matter, so the actual consequences matter, then we can ignore the squeals of conspicuous outrage (or other posturing) and move on.

A further complication is that welfare, indigenous policy and aid bureaucracies have little incentive to explore options that make them redundant. Worse, politicians can have an incentive to keep people welfare-dependent or otherwise limited in opportunities if improved circumstances would increase the likelihood they would vote for their opponents. Or, in the case of indigenous political entrepreneurs, lessen their appeal. Part of the so-called Curley effect (pdf), using taxes and redistributive policies to shape the electorate. The ALP and other centre-left political parties, for example, have an incentive to expand public housing that concentrates their voters, and put them in marginal seats, as a way of increasing their chances in such electorates.[2]

Foreign aid is in even a worse situation than welfare or indigenous policy, given that the recipients are not even potential voters in the donating polities. So, one would expect fairly low (share of total) expenditures with little effective benefit to the alleged recipients, since the main political benefit domestically is the signalling one gets from the intentions, which actively militates against paying serious attention to any negative consequences. Any policy area where there is active pressure against facing failure is going to tend to produce a lot of it.
In other words, these are areas where there are sadly good grounds to have low expectations about policy effectiveness (defined as good for the recipients).

Including not even asking the right questions.

Evolved norms or imposed constraints
Cooperative behaviour (both active--doing things together--and passive--not blocking others) is crucial to achieving positive social outcomes. A society of rational egoists would be poor and nasty. (Postively Hobbesian indeed.)

In the paper on collective action and the evolution of social norms (pdf) first cited above, Elinor Ostrom pointed out that imposing outside rules turns out to be somewhat fraught in encouraging cooperation:

... experimental (as well as field) evidence has accumulated that externally imposed rules tend to "crowd out" endogenous cooperative behaviour ... To the surprise of experimenters, a higher level of cooperation occurred occurred in the control groups [that had not experienced imposed rules], especially for those who communicated on a face-to-face basis. The greater cooperation that had occurred due to the exogenously created incentive-compatible mechanism appeared to be transient. As the authors put it ... the removal of the external mechanism "seemed to undermine subsequent cooperation and leave the control group worse off than in the control group who had played a regular ... prisoner's dilemma."
Several other recent experimental studies have confirmed the notion that external rules and monitoring can crowd out cooperative behaviour. These studies typically find that a social norm, especially in a setting where there is communication between the parties, can work as well or nearly as well at generating cooperative behaviour as an externally imposed set of rules and system of monitoring and sanctioning. Moreover, norms seem to have a certain staying power in encouraging a growth of the desire for cooperative behaviour over time, while cooperation enforced be externally imposed rules can disappear very quickly (p.147; p.12 of the pdf).

Public policy, it's difficult. Particularly when it is effectively attempting to shift people in a single generation through processes of social evolution that took millennia elsewhere. Europeans and East Asians are the fortunate heirs of said millennia of evolution, so are not in a great position to sneer at those who are not.

Even in the case of industrialisation in farming society, we are still talking taking a generation to traverse what the originators took a couple of centuries to work through. Rather more centuries if we mean developing rule of law and responsible government. A point, btw, which also applies to migrants. So policies which undermine the development of productive norms by migrants and their children are particularly problematic, for both them and the host society.

Regarding indigenous policies, one of the more tragic stories I have been told is of a group of indigenous kids from Arnhem Land who were taken to Singapore; apparently the take-away point the organisers were after was that you did not have to be white to be successful. The kids came back to their broken communities and got straight into the glue-sniffing etc, because they were not white and so had no excuse. Realising how very different things can look to the person standing next to you is one of the hardest things in life, let alone public policy. Lots of folk pontificate about cultural difference; rather fewer seriously consider their implications.

Morality, custom and law
A point Ostrom makes in the above paper and elsewhere, supported by lots of field research (particularly in irrigation systems, were locally generated rules tend to manage water resources much more sustainably than those with externally imposed rules), is that the government advantage in rule provision and enforcement is much more limited than is generally realised. Particularly for common resources used by longstanding inter-actors. Worse, attempts to manage common resources--such as fisheries--have been sabotaged by central governments refusing to recognise the local rules and property rights that have evolved to manage the common resource. This has been particularly true of forests, local streams, grazing areas and inshore fisheries in the developing world, often out of a misplaced environmental concern and an inability to recognise the difference between open-access and common-property regimes. Ironically:

When resources that were previously controlled by local participants have been nationalized, state control has usually proved to be less effective and efficient than control by those directly affected, if not disastrous in its consequences (...). The harmful effects of nationalizing forests that had earlier been governed by local user groups have been well documented for Thailand (...), Niger (...), Nepal (...) and India (...). Similar results have occurred in regard to inshore fisheries taken over by the state or national agencies from local control by the inshore fishermen themselves (...).

In looking at norms, how they work, how they arise, what factors effect their evolution, we are in the area where morality shades into custom shades into law. Indeed, in much of the medieval period--particularly early in the medieval period--law basically meant the custom of the area (or "what we remember doing last time this came up"). Nor were laws simply territorial; If a matter came to trial, a traveller might well be asked which set of laws applied to them. We are so used to thinking of law as something that emanates from a central authority, we now longer recognise it when it emerges out of custom, such as local use regimes. (Alternatively, states are determined to defend their monopoly privileges.) Though, in the mid-C19th, the California Supreme Court had the sense to legally recognise what the gold miners themselves had worked out. Native title is also legal recognition of existing custom.

Both of which were the common law returning to its roots. Henry II's attempt to provide royal judges for a kingdom that had Anglo-Saxon law, Danelaw and Norman law, and regional variations thereof, is what led to the development of the common law. Send us all your local laws was the royal request, and his chancery distilled the common bits--hence the commonlaw. Henry's royal justice was competing with both the ecclesiastical courts enforcing canon law (which led to some Beckett unpleasantness) and local manorial and baronial courts. His travelling judges were such a success that the only part of Magna Carta which called for more royal government was the clause insisting on more frequent visits by royal judges.

To call Henry II a law-giver is to underestimate his achievement. He oversaw the creation of a system for generating law; for taking custom, precedent and current experience and producing law. Appropriately, for centuries, the end of his reign was the beginning of time immemorial. About one-third of humanity now lives under full or part common law systems; a system which began operating in a knightly society now copes fine with the space age.

The barons were not so keen on the royal competition with their own courts, but they became quite keen on being able to sue other folk; provided, of course, that no royal judge could do anything to them unless they were found guilty by their peers. Possibly the most famous of the trade-offs in Magna Carta. (The list of trials of peers before the House of Lords makes for racy reading. A highlight being Earl Ferrers who pleaded his own defence on grounds of insanity; a paradoxical approach--he conducted his defence with sufficient ability as to fatally undermine it--that did not save him from the gallows for murder of his steward. Allegedly, he was hung with a silken rope, out of deference for his rank.)

That, in English law, only the holder of the title was noble--so all the rest of their family were legally commoners--affected both the laws and norms of England, since it gave the peerage a strong vested interest in how the law treated commoners. Not the case in, for example, France were all members of a noble house were nobles so lacked incentives to attend to the legal (or other) treatment of commoners. They did, however have strong incentives to insist on their status and privileges, these being increasingly unanchored in genuine responsibilities. So a significant number of the peers of France ended up guillotined while the House of Lords is still with us. (It is even still inspiring emulators; it is a pity that those responsible for post-invasion Iraq and Afghanisgtan did not consider something similar to the Somaliland House of Elders, thereby anchoring their new governments in existing social structures.)

Norms matter
Norms matter; so the incentives that affect their evolution matter. Aid, indigenous and other welfare transfers typically do not generate productive norms. Worse, unearned transfers encourage rational egoism with short-time horizons since they provide payoffs without cooperation or effort. The failures of indigenous policy, of foreign aid, are typically norm failures. They will continue to be failures until they are structured to encourage the evolution of norms that encourage healthy and productive lives, families and communities. Successful lives, families, communities and economies are built on patterns of behaviour and supporting norms; so failure to attend to what does, or does not, encourage the evolution of such norms simply leads to failure. Including making things worse.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Notes

---

[1] Speaking from personal experience, a narcissist--rational egoists with added self-delusion--can be very much more revealing in email; presumably because they are only channelling themselves, they are not getting any audience feedback, so their-convenience-as-reality-principle gets freer reign. Companies may also want to consider whether private payment structures are such a good idea.

[2] There have also been suggestions that centre-left parties may be using immigration policy to boost the number of supporting voters; in effect, importing voters.

Helmland follies: a case study in how aid (and indigenous policy) fails

Helmland is a province in Afghanistan where expensive and grandiose American ambitions go to die. It is a focus of the current war against the Taliban, but US involvement in the region goes back to the Truman Administration and continued until the Communist coup of 1978.

Fighting the Cold War with dams
Nick Cullather’s revealing (pdf) (and depressing) history of modern Afghanistan, focusing on the Cold War era Helmand Valley dam project, notes of the Kingdom of Afghanistan:

Modern states are able to govern through manipulation of abstractions—unemployment, public opinion, literacy rates, etc.—but in Afghanistan interventions of any kind, and the reactions to them, were brutally concrete.
… the regime persisted in slowly, firmly, laying the barren politics of abstraction and principle over the warm, cruel politics of the heart.

Afghanistan is a complex society. Partly tribal, so partly following the structures that Phillip Carl Salzman so revealingly delineates, and partly not. This complexity does not respond well to abstract plans developed elsewhere.

Such as dam projects (for example, the HAVA—Helmland and Arghandab Valley Authority) based on the “just add capital” notion of development-through aid. As Cullather points out, dam projects:

had the additional function of redefining political conflict as a technical problem. Britain’s solution to Afghanistan’s tribal wars had been to script feuds of blood, honor, and faith within the linear logic of boundary commissions, containing conflict within two dimensional space. The United States set aside the maps and replotted tribal enmities on hydrologic charts. Resolution became a matter of apportioning cubic yards of water and kilowatt hours of energy. Assurances of inevitable progress further displaced conflict into the future; if all sides could be convinced that resource flows would increase, problems would vanish, in bureaucratic parlance, downstream.

There was no history, no local social ecology, just the bright promise of technology.

As so often was the case, this was aid as driven by external ambitions, not local realities:

From 1946 on, the salaries of [contractor]Morrison Knudsen’s advisers and technicians absorbed an amount equivalent to Afghanistan’s total exports. Without adequate mechanisms for tax collection, the royal treasury passed costs on to agricultural producers through inflation and the diversion of export revenue, offsetting any gains irrigation produced. Although it pulled in millions in international funding, HAVA soaked up the small reserves of individual farmers and may well have reduced the total national investment in agriculture.

With a crude, by-the-numbers, approach to “modernization”:

The US ambassador in 1962 noted that if successful, HAVA would boost Kabul’s “earnings of foreign exchange and, if properly devised, could foster the growth of a strata of small holders which would give the country more stability.” This billiard-ball alignment of capital accumulation, class formation, and political evolution was a core proposition of the social science approach to modernization that was just making the leap from university think tanks to centers of policymaking.

No one seems to have noticed that that was precisely not how modernization had been built in their own countries. Ironically, other dimensions could be spotted if they had a Cold War element:

[Afghan Prime Minister] Daoud’s receptiveness to Soviet and Chinese aid was particularly troubling. As [anthropologist Louis] Dupree put it: “A nation does not accept technology without ideology. A machine or a dam is a product of a culture.”

Afghanistan was marked by weak central authority and periodic rebellion:

But despite their favored status, Pashtuns revolted against the Mohammedzai eight times between 1930 and 1960. Open violence between minorities was less common than conflict that pitted clan autonomy against central authority.

As had been true for millennia, settled agrarian existence was regarded as inferior to pastoralism:

But even with the closing of the border and the attraction of subsidies and well-watered homesteads, it proved difficult to entice Ghilzai Pashtun to become ordinary farmers. Freer and wealthier than the peasants whose lands they crossed, the nomads regarded their new Tajik and Hazara neighbors with contempt.

Phillip Carl Salzman’s work brilliantly explains why.

One needs to be careful about one’s assumptions, again and again:

Agricultural experts found the mullahs to be a progressive force, “constantly look[ing] for things to improve their communities, better seed, new plants, improved livestock.”

Afghanistan has a much longer history of American involvement and engagement than folk may realise:

By the 1960s, Afghanistan had Soviet, Chinese, and West German dam projects underway. It was receiving one of the highest levels of development aid per capita of any nation in the world. U.S. News described it as a “strange kind of cold war,” fought with money and technicians, instead of spies and bombs. The Atlantic called it a “show window for competitive coexistence.” Publicly, U.S. officials said this was the kind of cold war they wanted, just a chance to show what the different systems could do in a neutral contest. Afghanistan had become a new kind of buffer, a neutral arena for a tournament of modernization.

Alas, even more than most aid projects, the project, not the consequences, became the key thing:

For reasons of prestige alone the United States kept pouring money in, even though by 1965 it was clear the project was failing. Diplomats complained about having the US reputation and credibility hang on “a strip of concrete,” but there was no going back. Afghanistan was an economic Korea, but Helmand was an economic Vietnam, a quagmire that consumed money and resources without the possibility of success, all to avoid making failure obvious.

Examples of failing to attend to what happened in actually modern societies continued:

Legal titles were still clouded by HAVA’s inattention to land surveys, but the settlers had nonetheless sculpted wide tracts of empty land into irregular 15-acre parcels divided by meandering juis, tree-lined canals that served as boundary, water source, and orchard for each farm.

Hernando de Soto had not yet published his The Mystery of Capital. But, fear not, they had a plan:

Unfortunately, the juis system proved incompatible with the new plans. The small, hilly, picturesquely misshapen fields contributed to runoff and drainage problems and prevented the regular, measured applications of water, chemicals, and machine cultivation necessary for modern agriculture. A green revolution would require, in effect, a land reform in reverse: merging small holdings into large, level fields divided at regular intervals by laterals running from control gates on the main canals. As the wheat improvement program got underway, a team of U.S. Department of Agriculture advisers proposed that HAVA remove all of the resettled families, “level the whole area with bulldozers” an then redistribute property “in large, uniform, smooth land plots.” HAVA adopted the land preparation scheme but implementation proved difficult. Farmers objected to the removal of trees, which had economic value and prevented wind erosion, but they objected chiefly to vagueness of HAVA’s assurances. HAVA itself acknowledged, as bulldozing proceeded, that questions of what to do with the population while the land was being prepared, how to redistribute the land after completion, and whether to charge landowners for improvements were “yet to be worked out.” When farmers “met the bulldozers with rifles,” according to a USAID report, it presented a “very real constraint” that “consumed most of the time of the American and Afghan staffs in the Valley throughout the 1960s.”

The project folk had apparently never read (or if they had, understood) Hayek’s point about The Uses of Knowledge in Society:

But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.

All this failure was a product of bad theory, as Cullather outlines, citing a range of critiques. But it was bad theory persisted with because theorists and decision-makers were not constrained or burdened by the consequences of what they did—that fell upon others, who had no say in the decisions but were central to the outcomes.

Fighting the war on terror with …
And it is happening all over again, as Holly Barnes Higgins sets out in describing her experience as an aid worker in Helmland. The Coalition forces are offering modernization, which is precisely what the Taliban is a revolt against. The Taliban have a great advantage in that modernization is much easier to disrupt than to build:

Making the roads unsafe was and remains a Taliban objective. The more they could disrupt our work, the more they could intimidate through violence and murder, the more likely—they seemed to reason—we infidels would flee for safety, leaving the province ripe for their accelerated exploitation.

Another great advantage the Taliban have is that they are connected to local patterns in a way that the Coalition modernizers are not.

The third great advantage the Taliban have is that the local patterns the Coalition interlopers ended up having to work through inhibit modernization and aid the Taliban:

When the Taliban dissolved and left Lashkar Gah in the autumn of 2001, the position of provincial governor was filled by a man from the north whose arrival into town was accompanied by 200 armed men. Though barely literate, this relative-by-marriage of President Karzai was confident enough in his status to proclaim himself governor. A rival of the governor soon seized the position of regional police chief in similar fashion. In spite of the fact that both had a private militia in tow, neither man was strong enough to wipe out the other, so an uneasy truce prevailed.

This is a struggle over structures of governance. One the locally embedded and connected Taliban are winning and the Coalition interlopers are not:

… an informal alliance between farmers, officials and the Taliban. In the end, it would be hard for me to swallow the simple truth that the benefits of these symbiotic relationships far outweighed anything we could offer as an economic development project.

The Taliban used coercion applied to the local population in ways that make sense to the local population and were embedded in the local population. The Coalition soldiers are just visiting. Which makes them like Western aid workers everywhere, except with guns added.

The soldiers and aid works bring their own policy contradictions with them. For example, the “war against drugs” continues to frustrate “the war against terror” with neither being permitted to force assessment of the other (or, indeed, itself):

As a result of poppy production, the Taliban was able to recruit more, pay more attractive bonuses for successful attacks, and supply themselves more abundantly with weapons. But despite active insurgency/counterinsurgency warfare all around us, we were to persist. And so we did.

Those abstract notions modern government is based on can have their own blindness to, or discounting of, consequences.

The traditions that gravely inhibit harnessing the talents of women operated whether or not the woman was local or a visiting foreigner:

It was a bit harder to get used to the fact that, as a woman, I was not supposed to be seen outside my quarters without being fully covered from head to toe. While my male colleagues could sit out in the sun and read and had their clothes cleaned by male staff then hung dry outdoors, I needed to exercise and clean my clothes myself, then drape them around my room to dry indoors, lest they offend.

But the struggle to allow people to fully participate in Western society itself has been a long one, and continues still.

Higgins came to see how much it is about people: their beliefs, preferences and expectations, formed under very different bases than any Westerner is used to:

As time passed and my experiences accumulated, I began to understand the local saying that “Afghanistan is where God comes to cry.” Just as the country itself combines remarkable beauty with unrelieved bleakness, so the people are stuck between the rock of the opium economy and the hard place of no viable alternative, between the anchors of tradition and the desperate need for progress and change.

Aid and “nation-building” are not matters of applying Cobb-Douglas functions, whose mathematical and geometric forms operate over the top of institutional presumptions taken utterly for granted. The "just add capital" notion is not only not justified by history, it is flatly contradicted by history: specifically by the way the curse of silver turned Spain from the technological, institutional, organisational and intellectual cutting edge of Latin Christendom into an obscurantist backwater.

The problem of knowledge
Hayek wrote in his classic 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society:

One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail.

The saying “the devil is in the details” points in the same direction. But Hayek was making a larger point, as he goes on to say:

The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for—as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do—by the "law of large numbers" or the mutual compensation of random changes. The number of elements with which we have to deal is not large enough for such accidental forces to produce stability. The continuous flow of goods and services is maintained by constant deliberate adjustments, by new dispositions made every day in the light of circumstances not known the day before, by B stepping in at once when A fails to deliver. Even the large and highly mechanized plant keeps going largely because of an environment upon which it can draw for all sorts of unexpected needs; tiles for its roof, stationery for its forms, and all the thousand and one kinds of equipment in which it cannot be self-contained and which the plans for the operation of the plant require to be readily available in the market.

This is a point that applies beyond markets. Whenever one is looking at social arrangements, either directly (at people’s behaviour) or indirectly (the things they build) one is looking at a mass of judgments, local knowledge, trade-offs, incentives … Farms and buildings are not lumps of “things”, they are always and everywhere the products of human action. Sustained improvement means changes (for the better) in those patterns of human action and nothing less than that. Those patterns of action are not incidental, they are not simple conveyor belts by which adding inputs “make things better”, they are the heart of the story. They are the story.

Hayek quotes philosopher Alfred North Whithead:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Precisely so, which is why aid programs that operate on taking things for granted—that something translated into a new social environment will have the same significance as it did in the social environment that the designers of aid are used to—are so disastrous.

Institutions matter, because they structure how people act. A 2001 paper on the effects of different forms of colonisation on (pdf) (via) long term economic prospects presents clear evidence on this.

Starting with why some regions do worse than others:

These results suggest that Africa is poorer than the rest of the world not because of pure geographic or cultural factors, but because of worse institutions.

What matters was whether rule was about establishing authoritarian rule so resources could be extracted or whether there was a sufficiently large group of locals able and willing to agitate for—and then make work—the transfer of similar institutional arrangements as operated domestically in the colonizing state:

When the establishment of European-like institutions did not arise naturally, the settlers were ready to fight for them against the wishes of the home country. Australia is an interesting example here. Most of the early settlers in Australia were ex-convicts, but the land was owned largely by ex-jailors, and there was no legal protection against the arbitrary power of land-owners. The settlers wanted institutions and political rights like those prevailing in England at the time. They demanded jury trials, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and electoral representation. Although the British government resisted at first, the settlers argued that they were British and deserved the same rights as in the home country.

With appropriate institutions, and people who understood how to make them work and what you could get out of them, things happened. As a history the authors quote notes:

“the enormous boom in public investment after 1870 [in New Zealand] ... was an attempt to build up an infrastructure ... to maintain high living standards in a country where voters expected politicians actively to promote their economic welfare.”

As the authors point out, non-settler colonies were typically ruled by authoritarian, extractive structures based on a narrow elite; patterns that have continued after independence.

Or, in the case of Afghanistan, were never formally colonised so missed out on institutional transfer and basic capital investment (such as roads and electrification). People act on the basis of what they know, and what they know about. European settlers not only knew about, but knew how to operate, certain types of institutional structures and acted accordingly.

With limited knowledge of what was possible—and still less knowledge of how to make such institutions work—of course people in non-Western societies act according to what they know and are used to, what actually operates in their societies. Which is why institutions cannot simply be transferred—there is a lack of the knowledge and normative base to operate them. But even sillier is the notion that if one “just adds capital” either the institutions will magically arise, or that development “will just happen” without the institutional structure—the fundamental patterns of social life—to go with them.

Modernisation is hard, but can only be expected to “take” if grows out of, and transforms from within, the actions and presumptions of the inhabitants of a society. The power of modernization is precisely the way it grabs peoples choices but it remains something from the outside impacting on unless those internal transformations can take place.

Indigenous policy as exemplar of the failure of aid
In the settler countries of the Anglosphere, indigenous policy provides telling—and tellingly drear—examples of these problems.

When people write of indigenous Australia as “Australia’s Third (or even Fourth) World” they say more than they typically know. Not only are the social outcomes among indigenous Australians “third world”, the policies applied fail in the standard way aid policies fail: due to perennial failures to seriously consider the cultural-institutional (i.e. human social ecology) dimension. (As I have previously posted, even the same grim jokes are applicable.)

That indigenous Australians are Australian residents and citizens leads even more easily than normal to glib, unexamined presumptions about how things will work. That, for example, indigenous Australians will treat housing in the same way as people from cultures which have been agrarian for thousands of years. But houses do not have the same significance for people whose cultural inheritance (however battered) has Paleolithic presumptions. Westerners are the product of centuries, of millennia, of cultural evolution. Perhaps we should take our experience seriously so that we can take other people’s experience seriously?

If anything, the projection of “noble savage” collectivist fantasies on indigenous Australians is even worse: it operates as a double fail. It fails to grasp how mainstream Australia (or mainstream US or Canada) achieve the social outcomes that indigenous Australia’s failure to achieve is regarded as so shameful while foisting on indigenous Australians collectivist social forms that are themselves the product of agrarian and industrial societies and have a relentless history of failure.

Read Why Warriors Lie Down and Die by Richard Trudgen for the full horror. In Trudgen's Why Warriors Lie Down and Die—there is the illustrative tale of the Galiwin ’ku fishing industry.

The Galiwin ’ku fishing industry consisted of several small fishing boats made from local timbers at Galiwin ’ku by the Yolηnu and mission staff. The Yolηu named these boats with holy names from their clain or riηgitj nation alliance. The boats were owned by the mission but were skippered and crewed by different clans. Some small clans would come together in a riηgitj alliance to make up a crew. …
These clan groups would use the boats and sell their catch to the mission for processing and re-sale to other places. The people clearly understood that what they caught was theirs until they sold it to the mission and they benefited directly from their catch. From the point of sale on, it belonged to the mission. This arrangement satisfied the legal requirements of both the Yolηnu and Balanda systems of law.
When the mission at Galiwin ’ku handed the fishing industry over to the Yolηnu council in 1974, everything proceeded well for a while because the mission staff also transferred to the council. For most Yolηu nothing really changed. Then in 1975 it was decided to get a loan from the government to develop the industry. The Aboriginal Development Comission ‘decided’ to bring in a consultant to look at the viability of the loan and how it could increase the efficiency of the industry. Following the consultant’s recommendation, one big, modern fishing trawler replaced the small boats. In the dead of night, the small boats were burned on the beach and one was cut adrift, to ‘convince Yolηu of the need to move up to the big boat’. Within six months the whole fishing enterprise at Galiwin ’ku had collapsed and Galiwin ’ku became an importer rather than exporter of fish products.
… from a Yolηu perspective the collapse happened because the separate clans and nation alliances found it impossible to work under one Balanda boss on the trawler, as the trawler captain now had to be licensed. Moreover, Yolηu were insulted and grieving over the destroyed boats. With no clear lines of ownership the people could not see that any authority had passed to them. …
To expect all the clans at Galiwin ’ku to believe they collectively owned the fishing company was like telling twenty-six Balanda companies that they collectively owned an industry incorporated as an association. … But this is not how community structures were set up. … The Yolηu fisherman did not see themselves as working for their own gain anymore; in fact, many now thought that the captain of the new trawler would reap the dividends. They had just become wage earners, and the incentive to work and build the industry for their own benefit was gone.
On top of all this, people had become confused about where these wages came from. In the past they saw a clear trade with the mission—so much fish for so much money. This trade was what the Yolηu were used to. Now they got wages no matter how many fish were caught. The steps in the development of a cash economy, with its system of wages-for-labour, are many. The Yolηnu were catapulted into the cash economy with little preparation.
With all this confusion, only conflict could occur, and economic development through industries like fishing was lost. (pp47-8)

Sound anything like what went on with the Helmland dam project’s attitude to the locals’ agricultural efforts?

If you want to understand the failure of indigenous policy, examine the failure of aid policy. And vice versa. It is the same problems with the same interlocking dynamics:

Failure to grasp how modernization happened, and what it is.
Failure to understand the centrality of human action: in particular, that technology operates according to how people understand and operate it.
Pervasive failures of communication.
Application of policies by people who do not suffer the consequences of what they do.

The failure of indigenous policy in Australia tells us what one needs to know about the failures of the Coalition’s “nation-building” efforts in Afghanistan because they are all manifestations of the failure of aid. The failure to understand that development is what happens (or not) in the minds of people. That technology (including capital as the produced means of production) is the product and benefits of that, it is not the thing itself. You have to understand where people really are—their presumptions, beliefs, incentives, expectations—and work from there in ways that look like a good thing to them from within their (evolving) worldview and will continue to do so after you are gone for development to “take”.

Otherwise it is just an expensive and wasteful game with other people’s lives. Adding guns to the mix does not change that.

ADDENDA There is a great irony in the Iraq v Afghanistan comparison. The Coalition intervention in Iraq has been generally much less popular with Iraqis, but was operating with potentially functional forms of modern government. The NATO intervention in Afghanistan is much more popular with Afghans (especially the non-Pashtun) but is operating with less modern forms of governance. The intervention in Iraq is broadly a success (Iraq is at least as functional as Pakistan, and much less disruptive to its neighbours), the intervention in Afghanistan appears to be failing: lack of useful government structures trumping what the locals think about the intervention--or, to put it another way, institutions matter more than attitudes.

UPDATE Michael Yon notes that the Coalition spends very little time or effort in the areas of Afghanistan where it is welcome.

The Root of the Wild Madder

Brian Murphy is the religion correspondent for Associated Press. He is also a “Persian” carpet obsessive and has written a splendid book about “Persian” carpets, their history and the people who make them in The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet.

The book is, in part, a travelogue. Murphy takes us to the Teheran carpet bazaar, to cities, to villages, to nomad camps across Iran and Afghanistan. We start in a field of wild madder, a key dye plant for carpets: chemical dyes had taken over to the extent that only 10% of carpets had natural dyes by 2000: the proportion is now 25% and rising, a response to consumer demand (p.5). The book ends in a Cairo shop, near the al-Hussein mosque he was visiting for a Sufi ceremony, where a shopkeeper digs up some coarse dry madder that no one has asked for a long time (p.288).

In between is a travelogue of both physical places and of people and societies. But it is also a journey through the history of carpets—particularly the Western discovery and appreciation of them—and the tangled history of the region. A time-line sets out events from 8,000BC (first settlements) to the 2004 Iranian election. History, personal experience, literature, local outlooks and culture weave together in a thoroughly entertaining narrative.

Murphy is a religious correspondent, and religious experience and practices wander in and out of the narrative. Particularly Sufism. Reading the book, it struck me that, like Tantra, Sufism developed in a society of pervasive religious rules. Like Tantra, Sufism can offer rule-breaking as release but still contained within a religious framing.

One of Murphy’s great virtues is the people speak for themselves: they are not corralled into convenient Western framings. So we do not get romantic nomads, but women who hope education will give their daughters and granddaughters better prospects. A man studying neuroscience thinks about how experience changes the brain while we seek to control the universe around us in mutual effect (P.282). The book makes clear—as more recent events have made even clearer—the popular disaffection with the theocracy, the sense of a revolution hijacked and betrayed.

At the end of the book, in the last of a series of interspersed vignettes, Murphy tells the story of Majit Enderva and three other Iranians who attempt to smuggle themselves into the EU from Turkey. Majit and two others are killed in the border minefield they accidentally come ashore in, only his best friend survives. Murphy goes to Majit’s village, where his mother presses onto him a carpet she was making during and after her son died in the hope that something connected to her son will end up in the place he died trying to get to. An ordinary, unremarkable carpet becomes a carrier of love, tragedy and connection.

Via the author’s passion for carpets, interest in religion and respect for people, The Root of Wild Madder brings alive Persian carpets, and a fraught and complex region, in a very human and accessible way.

Medieval wisdom

Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities (at outlined in his TED talk here) has a certain wry amusement value for any medievalist, since “charter cities” is simply a variation on how medieval rulers created cities as economic hubs. The notion was, quite straightforwardly, to create the situation where economic activity could take place that would not occur in the rural areas that were otherwise the norm. This was particularly so in medieval England, with its boroughs operating under royal charters run by corporations. The self-governing city, generating its own laws and institutions was very much a feature of medieval Europe, particularly northern Italy. Venice was, in some ways, the Hong Kong of its time: the stand-out institutional success. (I find attempts to dismiss the success of Hong Kong as some one-off freak quite ahistorical.)

Gen. Petraeus in his “Surge” in Iraq pulled US troops out of the “firebases” and put them into the local communities. The idea was security was security for people in the area: it was something you could not create and maintain unless you had ongoing connections to those people. So that they told you stuff, you knew what was going on and you provided the security services they actually needed and wanted. This was simply a version of what Commonwealth forces had done in Borneo, with their patrols living and working in the local villages and the Brits had done in Oman. The use and expansion of pre-existing connections was also part of the Commonwealth success in the Malayan Emergency.

These are versions of the medieval approach to establishing law-and-order: local lord/knight with a range of connections to the local populace and a long-term incentive for law and order (since dead or de-propertied peasants were not very productive). We know this worked better than other arrangements, since Arab chronicler Ibn Jubayr commented on how much better off Muslim peasants were under “Franj” rule than Muslim rule (the latter being based on warriors with revocable tax-rights rather than the inheritable land ownership of Western knights). The trick was long-term incentives. It is that lack of long-term perspectives that Paul Collier notes as a central problem in the regular failure of post-conflict reconstruction: the need, in his words, to move from the politics of plunder to the politics of hope.

The representative principle (electing folk to represent you) is a medieval idea: from Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile, Simon de Montfort, and Edward I. But it was built on existing structures—bishops and lords were already, and continued to be, members of the deliberative assemblies. So the assemblies worked because they reflected how the societies actually worked.

Clearly, they evolved over time but they started in a place that worked for those societies at that time. A model that has been sadly overlooked for Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which could have so done with a “Council of Sheiks” as an “upper house”, so that governance is connected to how things operate on the ground, not some merely theoretical notion of how things ought to be. As Paul Collier points out in his TED talk on the “bottom billion” the empirical evidence is that electoral competition is bad for poor governance resource-economies but checks and balances on power are good. A “Council of Sheiks” provides the potential for checks and balances connected to how things actually are on the ground.

The medieval period is the basis of Western civilisation: the most successful civilisation in human history. It is a period of major successes and achievements from a very bleak beginning. There are many lessons and benefits to be taken from it. Particularly for societies still locked into “tribal” (i.e. kinship and network lineages) patterns since they have rarely, if ever, experienced rulership as other than some version of predatory autocracy. Centuries of disparaging of medieval experiences, of talking as if it was just the “dark time” between the Classical period and modern revival, misses a lot of potentially useful ideas.

ADDENDA: Folk sometimes make a very big deal about the Taliban having a secure area to operate from in Pakistan's North-West Territories. But, during the Dark Ages, the Norse raiders going a-viking had secure areas to raid from. The solution was to build up local defenses, forcing them to operate in bigger groups that could be brought to battle and destroyed, such as at Ethadun, Clontarf and Stamford Bridge.

Or co-opt them as the new defenders. As was done in Iraq with the Sons of Iraq.