Economist Writing Every Day

Robert Nozick and John Rawls were intellectual rivals, friendly colleagues, and even members of the same reading group. Their conversations, at least the ones we were privy to through their iterations of published work, were dedicated to reconciling the role of the state in manifesting the best possible world. Nozick, it can be said in a gratuituous oversimplification, favored a minimal government while Rawls, similarly oversimplified, favored a larger, wider reaching set of government institutions. Both were well aware of the risks and rewards of concentrating power within government institutions, they simply arrived at different conclusions based on risks each wanted to minimize versus those they were willing to incur.

My mental model of the evolution of government (influenced heavily by Nozick and refined towards the end by Rawls) goes something like this:

1. 100,000 years ago roving bands of humans grow to thrive in their environment by solving collective action problems, largely through familial relations. Larger groups have more success hunting, foraging, and protecting themselves from predators.
2. Eventually some groups get so good at collective action that they begin to prey on other smaller groups. These “bandits” gain more through resources taken by force than they would strictly producing resources through hunting and foraging.
3. This creates an arms race in group size, with bigger groups having the advantage while facing the diminishing marginal returns imposed by difficultings in maintaining the integrity of collective action in the face of individual incentives to free ride i.e. its hard to get people to pull their weight when their parents aren’t watching.
4. Some groups mitigate these difficulties, growing larger still. At some threshold of group size, the rewards to mobilitity are overtaken by the rewards to maintaining institutions and resources (freshwater, shelter, opportunities for agriculture), leading to stationary groups.
5. These stationary groups begin to act as “stationary bandits”, extracting resources from both outsiders for the benefit of their group and from their members for the benefit of their highest status members.
6. Differing institutions evolve across groups, varying the actions prescribed and proscribed for leaders, members (citizens), and non-members. Some groups are highly restrictive, others less so. Some groups are more extractive, funneling resources to a select minority. Some groups redistribute more , others less.
7. Democracy evolves specifically as an institution to replace hereditary lines, a deviation from the familial lines that sat the origin of the state all the way back at step 1. Its correlation with other institutions is less certain, though it does seem to move hand-in-hand with personal property rights and market-based economies. Democracies begin to differentiate themselves based on the internal, subsidiary institutions they favor and instantiate.

A lot of my political leanings can be found not in favoring Nozick or Rawls, but in the risk immediately preceding their point of divergence. When I look at well-functioning modern democracies, I see an exception to the historical rule. I see thousands of years of stationary bandits voraciously extracting resources while high status members taking desperate action to maintain power in a world where property rights are weak and collective action is tenuous. Rawls saw a growing state as a opportunity to create justice through fairer, more equitable outcomes. Nozick saw a growing state as a further concentration of power that, no matter how potentially benevolent today, would eventually attract the most selfish and venial, leading to corruption and return to the purest stationary bandit, only now with the newfound scale.

Both strike as me as perfectly reasonable concerns about very real risks. Which do I believe the greater risk? Depends on the news and what I had for breakfast that day. In the current political context, both in the US and several other democracies, I am of the growing opinion they would be in broad agreement that the biggest risk is not the perversion of democracy from suboptimal policies and subsidiary institutions (step 7), but rather a disastrous reversion to the pre-democratic institutions (step 6).

The most underrated aspect of democracy may very well be its fragility. While historical rarity may not be undeniable evidence of inherent fragility, but it would certainly suggest that once achieved it is worth the overwhelming dedication of resources, including the sacrifice of welfare optimality, to ensure its perserverance.

It cost a lot to get here. A lot. Sacrifices that are hard to even conceive of, let alone empathize with, while living within the profound luxury of modern life. I have no doubt that many of us will find ourselves underwhelmed with the policy platforms of the full menu of viable candidates made available to voters at every level of national and local office in a few weeks. So take this little scribbling for exactly what it is: an argument to vote against candidates that reduce the probability of our constitutional republic remaining intact. By comparison, all the other differences add up to a historical rounding error.