Story Conflict, Reader Interest, and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”

24 Friday Nov 2023

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Some months ago I read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my children. I had not read the book since primary school, and it was interesting reading in a number of senses. One of them is that it seems to violate modern advice on how to write a novel—and yet it is a beloved piece of children’s literature regardless. So is the advice wrong? Or incomplete? Or are modern audiences just different than they were decades ago?

Conventional wisdom for authors is that a strong plot is based on a strong conflict or interweaved conflicts—and that each scene needs to advance the conflict in some way. (Or perhaps every other scene, if you follow the Deborah Chester model of action-reflection-action-reflection.) Without conflict, it seems, audiences get bored and simply stop reading.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seems to follow this model initially. We are introduced to the desperate poverty of the Bucket family, which is juxtaposed against the delectable decadence of a wondrous chocolate factory in the same town. The stakes are raised by the contest of the Golden Tickets, and one by one the tickets are claimed by other children who are truly horrid in their own ways. Charlie, meanwhile, shows his virtue by accepting his suffering without complaint, and doing what little he can to help the rest of the family.

But once Charlie finds the last ticket, the conflict as such seems to vanish. Charlie and Grandpa Joe go from one wonderful experience to the next, passive observers rather than active agents in the story. The other children suffer various unexpected fates, of course, but what exactly is the underlying conflict?

Moreover, the narrative gleefully brings itself to a halt several times, and invites the reader to enjoy such diversions as Square Candies that Look Round, which play zero role in the plot. Especially in such a short book, why does Dahl allow himself such self-indulgence?

Perhaps the more useful way to address the first issue is to reframe it. The story is not presenting a conflict—it is presenting the reader with two mysteries. The first mystery, created by the contrast between Charlie’s selflessness and the other children’s incredible vices, is whether Charlie will receive his just reward, and whether the other children will receive their just punishments. And the story goes on to answer that question in the affirmative, presenting a straightforward morality play as the other children receive punishments that fit the crime, so to speak. Charlie, being a good boy, does not overstep his bounds during the tour and seems to be in no danger.

Or is he? During my reread, I was struck by the depiction of Wonka himself. He seems indifferent to the danger that the other children are placed in, and even seems to relish the thought of Veruca Salt heading off to the incinerator, for example. As their parents understandably go into panic, Wonka blithely promises that “they all come out in the wash.” The net effect is quite sinister—and Dahl is a master of sinister, as you can see in his stories for adults such as “The Landlady.” (One might even be tempted to read Wonka as a devil-figure, with his goatee and his profession of tempting children with sweets. Dahl certainly had the literary chops to be thinking in that direction.)

So the other mystery is what are Wonka’s intentions, especially with Charlie? And this mystery is deepened as the story progresses, until we finally learn that Wonka was looking for a successor. In that one moment of eucatastrophe, both of the key mysteries of the story get resolved in a whoosh of joy.

But what of the Square Candies that Look Round, and other such flourishes? My read is that Dahl was trying to maintain a sense of wonder, even if it didn’t advance the plot per se. Rather than presenting conflict specifically, Dahl’s technique is to provoke interest in general. Conflict is only one tool to provoke interest; mystery and wonder are others.

Slavish focus on plot action was not always mandatory for authors. In earlier eras, authors often would digress into various topics just because they were interesting. (One could think of Victor Hugo’s multiple-chapter celebrations of, for example, the sewer system of Paris.) Today, that sort of thing seems to have fallen out of fashion—with some notable exceptions. Neal Stephenson sometimes gets grief for his unexpected monologues on the proper way to eat Captain Crunch cereal and the like.

I don’t believe that modern audiences are so very different than in former years. Yes, attention spans are shorter, and some readers are conditioned to expect more action. But if, regardless of these challenges, you think you can provoke reader interest with a sparkling piece of writing even if it doesn’t advance story conflict, I would say go for it.

Governments and the Quick-and-Dirty Triangle of Public Policy

09 Monday Oct 2023

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In the previous post, I discussed several basic functions of government—while inserting snide remarks about whether governments actually carry out these functions. Anyone who pays even the slightest attention to the news will understand why; governments often claim to pursue a given goal, but then enact policies that seem designed to a) be ineffective at achieving that goal or actually make the problem worse, and b) happen to benefit the ruling faction politically or monetarily.

Why? In the basic model of public-choice economics, it is because all government officials act in their own personal best interest, at all times, even if that involves neglecting or victimizing the populace. If there is any hope of good policy, says this model, it can only be when it is in the personal interest of the officials to deliver good policy. (This is why democracies tend to have better policies than autocracies, at least on average: politicians need to at least look like they are furthering the interests, or perceived interests, of at least half the voters.)

We needn’t accept the strong form of this model, at least not all the time. We can still recognize that some political figures and bureaucrats genuinely want to do a good job. But good policy is hard to pull off, even with the best of intentions, because governments don’t always have enough information to make good judgments about complex policy choices, and often don’t even understand the information they do have. This is related to the “knowledge problem” of Hayek—people are better at accurately perceiving their own personal surroundings and experiences than they are at interpreting imprecise representations of the wide world that have gone through several rounds of abstraction and reification.

In an environment of insufficient information, it is very easy for even a small faction of self-interested actors to put their thumb on the policy scale, so to speak, so that policies end up favoring them. It is also easy for well-intentioned ideologues to push policies that seem nice in the abstract, but prove hideously inappropriate for the real world.

For worldbuilding purposes, we can boil down the messy workings of policy formation into a triangle with three points. One point represents the “best” policy that could be arrived at, assuming that governments were perfectly benevolent and omniscient. (This assumes, of course, that you know what the “best” policy would be for your invented society; but hey, it’s your story.)

A second point represents the most likely policy to be arrived at assuming benevolent intentions but imperfect decisionmaking, given the limitations of available knowledge and skill among policymakers, their mental models, and the capabilities of existing government structures, among other bits of administrative friction. (You can throw in the workings of the political system as a further obstacle, if you want to be ambitious!)

A third point represents what policy would be set if government officials were strictly maximizing their own personal interests (or alternatively, the interests of the state as against the populace or rival states—or a combination of both!). This is trickier than it seems; as we discussed with regard to taxation, an actor’s evaluation of its best interest will depend on its values and time horizon, among other things. But as a rule of thumb, it still gives you something to hang your hat on.

This is not meant to be a rigorous exercise, but a quick and dirty way to think about policy choices in your invented setting. For any given society, or even for specific policy areas in the society, you can arbitrarily decide at what point (within the triangle) public policy is going to land—and then you get to imagine how it ended up that way!

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Government’s Role in the Economy

09 Monday Oct 2023

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We’ve repeatedly alluded to the role of governments in structuring the economy. The full role of government goes well beyond a single blog post, or even a single book, but we can still lay out a few basic ideas to structure how we think of governments’ role in the economy in our worldbuilding settings. We’ll begin by talking about what ideal governments do, and in a later post we will discuss reasons why the real world often falls short of the ideal.

Let’s begin with a simple inventory:

Providing and enforcing laws. We’ve discussed how commerce thrives in stable societies where the threat of violence and banditry is low, and we can rely on enjoying the fruits of our labors even far in the future. The more secure that property rights are, the more complex commerce tends to become.

Notably, you don’t need a formal government to have and enforce laws. Several societies achieved a degree of social and commercial stability without a formal government, because a customary or religious set of laws was widely agreed upon and followed. Examples were/are the Nuer, Somali tribes following customary law, and the Jewish diaspora. Some societies in a border region even maintained a shared legal code even while at war with each other, such as the Law of the Marches between England and Scotland.

Similarly, it’s not necessary that a territory follow a single law code. In medieval England, the law merchant would compete with royal courts, which in turn competed with the courts of local lords. Today in America, the states often compete to provide laws that are favorable to particular industries, and companies also can use private arbitration to settle disputes.

Still, it seems that formal governments tend to be more effective at maintaining a stable legal system, on average. Or at any rate, the provision of law and order is one of the most compelling justifications that governments can give for their existence.

Providing public goods. How one defines “public goods” strongly depends on one’s level of cynicism, but in general we can say that there are certain kinds of things that governments have historically paid for that often do not get paid for in their absence. Militaries, road networks, and massive irrigation projects and drinking water are typical examples. One of the classic justifications of government is that by levying mandatory taxes and directing unified projects, it can overcome the collective-action problem and ensure that everyone benefits from public goods that everyone wants, but no one is able to fund on their own.

Again, many are quick to label something a “public good” when in fact it could be provided privately, as long as the necessary incentives are created and methods exist to coordinate people and resources. Mercenary units have existed since the dawn of time, and private companies often build roads and water projects if they are able to charge for them. Robert Nozick imagined a contractual mechanism in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia for people to commit money to a project and only be charged if enough other people join, and today we actually do this on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. I myself have hoped for a long time that we could replace much of our tax code with crowdfunded public works (and published a rather amateurish short story on that theme—but we all have our old shames!).

Nevertheless, there is a sense felt by many that certain goods and services ought to be provided collectively, and not through market mechanisms. National defense and crime prevention are prime examples.

Redistribution of incomes. The oldest governments known, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, spent the bulk of their efforts on gathering food and then distributing it to their populaces. Ever since, some level of social support has been practiced by nearly all governments. The scale of such redistribution varied widely between, say, the Soviet Union and Victorian England. But in general, governments usually recognize that their power comes from their (control over the) populace, and that allowing large numbers of people to starve to death does not serve their interests (if it can be prevented cheaply enough, anyway).

Redistribution is expensive, and often bitterly resisted by those who are forced to pay for it. And it is also quite common for redistribution to be manipulated to produce, ahem, unexpected beneficiaries.

Aside from the three roles above, economists typically point to three other roles that seem, to me, rather less universal:

Stabilizing the economy. Economic fluctuations and crises are of concern to states, for several reasons. (But not all states are able to respond usefully; and not all states’ responses are effective.)

In one interesting example, he Babylonian Talmud records that the Temple in Jerusalem would use a portion of its treasury to buy food products if market prices were unusually low, and then sell them to the market once prices rose. [Find the cite.] The text is silent on whether such market activity was meant to be stabilizing; but the profits from such trading were spent on “extra” sacrificial offerings, rather than being retained, suggesting that profit was not the motivating factor.

Maintaining competition (or the reverse!). Often, governments use regulations to prevent markets from being dominated by particular actors. For example, governments might impose a fixed rate on rail freight so that farmers are not squeezed by the rail companies. A city might require that marketplace stalls have a maximum size, so that many sellers can fit in the town square. 

Conventional economists aside, often governments do the opposite: reserve an entire market sector for a designated monopoly. This can be done for purely self-interested reasons (such as to enrich a government minister or an ally), but governments often justify monopolies in situations with high barriers to entry, such as the need to outfit a private navy to deepen trade links with the East Indies, or building fantastically expensive semiconductor plants. Creating a monopoly, it is sometimes believed, can prevent “wasteful” competition in situations where it would yield little benefit.

Similarly, state monopolies are often advocated for in situations prone to “natural” monopolies, such as a water utility that needs to build pipes to every building.

Finally, and most speculatively, we have:

Correcting externalities. Often, commercial activity creates costs that the participants can shift to others, such as pollution or the depletion of natural resources. Since the participants don’t bear the whole costs, they have incentives to act in ways that are, globally speaking, not optimal. Governments often (claim to) act to control such misaligned incentives. For example, the U.S. government has a cap-and-trade system to limit harmful emissions from power plants, and many have advocated for a carbon tax to discourage energy-intensive behavior.

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Now, merely listing the potential activities of governments does not tell you what governments actually do, or why. As we know, governments often have different motivations than the welfare of their peoples. But this post is already going long, so we will discuss a three-part model for government motivations in a future post.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Entrepreneurship

26 Tuesday Sep 2023

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In the economics literature, there is a heated debate over whether entrepreneurship should properly be considered a factor of production, or whether it is better thought of as a special mode of using the three main factors of production. For the present purposes I don’t really care; the main thing is that entrepreneurship is sufficiently different from land, labor, and capital that it merits discussion by itself.

What is entrepreneurship? Depending on who you read, it can consist of either or both of willingness to bear risk, or skill at coordinating and directing the other three factors of production. In either case, unlike land and capital (both passive resources) and labor (the physical work of masses of people), entrepreneurship is a mental and social activity of individuals (though groups of skilled entrepreneurs can be quite effective, for example the “PayPal Mafia”)

Willingness to bear risk (or uncertainty, not the same thing) means to accept the possibility of failure when trying something that could work better (or be more profitable) than the status quo. The entrepreneur has a certain amount of resources, and is willing to devote them to some business pursuit even though they could be lost if things go bad. This is distinct from “normal” work or investing, where a given amount of labor or capital yields a more or less predictable output (wages or interest payments). (You might argue that many workers face risks as well; according to this framework, they would therefore be acting in part as entrepreneurs.) This was the standard 18th- and 19th-century formulation, pioneered by Cantillon.

The newer understanding of entrepreneurship is skill at coordinating the three factors of production in new and more productive ways. This aspect is somewhat broad; it could encompass inventiveness, creativity, strategic vision, skill at managing employees and vendors and getting them to play nice with each other, skill at negotiating deals, or a deep desire for technical or organizational optimization. Note also that this aspect of “entrepreneurship” doesn’t require that the entrepreneur be using her own capital; the entrepreneur could be an employee of the firm specifically for her entrepreneurial talents, rather than being the boss and risking her own money. This vision of entrepreneurship was pioneered by Joseph Schumpeter and Israel Kirzner.

A word on organizational skill. Anyone who has ever run a business, or been a supervisor or manager, knows just how hard it is to get a group of people pointed in the same direction and keep them from dissolving into acrimony or full-throated mutual combat. The ability to manage people, and to cultivate a strong organizational culture, is what often separates successful companies (and countries) from backward ones. And the prevailing culture of a society can make building strong organizations easier or harder. Willingness to work hard and work as a team, balanced by the confidence to take individual initiative, can lead to tremendous results. Conversely, a society that fosters narrow selfishness, does not encourage individual drive, and punishes nonconformity or excellence, will tend to produce organizations that are lackluster at best.

Additionally, while entrepreneurs are risk-tolerant, they still want to find good opportunities that are worth the risk. So they thrive in a society that is relatively stable (but not stagnant!), has predictable laws, and low levels of violence. Societies with high corruption and banditry, on the other hand, make entrepreneurialism a difficult sell—because businessmen are much less likely to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

As a result, you can fairly characterize whole societies as being more or less hospitable to entrepreneurialism. America is famously entrepreneurial (or more properly, certain parts of America); Israel has been called the “Startup Nation,” punching well above its weight in terms of new businesses. By contrast, countries with high levels of social stratification and economic corporatism, such as France or Germany, will tend to discourage entrepreneurs because it is hard for them to challenge the status quo with something new. And countries that have high corruption or social unrest (or even civil wars) will have little entrepreneurialism beyond the informal “hustles” of people trying to keep themselves alive by any possible means.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Social Capital

25 Monday Sep 2023

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We previously discussed how the main factors of production are land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. I might have to amend that list, however, to include social capital—that is, the set of beliefs and attitudes about the world that influence how people living together cooperate to form a society, or not. (I might also end up squeezing it into an existing category such as the “culture” component of human capital; but the categorization is artificial anyway.)

The study of social capital was largely kicked off by Robert Putnam, famous most recently (I think) for Bowling Alone, his argument that the American social fabric was fraying. But the basic theory was based on over a decade of research prior to that, focused on Italy. By comparing the northern cities of Italy (which had a heritage of having become free cities some 500 years ago) with cities in the Italian south (which did not), Putnam showed not only that people in the northern cities were much more prone to social and civic involvement, were less tolerant of corruption, and had more generalized trust—he showed that these characteristics had measurable impacts on economic growth. The more social capital a society had, the more economic growth.

Luigi Zingales (in A Capitalism for the People) discusses why this is so, specifically with regard to generalized trust—that is, the predisposition to trust other people even before you know them. Generalized trust is the reason that we hand packages off to the postal worker, that we deposit money in the bank, and that we buy things from the supermarket while they are still in the package. A general belief that most people are trustworthy, absent concrete evidence otherwise, makes possible a tremendous amount of trade and exchange.

Contrast the above picture with the situation in backward villages of Sicily. Zingales describes a social milieu where no one trusts anyone else outside of his family (and even within the family, not much!), and people are chiefly concerned with not being a sucker. Moreover, that expectation is justified by experience, as government officials are corrupt, businessmen are shady, and people from other families will cheerfully exploit any momentary advantage offered by some poor sap. As one result, farmers do not cooperate with each other and end up with perennially bad yields, remaining mired in poverty.

Zingales also notes that it takes a very long time for people to develop generalized trust. Immigrant communities in the United States from low-trust countries take several generations for their level of generalized trust to rise to the level prevailing in American society. By contrast, it is very easy to lose such trust. If a government victimizes the people, or businesses do the same (for example, by the growth of crony capitalism or by violating laws with impunity), generalized trust suffers immediately and the legacy of such abused trust can echo for hundreds of years.

Depressing, certainly (especially given how cavalier our political class is acting right now in squandering the trust of the public; but I digress). But extremely useful for worldbuilders. If you characterize an invented society as having high or low levels of social capital, that has a whole host of implications for its history, its future development, the basic attitudes of the people, and its level of economic dynamism.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

A Few More Comments on Cities

20 Wednesday Sep 2023

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Rereading Fernand Braudel recently, I came across two critical points he makes during his discussion of cities. We’ve previously discussed how cities show up where they are most convenient for commerce, production, or government control (and sometimes all three at once). But Braudel adds some lovely texture to that discussion.

First, he notes that in Europe, cities were often placed by rivers in order to take advantage of watermill power for production. Every inch of suitable riverbank was harnessed by mills, where possible (and where the riverbank was not already devoted to docks for the vast array of shipping needed to supply the city). If the site was not conducive to the growth of a city, the mill complex would become a standalone production site, such as ironworks or mines. But cities had several advantages as centers of production even before the Industrial Revolution, namely that they had lots of workers nearby and potentially had lots of customers, and easy access to the transportation networks for raw materials and the export of finished goods.

In a more abstract sense, you could say that cities grow where they can access enough power (plus food, another frequent topic of Braudel’s). If new ways to produce (and transport!) power emerge, expect to see new cities grow up that can make use of the new power availability to exploit opportunities that previously were out of reach.

Second, we noted that “administrative” cities often have little production of their own, and rely on constant government funding. Braudel (starting around pg. 530 of Structures of Everyday Life) gives us hard numbers of major European capitals, which were particularly prone to such tendencies, and they are quite astonishing.

Lavoisier, writing in the mid-1700s, estimated that the city of Paris spent some 260 million livres per year to support its populace—of which only 20 million came from commercial profits, while 140 million came from government salaries and bonds, and 100 million came from ground rents or from business activities conducted outside of the city.

Some 141,000 people lived in Berlin in 1783, of which some 33,000 were soldiers and their families, 13,000 bureaucrats-and-families, and 10,000 servants—in other words, over a third of the city was economically unproductive, spending salaries that came from tax revenue. Many of the remainder made their living solely by catering to the needs and tastes of the salaried class.

St. Petersburg, capital of imperial Russia, was even more lopsided. In 1789, it had about 220,000 inhabitants, more than two-thirds of whom were male. Soldiers, (military) sailors, and cadets (and their families) comprised some 55,000 people, over a quarter of the city. Large numbers of others were servants. And let us not forget the bureaucracy. The city itself was placed in a bad location for practical purposes, constantly dealing with bitter cold and floods that killed many every year, far away from its sources of food and even building material; but that was where Peter the Great wanted his court, due to the spectacular vistas it afforded. Consequently, vast sums of money were spent to build the city and keep it working.

None of this is bad, per se. If a country has the money and wants to spend it in a major city, good for it. But it does illustrate that the fortunes of such cities are inextricably tied to those of the government. Braudel notes that when the Mughals of India moved their capital city, practically the entire population of the old capital would move with them; they had no way to support themselves otherwise.

Braudel also points out, in an argument later echoed by Jane Jacobs, that when a capital city grows too large and lacks an independent commercial base, its elites end up bending government policy to favor the capital city at the expense of the rest of the country. Jacobs noted in particular that London favored policies that benefited its international banking business and impoverished the rest of Britain. Paris likewise became a massive megalopolis that drained wealth from the countryside.

(I note in passing that until recently, Washington DC and its environs were not a major urban powerhouse—that role was played by New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities able to counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of the capital. By 2011, however, that had changed. The region has become overrun by well-paid lobbyists, and to a lesser degree by financial and healthcare firms that benefit from easy access to regulators. This was probably a symptom, not a cause, of the growth of centralized policy; but once such people are ensconced, they continue to drum up business at the expense of the common citizen. See Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People [2012]. Matters have only become more exacerbated since he wrote.)

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part IV

30 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, War, Writing

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In previous posts, we discussed Jeremy Weinstein’s argument of how rebel groups’ initial access to resources tends to put into motion a series of cascading decisions over who to recruit, how to govern civilians, and how to employ violence against civilians—with the result that initially “rich” rebel groups usually end up using indiscriminate violence against civilians, and those resource-poor groups that survive long enough tend to become “activist” groups with close ties to the populace, and use violence selectively (though in some cases the level of violence may still be high if they face high levels of civilian collaboration with the government).

Now, in this final post of this sequence, we will ask a crucial question: do rebel groups ever change character from “rich” to “activist” or vice versa? And if so, when?

Weinstein argues that rebel groups can face four types of external shocks to their existing organizational logic:

  1. Battlefield losses can weaken beliefs by civilians and by the rebels themselves that victory is possible, or near; and it also creates the need to replace casualties.
  2. Battlefield success can lead observers to conclude that the rebels are about to win, and therefore that joining the rebels is a ticket to future power or largesse.
  3. The rebels may access new economic resources, or economic resources may suddenly halt, threatening to undermine the rebels’ existing organizational logic.
  4. The government may change its strategy, increasing the incentives for civilians to cooperate or encouraging rebels to defect.

“Rich” rebels, having previously foreclosed on building trust with civilians, typically respond to 1, 3, and 4 by intensifying violence and repression. (Such groups don’t view 2 as a problem.) They lack the organizational capacity to change course, most of the time. In particular, rebel groups that suddenly lose access to an external patron or that lose their tax resources are no longer able to pay their troops as they once did; but because their personnel are out for personal benefit rather than interested in the common good, a (formerly!) “rich” group would have a very difficult time switching the logic of its behavior to an “activist” model that relies on cultivating support from the populace.

Instead, such groups tend to unleash even more violence against civilians, engaging in more looting to gather resources, more indiscriminate violence to discourage collaboration (which is often self-defeating), and kidnapping and forced recruitment in order to replace battlefield losses. (The Lord’s Resistance Army is a notorious example, relying as it does on recruiting children who it kidnaps and forces to commit atrocities.)

In rare cases, a formerly “rich” group facing utter destruction can decide to try and reconfigure itself as an “activist” group out of desperation. This depends heavily on the presence of talented leadership, and faces many pitfalls such as defection of its current members, distrust by civilians, and continued government pressure.

“Activist” groups tend to react to 1 and 4 (i.e. strategic setbacks of various kinds) by reinforcing their commitment to their existing relationships with civilians. The temptation to resort to forced recruitment to solve short-term problems is certainly present, but typically outweighed by the groups’ long-term orientation. Adversity is not a new problem for such groups. The tricky bit is how they respond to success: an influx of new money or recruits (2 and 3).

Sudden control over new resources can come about in several ways. A rebel group can gain a new patron. It can extend its control over more civilians and suddenly have more tax revenue. It could capture natural resources such as diamond mines. However it happens, new money means new temptations to corruption. In the worst case, the group can find itself slipping into the logic of “rich” groups.

Weinstein finds that “activist” groups are best able to resist this threat if they put in place strong organizational structures to control the new money and make sure it is being spent on strategic objectives, rather than to enrich leaders or troops. If such structures are not present, the group is in great danger of undermining its organizational logic and becoming a “rich” group.

Similarly, a sudden influx of recruits who merely want to “back the stronger horse” threatens to weaken the group’s commitment to its principles and proper behavior towards civilians (in the language of our model, the group would have a higher proportion of “consumers” and fewer “investors”). Successful activist groups are those that respond by strengthening their screening efforts and indoctrination, in order to filter out troublemakers and impress upon the rest that the group operates according to firm rules.

In general, effective leadership seems to be crucial in how a rebel group handles changing conditions. Weinstein theory doesn’t encompass leadership per se, other than noting its importance in influencing outcomes.

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I have seen very little fiction concerning rebel groups that discusses the challenges brought on by success. This seems like an oversight, given how frequent the problem of “betraying the revolution” is in real life, and more importantly the fantastic story conflicts that can be generated in this way. Now you have a conceptual model for thinking about such conflicts; huzzah!

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Collective Action Problems

27 Thursday Jul 2023

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Why is it so hard to organize people behind a project that benefits everyone?

Economist Mancur Olson won a Nobel Prize for his answer (which he laid out in his book The Logic of Collective Action), which in a nutshell is this: when multiple people work on some task that benefits all of them, each of them faces an incentive to shirk—meaning to work less hard on the task and wait for all the other people to pick up the slack. If the group succeeds even when an individual member shirks, then that member gets all the benefit for none of the cost (that is, the member is a “free rider”). Conversely, if the member puts forward full effort but not enough others do and the project fails, then the working member is a sucker (so to speak) and has suffered high costs for no benefit.

But if all the people have that incentive to shirk, then everyone will shirk and the project itself will not be accomplished. As a result, says Olson, only certain types of groups will successfully accomplish their goals.

The first type is a group working toward a goal that is so valuable, each of its members would do all the work necessary by itself if it had to.

The second is a group that is small enough that each of the members can monitor the others, to make sure that they all are pulling their weight.

The third type of group is one that manages to create “selective benefits” to reward its members for their participation, even where direct monitoring is infeasible. For example, the AARP is an advocacy group that also provides benefits like insurance or travel perks to its millions of members. That encourages people to pay the membership fees, which are then used to fund the AARP’s advocacy.

(A selective benefit can also be social, or even metaphorical. For example, most religious groups consider charity to be spiritually beneficial for the giver. Someone who holds this belief will tend to give charity even in the absence of a material incentive to do so.)

By contrast, large groups of people who cannot monitor each other, and who lack a selective benefit to encourage participation, will have a very hard time sustaining cooperation between their members to achieve their goals.

Olson notes that lobby groups are often small groups of actors seeking especially valuable payoffs. Citizens’ groups, by contrast, are relatively large, and often have a hard time providing selective benefits. As a result, narrow lobbies (which Olson later names “distributional coalitions”) routinely have a leg up in advocating their goals (in a democracy but also in other systems, such as autocracies where access to the ruler is restrictive), compared to the citizens’ groups who are often unable to stop them. Over time, therefore, public policy is likely to be more responsive to narrow lobbies than to the interests of the majority, or the populace as a whole.

Olson continued exploring this insight in a follow-on book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. As the title indicates, Olson is pessimistic about the implications of his theory. If society remains stable over time, the number and power of distributional coalitions will grow as time passes; and “there is for practical purposes no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on the society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself.” (As Adam Smith noted in an earlier century, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”)

Distributional coalitions generally obtain “shares[s] of the social output” by securing special privileges for their members, such as by excluding competitors from their industries, or by getting a direct government subsidy paid for by general taxes. Typically, such privileges end up burdening the rest of society, and as such burdens accumulate, it becomes relatively less attractive for individuals to engage in productive activity—and more productive to devote your energies into fighting for a larger slice of the pie. Political life consequently becomes more and more acrimonious, a constant brawl of distributional groups against each other to see who can best expropriate the public.

As distributional coalitions proliferate and grow in power, society will reach a tipping point where its most talented people take up lobbying and rent-seeking rather than productive activity. At this point, the calcification of the economy accelerates. Worse, because much of the economy is now subject to the demands of distributional coalitions, and such coalitions make decisions slowly in a process of internal bargaining and consensus-building and lobbying the government, the economy as a whole grows less responsive to changing conditions. New technologies are adopted more slowly, resources are not reallocated to meet new crises and opportunities, and economic growth stagnates.

Importantly, the power of distributional coalitions depends on their relationships with the government and their dominance of their industries. Free politics and freedom of trade are therefore a threat to such coalitions; electoral turnover can bring less friendly politicians to power, and the rise of economic competition can disrupt the existing industry structure and dethrone those at the top. (Olson was writing before the rise of today’s powerful identity-based interest groups, or he would have said something similar about the power to define your own identity, rather than having it imposed on you by powerful interest groups that want to yoke you to their plow.) Therefore, distributional coalitions hate and fear freedom and seek to curtail it wherever possible. They much prefer stability, since that freezes their own advantageous position.

As a result, Olson concludes, long-lived societies tend to become shot through with durable class divides that harden over time, between those who amass special privileges for themselves and those who do not. (He discusses apartheid South Africa, Britain, the Indian caste system, and the pre-Communist Chinese guilds, among several other cases.) Those social groups with effective distributional coalitions tend to cement their power over time. As Olson notes, “There is greater inequality, I hypothesize, in the opportunity to create distributional coalitions than there is in the inherent productive abilities of people.”

The only way out, according to Olson, is to periodically disrupt society and shake up the cozy power arrangements that accumulate. The most common way in history that this came about was through conquest by a foreign power, unfortunately. But gentler means are also available, such as free economic and electoral competition.

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In your own worldbuilding, Olson’s theory can be a powerful tool in creating settings simmering with latent conflict. The old and decadent society that is ripe for revolution is a mainstay of fiction for a reason. As a first pass, think about who the most powerful groups in your invented society are, and ask how they got there. Then ask, what would they want to do next, and at whose expense?

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post will show up in the planned second and third books in this series, working titles Wealth for Worldbuilders and Tyranny for Worldbuilders respectively. No idea when they will be finished, but they should be fun!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part III

26 Wednesday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, War, Writing

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In previous blog posts, we discussed Jeremy Weinstein’s work on the internal dynamics of rebel groups, and how they lead some groups to commit indiscriminate violence against civilians. In a nutshell, groups with limited initial resources are forced to establish close relationships with civilian communities in order to survive, which forces them to discipline their forces and share significant power with communal leaders.

By contrast, groups with significant wealth at their founding (for example, due to state sponsors or involvement in the drug trade) have no strategic imperative to depend on civilians, and furthermore tend to recruit personnel who are in it for the money. As a result, personnel tend to abuse civilians, the leadership doesn’t want to incur the costs of disciplining them, and the groups tend not to share power with the civilian populace.

We are now at the crux of it. The foregoing processes tend to encourage “rich” rebel groups to use massive violence against civilians, mostly because their previous mistreatment of civilians leaves them with no other options. Let’s see why.

Rebel groups want civilians in (or near) their territory to cooperate with them—to provide food, tax revenue, recruits, and information about government troops and collaborators. Civilians, on the other hand, may or may not want to cooperate. Some might be government supporters or officials. Even if civilians oppose the government, they may not want to risk government reprisals. And they might view the rebels as worse than the government, and not want to cooperate with them even if they could do so safely. Therefore, rebel groups (and governments, for that matter) will sometimes want to harm civilians who cooperate with the enemy or refuse to cooperate with them—not least in order to frighten other civilians into complying with their demands.

A rebel group that has close ties with civilian populations (usually because it began its existence as “poor”) will have a much easier time using violence in a selective, targeted fashion. Because the populace trusts them, civilians are more willing to give information to the rebels. And because the rebels have close ties to the populace, they will be able to vet information they receive to make sure that their informants are telling the truth, so that they don’t harm an innocent party by mistake. Punishments are usually more graduated (such as kidnapping civilians and confining them for a time), giving rebels the chance to discover a mistake before harm becomes irreparable (i.e. the wrong person is shot). Finally, when mistakes are made, the rebels usually make amends to the populace and punish the offending personnel, reinforcing the trust that the population has in them.

As a result, “poor” rebel groups will tend to use violence selectively against civilians, seizing or assassinating government officials and collaborators and rarely harming the wrong people. The overall level of violence against civilians will be fairly low (at least from the rebel side; often government forces are less discriminate, for the same reasons we are about to discuss with reference to “rich” groups).

In contrast, we discussed how “rich” groups will tend to abuse civilians because they don’t bother disciplining their troops, and they will tend to exclude civilians from power arrangements. As a result, civilians will tend not to trust such rebel groups, even if they nominally support them over the government (and they may not). Rebel groups will thus receive less information from civilian sympathizers, making it harder for them to selectively target government collaborators or functionaries, or to punish civilians who are refusing to cooperate with them.

Worse, when they do receive information from civilians about potential targets, “rich” rebel groups will have a hard time verifying its accuracy (if they even care to). As a result, malicious civilians will frequently exploit the rebel groups to take revenge against their neighborhood enemies. Even without such deliberate deceit, rebels will frequently target the wrong people, ending up harming innocents. This will cause civilian trust to erode still further and causing information flows to slow or stop. In the end, even if rebel groups wanted to target civilians selectively, they will find it impossible.

But such groups still have a strategic need to force compliance by civilians. Unable to use violence selectively, they will instead resort to collective punishment, massacring people at random or even whole communities in order to frighten other communities.

Obviously this is a suboptimal outcome for the rebels, even setting aside moral concerns. Once you murder people indiscriminately, it becomes almost impossible to go back as no civilians will trust you or want to help you. “Rich” rebel groups are thus set on a path to continued massacre and bloodshed that ends only when they establish unchallenged control over a given community or population. (And even then, the pervasive acts of individual exploitation will continue.) Their ability to gain popular support will be very much hobbled, and their effectiveness in challenging the government and ruling the populace will be significantly less than it might have been.

Still, it’s not impossible to overthrow the government and rule a country while murdering indiscriminately. (Charles Taylor comes to mind in Liberia.) Less dramatically, in Mozambique, RENAMO managed to bring the ruling government to the bargaining table after a very long and bloody civil war.

In the final post of this sequence, we will discuss how external shocks can challenge rebel groups’ ability to operate, and how their responses to such shocks might change their pattens of behavior from “activist” to “rich” or (rarely) vice versa.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part II

22 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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In a previous post, I discussed the theory of Jeremy Weinstein on why some rebel groups act in a relatively restrained manner towards civilians, while other groups engage in indiscriminate violence. He argued that much of the difference stemmed from the initial resources available to the group, and how that affected the incentives of people to join the rebels. Poor groups were forced by circumstance to become “activist” groups, that is, to appeal to a base of civilian support and to recruit personnel who were “investors,” i.e. willing to endure short-term sacrifices for the sake of the group’s long-term goals. In order to do that, activist groups were forced to maintain strong discipline to convince the civilian populace that it would protect them from abuses by its soldiers. Poor groups that failed to do so soon withered away from lack of recruits or food.

By contrast, groups that began with access to money and guns from external sponsors, or from control over valuable resources such as drugs or gems, lacked the strategic imperative to seek civilian support. Moreover, they had a strong incentive to expand their membership by offering high pay or other benefits, and therefore attracted “consumer” members, those seeking short-term benefits that flowed from their membership in the rebel group. Groups largely made up of consumers had a much harder time preventing abuse of civilians, since their members were prone to looting or to abducting civilian women or murdering people they disliked for personal reasons. And such groups also had fewer reasons to impose strong discipline: because they had independent resources, they suffered few (initial) disadvantages from tolerating abuses of civilians.

In this post, we will continue Weinstein’s argument and examine the consequences of the previous paragraphs for rebel groups’ governance of civilian areas.

As rebel groups gain control over territory, they have to decide how to handle the civilians living there. Civilians can provide useful resources to rebel groups: information about government activity, new recruits, food, and tax revenue. However, civilians are strategic actors: they can choose to support the rebels or the government, and if neither option seems attractive they will try to flee the area entirely or to resist both sides.

Rebel groups have options in how to build governance structures in response. These can be said to vary on two factors: inclusiveness (AKA participation) and the extent of power sharing. (This is true of regime governments as well, which is not surprising since a rebel group administering territory is basically a kind of government.) A participatory governance regime tries to address the preferences and needs of the populace, while a non-participatory regime treats civilians with indifference at best, as targets of predation at worst. But even participatory governments need not actually share power over decision making, a tempting option in wartime. However, the more that a rebel group shares real power with civilians, the more that civilians will trust the group (or the government in similar circumstances) to uphold its bargains in the future. And in response, rebel groups that build participatory structures of true power sharing are likely to elicit more cooperation from civilian populaces.

Why then doesn’t everybody build such structures? Weinstein argues that the difference hinges on three factors (though he subdivides the factors somewhat differently on pages 171 and 196 of his book without tying the differences to his findings—tsk tsk, Cambridge University Press editors!):

  1. The degree to which the rebel group needs support from the populace;
  2. The extent to which extracting resources from the populace is dependent on civilian productivity; and
  3. The time horizons of the group’s members (i.e. whether they are predominantly “investors” or “consumers”), and the resulting ability of the group to make credible commitments to the populace.

A group that has significant starting resources needs the support of the populace less if at all, and will tend as a result to build non-participatory structures that do not share power. This tendency is exacerbated by the short-term orientation of its members, who want to plunder the populace and seize loot. Even the need to get food from the populace will not moderate this tendency much, since civilians cannot simply stop growing food and will therefore usually have food available to seize.

One complicating wrinkle occurs when the group can extract valuable resources from the populace, but only if the people commit their work to generating such resources. For example, the Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga Valley gained most of their revenue from the drug trade, but they therefore depended on civilians to grow coca. Out of self-interest, then, the rebels built structures that were responsive to civilian interest in having a predictable market for coca leaves, charging fixed taxes and administering public markets. (We would describe the resulting governance structure as inclusive but not featuring true power sharing.) 

A rebel group in this situation could instead choose to enslave civilians en masse, and some try, but this tends to result in civilians fleeing the area or throwing their support to the government in response. Still, the short-term orientation of group members tends to cause the breakdown of the inclusive structures over time, as individual members steal opportunistically. As a result, even non-activist groups that try to take the interests of civilians into account for selfish purposes often fall back on control by force.

An activist rebel group, on the other hand, is dependent on the support of the civilian populace for its very survival. As a result, it will prize the cooperation of civilians, and will tend to create governance structures that both are participatory and share true power, so that civilians will trust them to uphold their bargains. Because activist groups are largely made up of members with longer time horizons (i.e. patient “investors”), the members will submit to such checks on their power for the sake of the group’s strategic goals.

In later posts, we will discuss rebel groups’ strategic use of violence against civilians, and their ability to sustain their membership over time.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)