Tag Archives: government

Types of Government Legitimacy

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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Why do people obey a government? And how can you use this in your fiction?

At the most basic, people obey for two reasons: they want to, or they are forced to.

(And for many people, both of these are at work at the same time. Margaret Levi calls this quasi-voluntary compliance, and it’s far more effective than relying on either mechanism on its own.)

For the moment, let’s talk about why people might want to obey a government—or to be more precise, because they believe that they should obey. This is the concept of legitimacy, that a government has the right to do what it does, and has the right to demand obedience from its citizens (and conversely, the citizens have a moral obligation to obey). Philosophers and governments have offered many reasons why citizens should obey their governments, but we can boil them down to four categories:

1. Justice demands it. This category encompasses theories of divine right or divine justice; we obey the government because the gods tell us to. It also includes non-theistic theories of justice; if the institutions of government help to maintain a just society, some philosophers say, that creates an obligation on citizens to uphold those institutions. Even if a particular law may be unjust, they say, it still might be necessary to obey the law in order not to weaken the whole system, which maintains social order and justice.

Needless to say, if the gods do not exist or do not merit obedience, or the society as a whole is unjust, this claim to legitimacy loses some of its force. At the extreme, if society is so unjust that total societal collapse would be an improvement, then justice would demand disobedience rather than obedience.

2. Loyalty to our nation compels us. This theory of legitimacy is based on two claims. First, that we each are a part of a larger whole—a family, a nation, a species—and owe our service and sometimes our very lives to that larger group. Second, obedience to the government is the best way to advance the good of the larger group.

If one is more of an individualist, rejecting claims of duty to the group, this claim to legitimacy loses its force in turn. Even if someone believes in group duties in theory, she might reject the worthiness of her particular group and seek to affiliate with another group instead. Finally, one might believe that his government is actually harming the interests of his group, and believe that group loyalty demands disobedience to the government instead.

3. We empower the government through consent. From John Locke on, modern thinkers often base political legitimacy on the consent of the governed. Some thinkers go so far as to say that only consent can ground the power of the government, and that all the other claimed bases for legitimacy (like divine right, for example) are insufficient.

The tricky thing is that in the real world, citizens have almost never freely consented to their governments. In the United States, for example, we adopted the Constitution over 200 years ago; almost no American since then has ever been given the choice to consent to the government we live under. Facing this difficulty, advocates of consent theory often fall back on some version of tacit consent; by continuing to participate in society, you implicitly endorse the original episode of consent.

But tacit consent has limited moral force, because citizens are almost always subject to some sort of constraint or coercion. For example, if we are born in a given country, it takes a great effort to move to a different one. Voting in an election does not necessarily imply consent to your government; you might be voting for the lesser of two evils, out of mere self-defense. And there is no practical way to “secede” from your government if you do not want to consent to its rule over you (so-called Sovereign Citizens notwithstanding!). So one could reasonably argue that mere participation in society does not imply that you consented to that society.

4. Legitimacy from providing benefits. Some thinkers essentially believe that when the government provides a benefit, such as health care or national defense, that creates an obligation in the citizenry to obey—perhaps out of gratitude, perhaps out of the need to participate in order to make the benefit available to your fellows.

These theories are hotly contested by thinkers like Robert Nozick, who argued that you can’t just give somebody something that was not asked for and then demand payment. Others who cautiously accept the principle still object that it doesn’t establish the degree of obligation created; if the government provides a public library, does that obligate you to fight and die in its wars?

That said, this is a very common form of legitimacy in smaller groups such as tribal bands; the chief sees that the tribe is fed, and demands obedience in return.

* * *

In the real world, elements of all of these theories are usually at work. For example, you might obey the king because you believed he was blessed by the gods, but also because trying to overthrow him would lead to massive death and upheaval, and because he’s doing a good job at fostering commerce.

In your stories, you can judiciously emphasize any of these ideas as they mesh with the story you want to tell. Clarity on how a government justifies itself, and why its citizens might agree or disagree, will help you develop your story’s themes more strongly.

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

09 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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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

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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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.

*****

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!)

A Few More Comments on Cities

20 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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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 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.

******

(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!)

Cities, Money, Power, and Political Bargains

20 Thursday Jul 2023

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

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For most of post-Roman, premodern history, Europe was hardly the most powerful region in the world. China and Japan were in many ways far more powerful than any European power and had more advanced technology. Africa too featured sprawling empires, such as that of Mali. Europe, by contrast, was something of a backwater, struggling with depressed trade, frequent war, limited education, and disease among other obstacles. And yet starting only a few hundred years ago, strong states emerged in Europe that were able to mobilize vast wealth and military strength sufficient to subdue most of the globe.

The question that scholars have grappled with is how this happened. The “state-formation” literature is generally more applicable to the discussion of state capacity (a topic to be covered in Book 3 of my series) rather than the economy per se; but it is still useful to us as we discuss worldbuilding models of the economy, because in one of the leading theories of state formation, economic development—and the growth of cities in particular—plays a central role.

In Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, he argued that European cities played a key role in the development of strong states because of their role in concentrating and deploying capital. While many states (such as Russia) were heavily coercion-intensive, states that featured a large amount of capital (such as the Netherlands) eventually found that they could mobilize more of that capital by sharing political rights with the merchant class. As a result, high-capital states that made political bargains with their populace were eventually able to build more powerful militaries than predominantly coercive states, and that particular model of state structure became common.

(It is worth pointing out that Tilly explicitly limited the scope of his theory to Europe due to the unusual concentration of urban cities and high populations found there, and did not apply the theory to other regions. For a while, there was a thriving literature arguing that Tilly’s argument failed in various other regions, or that it did not account for various factors even in the European experience. When the dust died down, I think the best evaluation is that Tilly’s basic thesis holds true even outside of Europe where its necessary conditions hold, such as in China. And where it does not hold, scholars trying to explain why have enriched the general theory by discussing the differing conditions that resulted in other outcomes, such as Jeffrey Herbst’s work on African state-building.)

Fundamentally, the driving force behind the development of strong states was the need to prepare for war. The first states were formed by men seeking to extend their control over others, and the states with the most power would extend their control as far out as it could go, stopping only when they reached the limit of their ability to project power—whether because of the limitations of available transportation technology, geographical barriers, or the opposition of other states. As a result, in each region, the most powerful state set the terms of coexistence—neighboring weaker states could either submit to vassalage or outright conquest, or else spend disproportionate resources on their defense. As Tilly puts it, “[M]ost rulers settled for a combination of conquest, protection against powerful rivals, and coexistence with cooperative neighbors.”

Within the constraints imposed by powerful rivals, states had to build structures to efficiently extract resources from their populations (or other populations forced to pay tribute or subject to plundering) and then translate those resources into military power. Tilly zeroes in on four variables to explain the variable success of a European state in doing so:

  • its concentration of capital,
  • its concentration of coercive power,
  • its need, and ability, to prepare for war, and
  • its position within the regional or international state system.

For Tilly, the key difference was between capital-intensive and coercion-intensive regions. In short, coercion-intensive states were able to mobilize larger armies, at least initially; but their advantage was nullified when warfare changed to require more and more money, to pay for professionalized troops, new weapons, and regularized logistics, and coercion-intensive states tended to have stunted economies as a result. Meanwhile, capital-intensive city-states had skilled professional armies, but small ones; they had not enough population to compete effectively with national states in the long run. The sweet spot was occupied by national states built around large, capital-intensive cities so that their political institutions tended to grant rights to the holders of capital. As a result, they could access large national populations and the money needed to fuel powerful armies.

Coercion

Tilly describes three kinds of European states during the period under discussion:

  • Tribute-taking empires tended to have relatively low accumulations of coercive power, but high concentration—that is, they might have had one or two armies that periodically swept through their vassal territories, demanding resources at swordpoint and punishing rebellions. Such empires were relatively fragile; if an adversary managed to accumulate significant coercive power, the empire’s ability to extract tribute might collapse entirely.
  • Systems of fragmented sovereignty typically included city-states as well as urban federations such as the Hanseatic League or the early Netherlands, which featured several loci of political power without a single clear sovereign. Such systems tended to have high accumulations of coercive power (usually because each of the constituent cities or other units was rich enough to afford its own army). This is almost true by definition; if a fragmented system were not able to accumulate a lot of coercive power, it would have been swallowed up by a competitor. However, such systems usually featured low coercive concentration, as the cities often cooperated poorly on defense and rarely subordinated their forces to a unified command.
  • Finally, national states were in the middle: featuring a high concentration of strong coercive power, but forced to bargain with their populations for their cooperation—typically by granting them political rights or participation of one kind or another.

Capital

Whether capital is concentrated or not depends heavily on the available technologies, and whether they tend to encourage distributed or centralized production.

In a subsistence economy, there is practically no capital at all as we are used to thinking of it. Even if there are a small handful of nobles living in castles, and merchants living in sturdy houses, most people have absolutely nothing to their names. Fernand Braudel (The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 282), writing of the centuries before the eighteenth century in Europe, notes that official inventories of possessions of the deceased almost invariably were restricted to “only a few old clothes, a stool, a table, a bench, the planks of a bed, sacks filled with straw.” That was all that most people had. Capital as we know it was the province of a very few people who engaged in large-scale trade or taxation. Labor-saving devices were few, even including such things as plows (many farmers were forced to use spades and dig by hand). The most readily available form of capital was living beings: livestock, slaves, professional hirelings, or peasants drafted for periodic corvée labor. (That is, the analytical distinction between capital and labor essentially breaks down.) As a result, to accumulate useful capital you had to command the labor of people, which is why rulers were often forced to rely on local landlords to muster their peasants.

In the “protoindustrialization” era of cottage industries, the available technology made production suddenly more efficient, but did not produce large economies of scale—at a time when the roads were just good enough for finished goods to be cost-effectively sent to markets, but not good enough for raw material and workers to routinely travel to centralized production. Capital flowed to labor, in smaller-scale workshops dispersed through cities and their surroundings or out in the countryside. This was the time of the putting-out system, of small workshops and manufacturies built around windmills and watermills, of largely local production. As a result, there was prodigious accumulation of capital compared to what had come before, but it was not excessively concentrated and was spread around relatively evenly. Still, cities served as nexuses for trade, and represented the most available “containers” for capital. City-based merchants and burghers became politically important, because they had the money that rulers needed to pay for their armies. (And sometimes, as in the case of the Hanseatic League, the burghers became rulers themselves.)

By contrast, industrialization featured massive centralized factories, encouraged by the coal boiler and the huge returns to scale that it created. Workers came to capital, concentrating themselves in the cities. The rewards of production became concentrated in relatively few hands and places, which consequently made it easier for governments to make bargains with such capitalists and appropriate some of that wealth in exchange for political privileges.

Effects on State Power

Tilly notes, “Two factors shape the process by which states acquire resources, and strongly affect the organization that results from the process: the character of the bottom-up hierarchy of capital [that emerges naturally from trade and exchange], and the place within that hierarchy of any location from which a state’s agents try to extract resources.” In other words, for a state to be capable of taxing individual incomes requires far more institutional capacity than a state that can only tax salt entering at a single port, for example. And conversely, a state that is dependent on a few sources of tax income must be more solicitous to the interests of the relatively few, relatively wealthy taxpayers.

As a result, states that emerged gradually during the early modern era developed in a clear pattern. The biggest cities with a lot of commercial activity and wealth often became their own city-states (such as in Italy and pre-Bismarck Germany). The regimes in these city-states were often thinly structured, able to easily collect customs duties and borrow money from bankers without large coercive bureaucracies. That, in turn, tended to discourage coercive government policies on the margin. Somewhat less powerful cities were typically incorporated into national states, but were able to negotiate political bargains with the developing state in exchange for their tax revenue (as in France).

By contrast, regions that were relatively poorer and had relatively few cities with weak commercial links with the hinterlands around them often were subject to straight coercion by the ruler, in states that covered a larger geographic area but a relatively dispersed and poor populace (such as Russia). Tilly writes, “In broadly similar ways, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Serbian, and Brandenburger states formed on the basis of strong alliances between warmaking princes and armed landlords, large concessions of governmental power to nobles and gentry, joint exploitation of the peasantry, and restricted scope for merchant capital. Repeatedly, leaders of conquering forces who lacked capital offered their followers booty and land, only to face the problem of containing the great warrior-landlords they thereby created.” The only feasible solution was to rely on extensive force, which became less and less effective as the coercive states fell behind their neighbors on economy.

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This has gotten quite long and somewhat disorganized, but the key ideas are still useful in your worldbuilding. States need to survive in a dangerous world, and need money and power to do so. In poor settings, highly coercive states have an advantage; but as capital accumulates, richer societies that made political bargains with their populaces end up pulling ahead. (On average!)

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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!)

Building an Economy: Ease of Transport

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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In our last post, we started building a model for how to think of a region’s geography with three major factors: population density, ease of transport, and natural resources. Here, we will discuss the second factor, ease of transport.

We’ve referenced the importance of transport several times before, including with regard to cities and touching on it briefly in Book 1 of my “Politics for Worldbuilders” series during the discussion of the Nobility. Now we’re going to discuss transport squarely. It plays vital roles for economic activity, the placement of cities, and politics.

Let’s begin by assuming that a given territory can be easy to cross, difficult to cross, or have particular constrained routes such as rivers or valleys that allow for easy transport but can also be easily controlled. Each of these options generates its own set of possibilities.

Trade

The easier it is to transport goods and people, the easier it is to trade—you have to be able to get your goods to buyers without too much cost, and on the flip side you have to be able to access raw materials. If transport is cheap and easy, a lot of trade becomes feasible and economic activity will tend to flourish. Cities will be supported by food transports and shipments of raw materials such as iron ore or coal, paid for by the goods and services they generate, and they can also trade finished goods with each other and with their surrounding rural areas.

Similarly, the easier that transport is, the easier it is to stay current on news from distant places. This is somewhat less of a factor in our modern era of instant communication, rather than having to wait for the latest ship from far-off shores; but even today, there needs to be people on site to report what is going on, who want to report it to you or to an audience that includes you. This is more likely when transportation is easy and cheap.

If transport is difficult—the territory is a rugged mountain range, for instance—trade becomes difficult as well. People will have to depend more on their own production, rather than producing for trade with distant buyers. Villages will be inward-focused, struggling to produce their own food, clothes, tools, and other goods. Traveling peddlers might come along every month or three, or not at all. Cities will be rare, placed in the few places where transport is relatively easier, and more likely to be administrative/garrison cities supported by the government than commercial or industrial cities, simply because it is so hard to produce anything and transport it out to buyers. Economic activity as a whole will be stunted as a result.

(Many scholars believe that this is one of the reasons for the relatively low economic growth of the inland part of the African continent and Eurasia. In contrast to Europe, which features long coastlines and many rivers that penetrate into the hinterlands, Africa and Eurasia are mostly landlocked and have few rivers. As a result, areas along the coast and next to rivers will tend to flourish more than inland areas that have a relatively difficult time getting goods to market.)

Trade and production in places with difficult travel will tend to focus on valuable and rare goods if they are present, such as gold, spices, uranium, and the like. If there is enough money to be made, governments or merchants will invest in roads or other transport at fantastical expense that go directly to the production site and nowhere else, in order to make extraction easier. This will create path-dependency effects that favor continued focus on the extractive industry, rather than allowing the economy to broaden and deepen in healthier ways. The region will likely become a supply region. If no such valuables are present, economic activity will simply stagnate. People will focus on producing their own needs, or else migrate to greener pastures if available.

If transport is possible through otherwise rough terrain down particular pathways such as rivers or valleys, we can expect these roads to become the focus of military conflict or economic competition. Whoever controls them will be able to profit from the trade that goes through them, and if the pathways are the key enablers of trade between vast regions then the rewards might be great indeed.

Note that if the transport situation changes—new roads are built, or somebody invents magical zeppelins, or the mountain pass suffers an avalanche and is blocked until spring—the effects on the society might be profoundly good or bad. There is certainly a story to be written here, about who would benefit from such changes, who would be threatened, and what they would do about it.

Politics

Just as trade is easier if travel is easier, so is power projection. It is no accident that the Roman Empire spent incredible effort on building its famed roads.

Political boundaries often map onto geographic boundaries such as rivers or mountain ranges, simply because it is hard to transport armies across, or to enforce laws or collect taxes on the other side. The more rugged the terrain, the more likely that an area will feature a patchwork of smaller domains rather than a unified government. (This is part of why Afghanistan continues to be the graveyard of empires.) As with trade, nominal distances as the crow flies matter less than travel time. This is particularly true with the transmission of information; the less information that can get through, the less likely that an empire or other political unit can maintain its control and the more likely that control will devolve to a more local level.

And naturally, the political situation will have effects on the economic one as well, good or bad. A vast regime might enable more internal trade, as Rome did, or it might ruthlessly squeeze its subjects, as Rome also did at various times. A patchwork of small principalities might be littered with obstacles to trade and feature frequent conflicts, or it might become a fecund region promoting creativity and economic development.

You can see how these factors interrelate. A government might build roads for military purposes, which then have the side effect of stimulating new economic activity. The interstate highway system in the United States, and the Autobahn in Germany, are good examples. So is the rail system in much of Europe. Or a transportation system built for commercial purposes might be adopted for military ones, such as airplanes.

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All in all, the ease of transport across a territory will dramatically condition what happens there and how people live. For worldbuilders, we can readily exploit some of the challenges that this presents in our stories.

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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 second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders, along with some overlap with the planned third book, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Taxation and Conflict

17 Saturday Dec 2022

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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Worldbuilders often have settings in which tax policies are key drivers of conflict. This is as it should be, given that taxes often drive conflict in the real world, for very good reasons. But typically, the decisions that a fictional ruler face are boiled down to “Do I want money? If so, tax everything that moves.” In the real world, things are more complex. And introducing a bit of carefully chosen complexity into your stories can make the conflicts a lot more interesting.

Our current discussion is based on the seminal model of Margaret Levi. Based on a deep review of the history of governments, Levi starts from the assumption that in general, sovereigns want to maximize their tax revenue. But this does not simply mean jacking taxes up as high as they can go.

First of all, the more you tax, the more opposition you get from those being taxed. This is obvious, but it has some notable consequences. A weaker regime will be able to tax less, because serious opposition could bring it down. Additionally, taxes will tend to fall more heavily on social groups that are less able to resist the government (often because they are poor!), or who depend on the government more, or who would benefit directly from the additional government projects that the tax revenues would fund and are thus more willing to bear the burden. In any event, the rulers will have to limit their taxation if they don’t want to antagonize the people.

Second, the higher the tax rate, the more that economic activity becomes depressed as many businesses simply become unprofitable. Moreover, it becomes worth it for people to rearrange their businesses to pay less tax, or even cheat on their taxes altogether. As a result, if you increase taxes by ten percent, say, your tax revenue will rise by somewhat less than ten percent. And at a certain point, tax collection actually goes down with higher taxes. (This concept is popularly known as the Laffer Curve.)

So a ruler will have to figure out the optimal tax policy for generating revenue. This is a difficult problem, especially if you don’t have a lot of data about the economy. Often, rulers get it wrong and set the tax rate too high for the amount of revenue they want to collect. (It is much less common to set the tax rate too low!)

This basic issue also functions across time periods; collecting lots of taxes this year will often mean that the economy’s growth will slow down in the future, reducing tax collection later. As a result, Levi notes that a major factor in the taxation decisions of sovereigns was their discount rate—that is, how willing they are to forego money today in exchange for more money tomorrow. 

(A quick example: suppose you have an opportunity to invest $100 today, and in a month you’ll get back $110 guaranteed. If you have money in the bank and won’t miss $100, you’ll happily invest the money for a good return. If you only have $100, on the other hand, and you need to spend it on food, it’s another matter entirely. Still, you might be willing to invest the hundred dollars if you would get back a thousand; for that much money, you’ll find some way to last the month. In the first case, you have a relatively low discount rate; you can afford to be patient. In the second case, you have a relatively high discount rate; you need money today, and it would take a massive amount of money in the future to get you to give up what you have.)

Levi notes that sovereigns facing a crisis—particularly a war—needed lots of money today, and were more willing to raise taxes for current revenue even if it harmed future growth, and even if it provoked domestic opposition (to a point). In other words, these rulers had a very high discount rate.

Next, certain types of taxes take different types of bureaucratic infrastructure; if you don’t have the infrastructure, you can’t levy the tax. For example, to tax incomes, you need a way to monitor how much money people make. This is tremendously hard, which is why direct income taxes across all of society were nearly unknown until the early 1900s. And some kinds of taxes would cost more to administer than you would actually raise!

A sovereign will then want to invest in new bureaucracy, to be able to collect more taxes in the future. But such investment takes money and time, and it usually provokes opposition from society—people resent intrusions into their privacy, and know that higher taxes are going to result in the future.

Levi’s model thus has a number of moving parts, including:

  • the discount rate of the sovereign;
  • the capability of the tax-collection apparatus;
  • transaction costs for commerce, and for tax collection (which include information/monitoring costs, and fees, operating expenses, and other forms of friction); and
  • the relative bargaining power of the state versus different classes in society.

Levi’s entire discussion includes many other complex facets, including the concept of quasi-voluntary compliance which I already touched upon in Beyond Kings and Princesses in the discussion of bureaucracy; I hope to write about more from Levi in future posts. But even this starting overview provides some useful tools for worldbuilders looking to juice up their political conflicts.

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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 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: Money, Part 1

14 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Economics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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Living in our modern world, we have certain assumptions about how money works. But historically, money has taken many more forms than we are used to. That’s actually good news for writers: if you want to do something cool with your setting’s system of money, there’s a wealth of concepts to play with (no pun intended).

In this post, I’m not trying to give you a crash course on what money is. (There’s a decent article on Wikipedia that does the job, though it is perhaps too heavily influenced by David Graeber’s work.) Instead, let’s drill down and ask when a particular form of money might be more useful, to the political regime, than other forms.

In a nutshell, people tend to form different kinds of economic relationships depending on the kind of interpersonal relationships they have:

  • A family unit tends to be run as a dictatorship (with all financial decisions being made by the head) or a political community (different members have different inputs into the decision process, and eventually some sort of guiding consensus is reached). Family members might loan each other money or buy and sell between them, but these relationships are often highly conditioned by the “normal” expectations between family members.
  • Good friends or neighbors will often give each other reciprocal gifts, trying to stay more or less in balance over the long run; or they will extend and receive loans of goods or services, trusting that debts will be settled in some form in the future. Cash deals might occur, but in general cash feels somehow gauche, cheapening the social bonds between people.
  • With more casual acquaintances or people you don’t know well, but who live in the same economic community as you, you tend to do business on a cash basis—using a shared currency that is preferred in that economic community. Loaning money to people you may never see again is unwise, but you still operate in a shared social-economic framework and share a currency that you, and the people around you, value.
  • If two utter foreigners meet—living in entirely separate societies, sharing no long-term economic relationships so that they do not have a mutually-valued currency to use—they will resort to barter, directly exchanging useful goods that each party has and the other party wants. They cannot rely on any shared system of economic value, because there is none. Instead, the scope of the relationship is narrowed to the purely functional. (In today’s world, this has become vanishingly rare; even people on opposite sides of the globe can transact in dollars, euros, or bitcoin.)

From this sketch, it seems that the less trust you share with someone else, the more likely you will do business with tangible goods (like wheat, cows, or gold and silver coins) rather than relationship goods (like debt and gratitude).

Unsurprisingly, we see in history that money has taken several forms, but we can lump them into four main categories: commodities, representative currency or tokens, coins, and fiat. In real life these ideal forms sometimes mixed with each other at the margins, but we can start by understanding the pure forms.

Commodities

In trade relationships, some communities will tend to produce particular trade goods like olive oil, tin, colorful beads, and the like, and trade them for other goods from other communities. Over time, settled trade routes tend to develop, with predictable trade goods and expectations surrounding their exchange. Eventually, commodities like grain, timber, spices, or precious metals develop standard forms, measurements, and relative values with each other. For example, in the Ancient Near East, the Mesopotamian sheqel became a standard weight for gold, silver, and copper, used widely across the region. Egypt used a different system of weights and measures, as did the seafaring Mediterranean societies, and international traders had to be fluent with all three systems.

In a more modern context, think of how cigarettes are used as money in prison, or in areas wracked by war and dislocation.

For commodities to play the role of money usually means that there is no better money available. Trust is low, shared economic frameworks are weak or absent, and political authority is fragmented. A government would usually prefer a different monetary system if possible, because the other systems provide more ways for government to skim off the top or enforce its own authority (see below). On the other hand, if the government itself controls a commodity source—a gold mine, or wheat fields, or similar—then it will be happy for a barter system to standardize around its commodity.

Tokens

Commodities are heavy. They are also expensive to transport. (One estimate was that to carry gold bullion from Rome to Naples in the Renaissance era, it cost about 10% of the gold’s value in pack animals and bodyguards!) Unavoidable if you actually need the commodity for functional reasons; but if you only need it as money, wouldn’t it be nice if you could carry a piece of paper that could be traded to some trusted authority in exchange for, say, 100 bushels of wheat?

Alternatively, tokens can represent not an asset, but a liability—I borrow money from you, and in return give you a piece of parchment or paper or a stone tablet that entitles the bearer to get money from me. The paper represents my debt; it also makes it easier to borrow, since the lender can sell the debt to another party if she needs the money early.

Tokens allow for commerce to be much more efficient that having to rely on raw commodities as money. But they also tend to restructure commerce around those trusted authorities that hold the raw commodities in storage—merchants, banks, temples, governments, and the like. Thus, wherever possible, the regime will want to encourage such tokens both to generate more economic activity and to keep the economy’s focus on itself. Governments especially love debt tokens, since they can thus borrow large sums by creating new money (right up to the point that the money loses its value…).

Tokens can also be an especially useful way to make tax collection easier. One fascinating example of this was in colonial America. Colonial governments would issue “bills of credit” as paper notes that could be used to pay the bearer’s tax bill. The bills had an expiration date; so as the expiration grew closer, people with large tax burdens would tend to collect these bills and then use them to pay the taxman, at which point the bills would be burned. In theory, issuance of bills of credit would be restricted to a reasonable level, commensurate with the general tax burden. However, colonial governments often were tempted to issue too much “free money,” with results so dire that the American Constitution specifically banned the states from issuing bills of credit (see Art. 10).

On a more “squishy” level, a token currency can strengthen communal bonds compared to commodities, since each transaction implicitly endorses the token system undergirding the currency.

Coinage

Surprisingly, gold and silver coins were a later development than token money, first emerging (as far as we know) in the 6th century BCE in Asia Minor. They combined the “intrinsic” value of a commodity with the “brand power” of the issuing government. So in political situations that were on the less stable side, or that featured lots of trade between neighboring (and sometimes hostile) countries, a coin-based system might make more sense than a token system.

Why issue coins? Two main reasons:

  • If your coins became desirable, or else you actually banned the use of foreign coins within your realm, it would stimulate local demand for the coins.
  • If you issued your coins for more than the raw metal was worth—either because of the abovementioned demand for the coins, or because you were secretly debasing the coinage with base metals—then you would earn a profit on the difference, called seigniorage.

Thus, there were two competing impulses: to keep the currency strong so people would want to use it, or to lower the precious-metal content in order to make short-term gains (at the expense of an eventual economic crisis). Stable societies tended to prefer a strong currency. If people trusted that Tyre’s silver drachma actually contained a drachma of silver, they would prefer Tyrian coins to those of (for example) Rome, which frequently debased their silver denarii with copper. As a result, coins that were known to be sound tended to circulate at a premium, compared to coins from less stable governments.

A heavily debased coin, meanwhile, could effectively act more as a fiat currency (see below) than one backed by valuable metal. (This illustrates that the categories we are discussing are more conceptual than actual; a currency can have attributes from multiple categories.)

Fiat

Fiat is the system we generally use today: governments issue money that only has value because they say it does, and they demand that taxes and other debts are paid with that currency. Governments would obviously want to issue fiat currency, if they can; it basically lets them expropriate a vast amount of value by “growing money on trees,” so to speak.

The drawback is that weak or unstable regimes quickly see their currencies become worthless. Even regimes that aren’t in danger of collapse can destroy their currencies, by issuing too much of it. Hyperinflation is basically impossible for commodities or coins (even heavily debased coins), but is historically common for fiat currencies. The temptation for governments to overspend seems far too powerful in the long run.

Now, fiat currencies do have some virtues. Under prudent management, they can allow the money supply to be much more responsive to economic conditions than even a token-based system, avoiding deflationary spirals that can crush debtors. In the United States, we managed to somehow not mess up a period of low inflation for roughly thirty years. (But that seems to be over for now.)

In general, a fiat currency is a way for governments to try and create a store of value (and borrow lots of money in the process) through sheer force of will. Sometimes it works. But more than any other form of currency, fiat relies fundamentally on trust in the issuing government. No more trust, no more fiat money.

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Hopefully, this has been a useful look at different currencies, and some of the conflicts that can be expressed through them. And as we know, conflict = plot.

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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 second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Worldbuilding, National Beliefs, and Punishment

03 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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The political and social institutions in a country are, in part, designed to reflect the country’s beliefs or governing philosophy. This is intuitive: you design your government (in part) the way you think will work best, so its design depends on what you think will work best. Sometimes this can be an unconscious process, as when the spread of mass production helped condition an entire generation to believe that fascism was better than democracy. At other times, this can be explicit. For example, Spain’s colonies in South America rebelled, in part, because of the galvanizing influence of the American Revolution and its great experiment of republican democracy. Later, in the mid-20th century, Latin American generals lost faith in democracy’s ability to run their countries, and decided to do the job themselves—launching coups against the elected governments and claiming the right to rule based on technocratic skill.

When we do worldbuilding and design our world’s countries, we should keep in mind the deep influence of ideas. Mind you, it’s easy to go overboard, and have every facet of a country be the pure expression of some philosophical system or other. Just remember that politics and history have their say too. But ideas still matter.

We can see this very clearly, for example, with how societies punish their lawbreakers. In the United States, most people tend to believe that prison is an appropriate punishment, and flogging is not. In Singapore, by contrast, criminals often accept caning as a way to reduce their prison sentence. In the ancient Biblical penal system (and in most penal systems of stateless societies), prisons were virtually unheard-of; most crimes were punished by fines of money or involuntary servitude, with some crimes resulting in flogging or the death penalty. Why?

In part, the differences are due to historical or practical factors. In particular, prisons are expensive and waste good labor. Still, we can learn a lot about the impact of ideas by looking at how the American prison system is justified philosophically.

The first thing we notice is that there is no single justification offered, and that many of the justifications conflict with each other. California Rule of Court 4.410, to take one example, lists eight objectives of the penal system:

(1) Protecting society;

(2) Punishing the defendant;

(3) Encouraging the defendant to lead a law-abiding life in the future and deterring him or her from future offenses;

(4) Deterring others from criminal conduct by demonstrating its consequences;

(5) Preventing the defendant from committing new crimes by isolating him or her for the period of incarceration;

(6) Securing restitution for the victims of crime;

(7) Achieving uniformity in sentencing; and

(8) Increasing public safety by reducing recidivism through community-based corrections programs and evidence-based practices.

Punishment and deterrence are not the same thing. To punish an offender, we decide how “bad” the offense was and then inflict a penalty commensurate with its “badness.” In part, this is to demonstrate that the offense was bad—that it merited a certain level of punishment. But to deter, we might have to inflict a penalty that is much worse than the offense. If it is hard to catch criminals, a proportionate punishment will not deter others.

For example, suppose that if you are caught stealing money, you have to pay back double what you stole—returning what you took and paying a further penalty. This makes sense from a punishment perspective: you stole from someone else, so your penalty is to lose the same amount as you took. Yet that punishment may not deter other criminals, if it is difficult to catch thieves. If only 10% of thefts are solved, for example, other criminals will figure that they will likely not be caught, and that it’s worth the risk.

If a society’s goal is to punish alone, it may view the lack of deterrence as an acceptable cost to keep punishments fair to the individual criminal. But if the society is worried about the overall level of crime, it might make the penalties harsher to deter other would-be thieves. For example, you might have to return five cattle for every one you stole. Or, as in early-modern England, you might be hanged. (Today, we would be horrified if someone were executed for stealing a sheep. On the other hand, in America the typical prison sentence for tax evasion is longer than for manslaughter.)

Such disproportionate punishments are unfair to the criminal, in one sense—it’s not her fault that most criminals escape punishment. A society that puts the highest value on individual rights might hesitate to use harsh “Beckerian” penalties. On the other hand, a society that prioritizes the collective good may be more apt to use harsh penalties if it thinks that the crime level will be kept lower that way.

Similarly, consider the tension between “encouraging the defendant to lead a law-abiding life,” and “isolating” the defendant by locking him in prison. If prison can be used to rehabilitate its inmates, then we ought to free an inmate as soon as his rehabilitation is complete. On the other hand, if someone is a hard criminal who will not change, and who will simply keep hurting people if able, it would make sense to keep her in prison forever, regardless of the particular crime for which she was convicted. So which is it? Do we as a society believe that criminals can be made better, or that they are irredeemable? Based on that difference, a society will tend to favor one approach over the other.

(In the real world, America isn’t sure what it believes—and everyone pays the price. The recidivism rate of the prison system—how often inmates are convicted of new crimes after their release—is over 75% in five years. Our prisons are not designed to rehabilitate people, in the main, but to dehumanize them. A more rational system would spend far more effort on rehabilitation, and society would benefit for it. Yet we also fail to treat many crimes with the seriousness that they merit, so that many dangerous criminals are released too early to harm again. Some would-be reformers focus on decarceration, which is easy, without spending much time thinking about reducing recidivism, which is hard. The result is more suffering, not less.)

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Now, suppose that you were an Evil Overlord. You believe that individual freedom or moral worth is unimportant, and the main purpose of punishment is twofold: keep yourself in power, and keep society functioning smoothly enough to keep the taxes flowing. How might your “justice” system work?

The worst crime would be treason, which would be punished with death by slow torture. The traitor’s family and friends might also be tortured to death, if you go for that sort of thing. Theft would be next, especially theft from a tax collector. By contrast, the seriousness of murder would depend on who is doing the murdering. If one of your nobles decides to kidnap a peasant girl, use her, and leave her body in a shallow grave, little harm done. But if her peasant father decides to kill the noble in response, that would be a threat to the entire social order and must be met with harsh penalties.

Individual guilt would matter, but not much. The appearance of swift punishment is more important. Forced confessions would be commonplace, collective punishment might be used if worthwhile, and penalties would be harsh. Slave labor might be common, being a nice bonus to help the state turn a profit on its criminals.

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We could keep going, but you get the point. We could go through a similar exercise thinking about other things besides punishment: property rights, the relative positions of men and women in society, attitudes towards work and wealth, and so on.

Sometimes this process goes in reverse. If society’s institutions happen to be a certain way, due to historical accident or material necessity or whatever, some people will develop justifications for why those institutions represent the pinnacle of moral achievement, no matter how cruel. (See under “chattel slavery in the American South,” for example.)

So in your worldbuilding, spend some time thinking about the impact of ideas on societies, and of societies on ideas.

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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 second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)