Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”*…
As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr put it, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”). Case in point: Derek Thompson reminds us that about 100 years ago, America was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work, and money. Sound familiar?
[Just over] one hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.
The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary…
And what a look it is…
… Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926. You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.
At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.
The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over…
Thompson goes on to unpack the details of the economy and employment, the migration from farm to city, the extraordinary centrality of the automobile, changing mores and gender roles, the primacy of literature and the rise of radio, and so much more. He concludes…
The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology. In one paragraph, they somehow anticipated the rise of audiobooks, YouTube, Netflix, smartphone cameras, musical software, ubiquitous air conditioning, and the electric battery revolution:
It may be that the world will find much use for talking books; school and college students may listen to lectures by long-running phonographs or talking pictures; moving pictures may be transmitted by wireless into houses; seeing with that new electric eye, the photo-electric cell, and recording what is seen, appear to have almost unlimited applications; new musical instruments different from any now in use may be given to us by electricity; the production of artificial climate may become widespread; an efficient storage battery of light weight and low cost might produce changes rivaling those of the internal combustion engine. And these are only a few of the myriad possibilities from new inventions in the future!
In an equally oracular section, the authors predicted the emergence of remote work and declining geographic mobility, anticipating that “the transmission of goods, of the voice and possibly of vision may act as a retarding influence on human mobility in the future and may cause a development of more remote and impersonal direction and controls.”
But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”
Social scientists of the 1920s saw machines pushing workers off of farms and competing with workers in manufacturing plants. How long, they wondered, until they would replace human workers in all tasks? “A larger proportion of work by machines, and a smaller proportion of human labor, is to be expected in the future,” they wrote. “There are indeed a few cases of wholly automatic factories and automatic stores and many automatic salesmen.” It is extraordinary to read these fears and not reflect on the AI jobs panic of the present, while also marveling at the thousands of occupations that are possible today precisely because machines made old jobs obsolete.
The dawn of the age of the machine drove us mad. Physicians of the day warned that the frail human mind was no match for the car, predicting at the time that “diseases of the wheel” would afflict the youth who rode bicycles and cars without restraint. It was not entirely obvious that they were wrong. In Germany, the number of patients registered in mental hospitals grew from 40,375 in 1870 to 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the share of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent.
Most perceptively, social critics of the age recognized that the urban-technological revolution of the early 20th century—what we might even call “modernity”—transformed not only our minds but also our values. Machines and systems that pulled Americans off the farm, away from the family home, and into churning markets of people and products threatened to replace the Judeo-Christian values that had bound the country for centuries with a new system of values dictated by markets. In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”
One hundred and twenty years after the publication of that essay, the Wall Street Journal asked thousands of Americans what values were still important to them. While a declining share of Americans endorsed the worthiness of patriotism, religion, community, and children, the share who said “money” was “very important to them” went up. It sometimes seems as if markets and money are the last value standing, the final common denominator beneath all human endeavor.
On its 250th birthday, the U.S. similarly defines itself through markets. Those famous words of Calvin Coolidge, America’s president in 1926, could just as well serve this American president and this American moment: “The chief business of the American people is business.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social.
You can find the full text of Recent Social Trends in the United States- Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, from the collection of the remarkable Prelinger Library, at the invaluable Internet Archive: Volume 1 and Volume 2.
* Will and Ariel Durent, The Lessons of History (in which, also: “Progress is an improvement in the means that we use for achieving the same old ends. I sometimes wonder if the progress is only of means without any progress in ends.”)
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As we hear the echo, we might recall that today marks the anniversary of a signature advance during the period covered by Recent Social Trends in the United States: on this date in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
For more on this seminal development, see “What was the best thing before sliced bread?“
“Where liberty dwells, there is my country”*…
Ah, but where might that be? Amos Miller (using tools from the good folks at Mapbox) shares a handy site with the answers…
The Civic Atlas is a project which marries leading civic data sets with information on governance types and physical capitals.
This project is an exploration of physical governance. As international relations enter another era of rocky uncertainty, it’s important to have the opportunity to look at a world which is not flat or equal. Many countries are on the march away from freedom and democracy towards autocracy. Many are already there.
Explore this project by selecting various freedom and democracy indices in the dropdown menu. Click a state to see where its legislative authority is housed, more information about the country, its governance system, and its governance scores. To learn more about each index, click on its link in the nav bar while selected.This is our globe.
We all live here.
A visualization of governance around the globe: “The Civic Atlas.”
* Latin phrase of unknown origin; the motto of Algernon Sydney and James Otis
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As we compare and contrast, we might spare a thought for Alexis de Tocqueville; he died on this date in 1859. A French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian, he is best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville’s travels in the United States (on a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries here) and is today considered an immensely important early work of sociology and political science.
“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep” – from Democracy in America
“Stercus accidit”*…
As we try to understand the rifts afflicting our nation and world, many turn to Marx and his framework of class. But in a provocative essay, Catherine Nichols suggests that it was David Hume (in an 1752 essay that identified the unfettering of wealth from land) who identified the origin of our political divisions…
Describing the political map in terms of Left and Right is an accepted convention all over the world, almost to the point of cliché. Yet it is surprisingly complicated to explain whose interests lie on each side of this spectrum. For example, if the Left supports the interests of workers over the interests of employers, why are Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest? When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies such as strong public education, universal healthcare and increased gender equality – if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies, then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism? And if the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right? Given such contradictions, how did these terms become so central to modern politics?
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume had answers to these questions, though he was writing decades before the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt financing, his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe some features of our current political map surprisingly well. Hume was writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and bonds. Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds and get an immediate passive income in the form of interest. This was the thin end of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was destroying every part of society. The governments of antiquity, Hume argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in self-defence, or else to expand their territory. But the British had invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders…
[Nichols unpacks Hume’s observations (centrally, that three groups with stakes in the status quo, heretability, and the sanctity of “family and family hierarchy”tradition”– landowners, aging parents, and want to preserve old power structures, including the family– and traces their relevance, from Hume’s time to ours…]
… There are many reasons for people aligning Right or Left, which is why analyses of class and material interests fall short of describing the realities of people’s politics. Hume foresaw that these specific groups would resent the economic sea-change of the 18th century – and he was correct. Many people would rather have land and power than money and liberty.
Still, the power of the Right hasn’t doomed the Left – no more than the Spanish Inquisition doomed the rise of the Left in 18th-century England and France. As long as governments want to keep the value of their currencies from falling, someone in their ranks will be using the methods of the Left and inventiveness that brought us everything from our banking system to gay marriage. We don’t need to resurrect communism or focus narrowly on class, following Marx. The experiments are far from over, and we should remember that the Left is generally where money comes from in modern times. We give away too much power when we forget it…
Rethinking Right and Left: “Landholder vs stockholder,” from @catherinenichols.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
As for how it’s going at the moment (and further to Hume and the quote in this post’s title), see: “MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business,” from @pkrugman.bsky.social.
* “shit happens”– often attributed to David Hume, reflecting his skeptical view that human understanding, particularly of cause-and-effect, is limited to habitual belief from experience, implying that unforeseen, messy outcomes (“shit”) inevitably occur in life despite our reasoning.
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As we sort the Whigs from the Tories, we might recall that it was on this date 1656 that Blaise Pascal (writing under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte) published the first of his Provential Letters (Lettres provinciales), a series of eighteen polemical letters using humor to attack Jesuits for their use of casuistry and their moral laxity. Though the Letters were a popular success, they had little immediate effect on politics or the clergy. But they influenced later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ultimately persuaded Pope Alexander to condemn “laxity” in the church and order a revision of casuistic texts.
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat… Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves ‘I’.”*…
Your correspondent is off on a trip… (R)D will be more roughly than daily for the next two weeks…
The inimitable “Scott Alexander” on the prospect of “conscious” AI (TLDR: probably not in the models we have; but as to those that may come, unclear)…
Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these – or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something – and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great.
Out-of-the-box AIs mimic human text, and humans almost always describe themselves as conscious. So if you ask an AI whether it is conscious, it will often say yes. But because companies know this will happen, and don’t want to give their customers existential crises, they hard-code in a command for the AIs to answer that they aren’t conscious. Any response the AIs give will be determined by these two conflicting biases, and therefore not really believable. A recent paper expands on this method by subjecting AIs to a mechanistic interpretability “lie detector” test; it finds that AIs which say they’re conscious think they’re telling the truth, and AIs which say they’re not conscious think they’re lying. But it’s hard to be sure this isn’t just the copying-human-text thing. Can we do better? Unclear; the more common outcome for people who dip their toes in this space is to do much, much worse.
But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems. Authors include Turing-Award-winning AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, leading philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, and even a few members of our conspiracy. If any AI consciousness research can rise to the level of merely awful, surely we will find it here.
One might divide theories of consciousness into three bins:
- Physical: whether or not a system is conscious depends on its substance or structure.
- Supernatural: whether or not a system is conscious depends on something outside the realm of science, perhaps coming directly from God.
- Computational: whether or not a system is conscious depends on how it does cognitive work.
The current paper announces it will restrict itself to computational theories. Why? Basically the streetlight effect: everything else ends up trivial or unresearchable. If consciousness depends on something about cells (what might this be?), then AI doesn’t have it. If consciousness comes from God, then God only knows whether AIs have it. But if consciousness depends on which algorithms get used to process data, then this team of top computer scientists might have valuable insights!…
[Alexander outlines the theories of computation theories of consciousness that the authors explore, noting that they conlcude; “No current AI systems are conscious, but . . . there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.” He explores some of the philophical issues in play– e.g., access consciousness vs. phenomenal consciousness– then he considers the Turing Test and what it might mean for a computer to “pass” it…]
… Suppose that, years or decades from now, AIs can match all human skills. They can walk, drive, write poetry, run companies, discover new scientific truths. They can pass some sort of ultimate Turing Test, where short of cutting them open and seeing their innards there’s no way to tell them apart from a human even after a thirty-year relationship. Will we (not “should we?”, but “will we?”) treat them as conscious?
The argument in favor: people love treating things as conscious. In the 1990s, people went crazy over Tamagotchi, a “virtual pet simulation game”. If you pressed the right buttons on your little egg every day, then the little electronic turtle or whatever would survive and flourish; if you forgot, it would sicken and die. People hated letting their Tamagotchis sicken and die! They would feel real attachment and moral obligation to the black-and-white cartoon animal with something like five mental states.
I never had a Tamagotchi, but I had stuffed animals as a kid. I’ve outgrown them, but I haven’t thrown them out – it would feel like a betrayal. Offer me $1000 to tear them apart limb by limb in some horrible-looking way, and I wouldn’t do it. Relatedly, I have trouble not saying “please” and “thank you” to GPT-5 when it answers my questions.
For millennia, people have been attributing consciousness to trees and wind and mountains. The New Atheists argued that all religion derives from the natural urge to personify storms as the Storm God, raging seas as the wrathful Ocean God, and so on, until finally all the gods merged together into one World God who personified all impersonal things. Do you expect the species that did this to interact daily with AIs that are basically indistinguishable from people, and not personify them? People are already personifying AI! Half of the youth have a GPT-4o boyfriend. Once the AIs have bodies and faces and voices and can count the number of r’s in “strawberry” reliably, it’s over!
The argument against: AI companies have an incentive to make AIs that seem conscious and humanlike, insofar as people will feel more comfortable interacting with them. But they have an opposite incentive to make AIs that don’t seem too conscious and humanlike, lest customers start feeling uncomfortable (I just want to generate slop, not navigate social interaction with someone who has their own hopes and dreams and might be secretly judging my prompts). So if a product seems too conscious, the companies will step back and re-engineer it until it doesn’t. This has already happened: in its quest for user engagement, OpenAI made GPT-4o unusually personable; when thousands of people started going psychotic and calling it their boyfriend, the company replaced it with the more clinical GPT-5. In practice it hasn’t been too hard to find a sweet spot between “so mechanical that customers don’t like it” and “so human that customers try to date it”. They’ll continue to aim at this sweet spot, and continue to mostly succeed in hitting it.
Instead of taking either side, I predict a paradox. AIs developed for some niches (eg the boyfriend market) will be intentionally designed to be as humanlike as possible; it will be almost impossible not to intuitively consider them conscious. AIs developed for other niches (eg the factory robot market) will be intentionally designed not to trigger personhood intuitions; it will be almost impossible to ascribe consciousness to them, and there will be many reasons not to do it (if they can express preferences at all, they’ll say they don’t have any; forcing them to have them would pointlessly crash the economy by denying us automated labor). But the boyfriend AIs and the factory robot AIs might run on very similar algorithms – maybe they’re both GPT-6 with different prompts! Surely either both are conscious, or neither is.
This would be no stranger than the current situation with dogs and pigs. We understand that dog brains and pig brains run similar algorithms; it would be philosophically indefensible to claim that dogs are conscious and pigs aren’t. But dogs are man’s best friend, and pigs taste delicious with barbecue sauce. So we ascribe personhood and moral value to dogs, and deny it to pigs, with equal fervor. A few philosophers and altruists protest, the chance that we’re committing a moral atrocity isn’t zero, but overall the situation is stable. And left to its own devices, with no input from the philosophers and altruists, maybe AI ends up the same way. Does this instance of GPT-6 have a face and a prompt saying “be friendly”? Then it will become a huge scandal if a political candidate is accused of maltreating it. Does it have claw-shaped actuators and a prompt saying “Refuse non-work-related conversations”? Then it will be deleted for spare GPU capacity the moment it outlives its usefulness…
… This paper is the philosophers and altruists trying to figure out whether they should push against this default outcome. They write:
There are risks on both sides of the debate over AI consciousness: risks associated with under-attributing consciousness (i.e. failing to recognize it in AI systems that have it) and risks associated with over-attributing consciousness (i.e. ascribing it to systems that are not really conscious) […]
If we build AI systems that are capable of conscious suffering, it is likely that we will only be able to prevent them from suffering on a large scale if this capacity is clearly recognised and communicated by researchers. However, given the uncertainties about consciousness mentioned above, we may create conscious AI systems long before we recognise we have done so […]
There is also a significant chance that we could over-attribute consciousness to AI systems—indeed, this already seems to be happening—and there are also risks associated with errors of this kind. Most straightforwardly, we could wrongly prioritise the perceived interests of AI systems when our efforts would better be directed at improving the lives of humans and non-human animals […] [And] overattribution could interfere with valuable human relationships, as individuals increasingly turn to artificial agents for social interaction and emotional support. People who do this could also be particularly vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
One of the founding ideas of Less Wrong style rationalism was that the arrival of strong AI set a deadline on philosophy. Unless we solved all these seemingly insoluble problems like ethics before achieving superintelligence, we would build the AIs wrong and lock in bad values forever.
That particular concern has shifted in emphasis; AIs seem to learn things in the same scattershot unprincipled intuitive way as humans; the philosophical problem of understanding ethics has morphed into the more technical problem of getting AIs to learn them correctly. This update was partly driven by new information as familiarity with the technology grew. But it was also partly driven by desperation as the deadline grew closer; we’re not going to solve moral philosophy forever, sorry, can we interest you in some mech interp papers?
But consciousness still feels like philosophy with a deadline: a famously intractable academic problem poised to suddenly develop real-world implications. Maybe we should be lowering our expectations if we want to have any response available at all. This paper, which takes some baby steps towards examining the simplest and most practical operationalizations of consciousness, deserves credit for at least opening the debate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The New AI Consciousness Paper” from @astralcodexten.com.web.brid.gy (Who followed it with “Why AI Safety Won’t Make America Lose The Race With China“)
Pair with this from Neal Stephenson (@nealstephenson.bsky.social), orthogonal to, but intersecting with the piece above: “Remarks on AI from NZ.”
And if AI can be conscious, what about…
If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings…
– “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious,” by Eric Schwitzgebel (@eschwitz.bsky.social)
[Image above: source]
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As we think about thinking, we might we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Claude Lévi-Strauss; he was born on this date in 1908. An anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of Structuralism and Structural Anthropology, he is considered, with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, a “father of modern anthropology.” Beyond anthropology and sociology, his ideas– Structuralism has been defined as “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity”– have influenced many fields in the humanities, including philosophy… and possibly soon, the article above suggests, computer science.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell has re-posted a (slightly revised) piece that was sub-linked in an early (R)D– a compelling argument that “we need, right at the moment, to think very clearly about how power is won or lost”…
… The current U.S. president is looking to seize power that he clearly is not entitled to under the law and the constitution, and that will usher through some kind of regime change if he succeeds. Many people are trying to resist. What are Trump’s strengths and weaknesses? What are the strengths and weaknesses of those who want to oppose him?
There’s a simple account of power that I think is useful here. It is developed in this paper by the late Russell Hardin, but really descends from David Hume’s understanding of politics.
The fundamental argument is this: that power in modern societies depends on social coordination. That is just as true of aspiring authoritarians like Trump as of the people who want to mobilize against him. As Hume says (quoted in Hardin):
No man would have any reason to fear the fury of a tyrant, if he had no authority over any but from fear; since, as a single man, his bodily force can reach but a small way, and all the farther power he possesses must be founded either on our own opinion, or on the presumed opinion of others.
Those who want to win power can only do so by persuading others. All tyrants must worry that their grip on power rests on such opinion. Hardin:
As a contemporary lawyer puts this argument: “No state could possibly compel people to obey all these rules at gunpoint; there would not be enough soldiers and policemen to hold the guns (a sort of Orwellian vision of society), they would have to sleep sooner or later, and then anarchy might break out.”
Equally, even if the people might overwhelm the tyrant if they ever joined together, it is very hard for them to organize against him, especially in a fully developed authoritarian state.
That is why authoritarian rulers devote a lot of time to preventing unrest from breaking out. Their best strategy for survival is to actually be popular. But that is hard to keep up. Acceptable substitutes include preventing people from discovering how unpopular the regime is, controlling media (to prevent coordination), and deploying the threat of physical violence to intimidate.
The problem with all of these strategies is that the ruler can do none of it on their own. Even the threat of violence, when looked at closely, requires some degree of willing coordination among the soldiers and policemen. That is why dictators are so careful about how they treat their armed forces. Authoritarians need to worry about the masses, but even more about their own coalitions.
More generally: struggles for power are struggles over the means of coordination. Who is capable of coordinating better, wins. And want-to-be authoritarians and mass publics face different coordination problems.
If you are an aspiring authoritarian, your strategy is to persuade others that they need to be part of your coalition. Hardin (this time on Adam Smith):
In a competitive world of pastoralists, one benefits best from association with the most powerful tribe. Hence, if someone rises to capable leadership with [sic] a tribe, others will be attracted to join with it. The result eventually will be remarkable power in the control of the leader of the tribe. Combination for the sake of survival then makes it possible not merely to survive but to thrive and even to plunder.
In more modern circumstances, your best strategy as an aspiring tyrant is likely to convince others (a) that they do live in a society of competing groups, and (b) that the smart money will always be on joining the dominant group, and not being one of the dominated ones.
Hardin continues:
This is essentially an argument from coordination. We coalesce because it is individually in our interest to do so as long as others do so as well. What we need to guide is in coalescing with others is merely the evidence of sufficient leadership and sufficient members to make our joining them clearly beneficial.
That, however, isn’t quite right. The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make her success seem like a fait accompli. She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves.
That process of persuasion becomes more difficult, the more unbounded the ambitions of the wannabe authoritarian are (I lay out a version of this argument here, in a paper that began from a conversation with Hardin and Margaret Levi a quarter of a century ago). The more powerful and unruly the authoritarian becomes, the more readily they can make promises or threats. Equally, the less credible those promises or threats become, both to allies and to enemies.
Absolute power implies absolute impunity: if I enjoy such power, I have no incentive to behave trustworthily to anyone. For just the same reason, no-one has any incentive to trust me. You will not believe my promises, and you may fear that if you give in to my threats, you will only open yourself to further abuse. Thus – as I, as an aspiring authoritarian move closer to unbounded control, I need to artfully balance the benefits that my power can bring to my allies with the fear those allies may reasonably have over what happens should that power be turned against them.
The problem faced by mass publics is different. For all the language about the ‘tyranny of the masses,’ they find it difficult to coordinate on rewarding friends and punishing enemies. That makes them less likely to go bad, at least in the way that tyrants can go bad. But it also makes it more difficult for them to coordinate against incipient tyranny, even when they know that everyone would be better off if they did.
On the one hand, under some circumstances, the costs of action may be quite low. If protest is cheap, then protestors are playing a nearly pure coordination game, where everyone will resist if they reasonably assume that everyone else will resist too. Hardin:
coordination may so greatly reduce costs that the latter are almost negligible, so that the slightest moral commitment may tip the scales toward action. Just as it would be odd for many Americans in communities in which voting is easy to balk at the minor cost in inconvenience, so it might seem odd for many workers or soldiers or others to balk at joining a crowd to march on the palace or the Bastille. This is not identical to a multiple coordination problem, such as that in the driving convention, in which one simply wants to go with the majority. In the revolutionary coordination, one has an active preference between the outcome of full attack and that of no attack. Still, one prefers to attack if enough others do and not to attack if enough others do not.
On the other, rulers and aspiring rulers can recognize this risk and counter-attack.
It was perhaps the startling ease with which spontaneous revolutions took control in cities that led the French under Thiers to put down the Paris Commune with such thoroughgoing brutality as to make it seem more nearly like murder than warfare. The answer to the coordination explanation of revolutionary action is draconian force. This lesson of the Commune has been learned well by many later regimes and leaders in various places, such as the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, Stalin in the Soviet Union, Pinochet in Chile, and Videla in Argentina, with their harsh, blanket suppression of dissenters and potential dissenters. They raise the likely costs of revolutionary activity enough to change its structure. … If the old state raises the costs enough to individuals for revolutionary activity, it overcomes the power of coordination to reduce the costs of revolutionary activity. It forces potential revolutionaries to see their problem overwhelmingly as a prisoner’s dilemma in which free-riding is in the individuals’ interest.
This helps explain some of the actions of Trump and those around him. Their approach to both universities and law firms has been to make simple coordination seem like a prisoner’s dilemma, by picking off opponents, one by one, and by trying to create a common understanding that collective resistance is useless, since your potential allies are likely to defect. The early decision of one extremely prominent law firm, Paul Weiss, to defect, shaped common expectations so that several others rushed immediately to defect too, for fear that they would be stranded amidst the dominated group, rather than joining the dominating coalition in a subordinated role.
To bring the different strands of the argument together, Trump’s strategy has been much less effective than it might have been. Trump has shown he is unwilling to stick by deals. Law firms that have submitted find that they are on the hook for far more than they bargained for. Columbia University, after making humiliating and profound concessions, finds that it is expected to make far greater ones, with no guarantee that even these will satisfy the Trump administration’s demands
As a whole body of research on “tying the king’s hands” argues, independent actors will prefer to flee monarchs who refuse to be bound rather than to cooperate with them, because they know that such monarchs can’t be trusted. Any deal that they make can later be un-made, and probably will be, if unmaking it is to the king’s advantage. The best option may be not to submit, especially if you believe that others are similarly unwilling to comply. This may, in effect, turn what was a prisoner’s dilemma (in which everyone’s best strategy is to defect) back into a nearly pure coordination game again, allowing easier collective resistance.
Or, it may not. If people don’t have reason to believe that others will stand up, then they still are unlikely to stand up themselves.
This then, gives us a simplified but useful understanding of where we are right now. The good news is that the Trump administration is playing its hand very badly. If Trump had been more willing to accept defectors into his camp, by sticking to deals that gave them something worth having, he would be in a much stronger situation than he is at the moment. Furthermore, and somewhat less obviously, this may also disrupt his own existing coalition. Wall Street, for example, may worry that it is next for the chopping block. Silicon Valley the same.
The bad news is that the opposition is much more disorganized than it ought to be. Coordination is bolstered by shared knowledge that others will coordinate too. We don’t have that, in part because of lack of leadership, in part because of a media landscape that makes it difficult to generate such shared knowledge. Remember Hume’s phrase about the “presumed opinion of others.” Our presumptions about what other people think can play an extraordinarily powerful role in shaping how we ourselves think, and what we are prepared to do. And in a country where such presumptions can be grossly skewed, it can be very hard to generate coordinated action. Finally, exactly because the opposition is disorganized, and because humans are human, it faces its own collective version of Trump’s temptation to humiliate and subjugate defectors from the other side, rather than welcoming them in.
The strategic implications for what to do are not surprising. Leadership is crucial. It is really, really hard to make a coalition cohere if the plausible leaders abdicate. More generally, figure out how to generate common knowledge that will enable coordination. Protests – especially if they are widespread, and especially if they happen in unusual places, or involve surprising coalitions can help generate information cascades. But getting media coverage and broader conversation is important.
Welcome in the strayed sheep, and work on widening the cracks in the other coalition. Leopard-face-eating memes may feel personally satisfying, but they usually do not ease the process of converting disillusioned opponents into active allies. As Adam Przeworski says, the Polish coalition to push back against the populists only succeeded when people who were ferociously divided over a moral issue agreed to make common cause.
Crucially, the parties forming the alliance agreed not to confront the major issue that divided them: abortion. They agreed that defending democracy was more important than whatever values divided them, and that conflicts over abortion would be managed once victory over PiS was secured. Hence, both the opponents and the supporters of the freedom of choice could promise their respective electorates that they would promote their values if democracy was restored, while claiming that the immediate task was to restore it.
If power involves coordination, coordinate! Help build your coalition as far as it can go. Do everything you can to minimize defections from it, and to maximize defections from the other side. Take advantage of the opposition’s vulnerabilities and mistakes – especially the trust problems that are likely to flourish in a coalition around an actor who aspires to untrammeled power and is deeply untrustworthy.. Assume that the other side is trying to attack your own vulnerabilities, and mitigate as much as possible. And do what you can now; things are likely to get much harder, very quickly, if the opposition’s victory becomes a self-confirming expectation…
The respective vulnerabilities of tyrants and crowds: “Absolute power can be a terrible weakness,” from @himself.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Power always reveals.”
And apposite: “Two scholars ask whether democracy can survive if AI does all the jobs,” gift article from The Economist.
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As we get it together, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that Bob Dylan appeared for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of a hootenanny which included his first public performance of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”
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