The Sovereign Individual – by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
Date read: 1/5/22. Recommendation: 8/10.
Over the past five years, few books have been recommended to me as often as The Sovereign Individual. Somehow I didn’t get around to reading it until now. It’s such a compelling, prescient book—despite having been written more than 20 years ago. The authors detail the transition to the next phase of civilization that’s well underway from the industrial age to the information age. The thesis of the book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized. Their assessment of the parallels between the medieval church and the modern nation-state is such an interesting lens to examine history through. And their perspective on political and economic realignment is incredibly relevant to the world that’s unfolding before us today.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
“The thesis of this book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized.”
Information Revolution:
“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Tom Stoppard
The Sovereign Individual explores social and financial consequences of the Information Revolution. These changes will happen within a lifetime, rather than a millennia as the Agricultural Revolution. “When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.”
Nonlinearity:
“Reality is nonlinear. But most people’s expectations are not. To understand the dynamics of change, you have to recognize that human society, like other complex systems in nature, is characterized by cycles and discontinuities. That means certain features of history have a tendency to repeat themselves, and the most important changes, when they occur, may be abrupt rather than gradual.”
The Dark Ages:
“Feudalism in its various forms was not only a response to ever-present risks of predatory violence. It was also a reaction to appallingly low rates of productivity. The two have tended to go hand in hand in farming societies. Each frequently contributed to the other.”
“The ‘Dark Ages’ were so named for a reason. Literacy became so rare that anyone who possessed the ability to read and write could expect immunity from prosecution for almost any crime, including murder. Artistic, scientific, and engineering skills that had been highly developed in Roman times disappeared.”
During the early stages of feudalism, the church played an important role:
“In an environment where military power was decentralized, the Church was uniquely placed to maintain peace and develop rules of order than transcended fragmented, local sovereignties.”
“The Church was the main source for preserving and transmitting technical knowledge and information.”
“Partly because its farm managers were literate, the Church did a great deal to help improve the productivity of European farming.”
“The Church undertook many functions that are today absorbed by government, including the provision of public infrastructure.”
“The Church also helped incubate a more complex market…construction of churches and cathedrals helped create and deepen markets for many artisanal and engineering skills.”
Paradise lost in the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer: “Farming was an incubator of disputes. Farming created stationary capital on an extensive scale, raising the payoff of violence and dramatically increasing the challenge of protecting assets. Farming made both crime and government paying propositions for the first time.”
Parallels between the Church + Nation State:
“At the end of the Middle Ages, the monolithic Church as an institution had grown senile and counterproductive, a marked changed from its positive economic contributions five centuries earlier.”
Like the Church then, the nation-state today has outlived the conditions that brought it into existence, imposing high costs and consuming tremendous amounts of society’s resources with minimal returns. “Technology is precipitating a revolution in the exercise of power that will destroy the nation-state just as assuredly as gunpowder weapons and the printing press destroyed the monopoly of the medieval Church.”
“The nation-state will be replaced by new forms of sovereignty, some of them unique in history, some reminiscent of the city states and medieval merchant republics of the premodern world. What was old will be new after the year 2000. And what was unimaginable will be commonplace. As the scale of technology plunges, governments will find that they must compete like corporations for income, charging no more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.”
“The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state. Printing rapidly undermined the Church’s monopoly on the word of God…The Church found that censorship did not suppress the spread of subversive technology; it merely assured that it was put to its most subversive use.”
Protection of life and property:
Increasing the security of property: “Now the dagger of violence could soon be blunted. Information technology promises to alter dramatically the balance between protection and extortion, making protection of assets in many cases much easier, and extortion more difficult. The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics. It is easier to multiply than to divide.”
History is moving towards the sovereign individual:
“Access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete. As borders disappear, the concept of taxation, which supports governments, becomes increasingly fragile…As borders disappear, the concept of entitlement—the belief that because you were born in a particular place, you are entitled to the economic advantages associated with that place—falls apart, and as it falls apart, the perks of nationhood fall apart with it.” Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker
“Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.” Christopher Lasch
Humans don’t mind hardship: “For human beings it is the struggle rather than the achievement that matters; we are made for action, and the achievement can prove to be a great disappointment. The ambition, whatever it may be, sets the struggle in motion, but the struggle is more enjoyable than its own result, even when the objective is fully achieved.”
Taxation:
“This habit of charging far more than government’s services are actually worth developed through centuries of monopoly.”
“This new economic dynamic contradicts the desire of the government left over from the industrial era to impose monopoly pricing for its protection services. But like it or not, the old system will be nonviable in the new competitive environment of the Information Age. Any government that insists upon lumbering its citizens with heavy taxes that competitors do not pay will merely assure that profits and wealth gravitate someplace else.”
“Because information technology transcends the tyranny of place, it will automatically expose jurisdictions everywhere to de facto global competition on the basis of quality and price…Leading nation-states with their predatory, redistributive tax regimes and heavy-handed regulations, will no longer be jurisdictions of choice. Seen dispassionately, they offer poor-quality protection and diminished economic opportunity at monopoly prices….The leading welfare states will lose their most talented citizens through desertion.”
“Governments in the industrial era priced their services on the basis of the success of the taxpayer, rather than in relation to the costs or value of any services provided. The movement to commercial pricing of government service will lead to more satisfactory protection at a far lower price than that imposed by conventional nation-states.”
Local jurisdictions competing to attract talent:
“In the new world of commercialized sovereignty, people will choose their jurisdictions, much as many now choose their insurance carriers or their religions…Competition will therefore mobilize the efforts of local jurisdictions to improve their capacity to provide services economically and effectively.”