Curt Doolittle

Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

  • Review: The Secret Of The West

    I try to keep track of the ‘Grand Theories’. And I came across this one last week. I can’t find the book anywhere except online. I read what I could. And found this page by the author that summarizes his theory. Which is, quite simply, “stability and wealth provide the foundation for technological progress.” There doesn’t appear to be anything new here. His thesis is a well understood circumstance of geography, which applies both tho coasts and to rivers. Europe has both. He seems to dismiss culture as a factor. But western culture developed at the fringe of the bronze age and then iron age civilizations. And as a fringe order, especially a fringe order of metalworkers and warriors, they wanted to preserve their freedom from eastern mysticism, decadence and tyranny. It is this culture that led to vast enfranchisement. I don’t see how he explains chinese stagnation. China is primarily coastal. It matured early. It has vast rivers, wealth and bureaucracy. What is it about confucian society that left it stagnant? I could go on, but I don’t feel he has made enough of a case to allow me to draw any conclusions. Hopefully I’ll seek him out on one of my trips to europe. Here is his summary:

    Le Secret de l’Occident (“The Secret of the West”) unveils an economic and political theory about scientific & technological progress. The theory gives the reasons why the scientific and industrial revolutions originated in the West, and not in the Middle East, India or China. It succeeds in explaining the European “miracle” in the IInd millenium as well as the Greek “miracle” in Antiquity. It unravels the causes for the declines and rises of India, China and the Middle East across the centuries. 
That theory was brought together, like a jigsaw puzzle, from many pieces of the historical research previously unconnected. To my knowledge, it is the first united scheme able to explain the main booms and slowdowns observed in the scientific and technological evolutions of the main civilizations. Chapter 1 – Debunking Traditional Explanations 
The usual “internalist” explanations for the European originality – religion, culture, genetics, climate, third-world abuse, Greek heritage, pure hazard – are dismissed. None of these elements can pretend to shed light on the long-term European success. 
They basically fail at the two following stumbling blocks: Eastern Europe backwardness and leadership fluctuations among civilizations. 
– Eastern Europe is religiously, culturally, ethnically, climatically very similar to Western Europe. Nonetheless, it has always been lagging backward, for centuries if not more, painfully catching up with Western advances, but never leading the way. 
– During some periods of time, China, India or the Middle East led the way in science and technology. This does not fit well with the idea of an inherent (religious, cultural, ethnical, etc.) superiority of the West. If, on the other side, one admits important changes in those inherent abilities, these remain to explain. 
Greek heritage must be rejected because the Romans, the Muslims, the Indians too could benefit from it. Randomness is not an acceptable answer, it merely amounts to giving up looking for an answer. Chapter 2 – The Economic and Political Theory (European case, 11th to 18th century) 
Chap 2 discloses the theory. For science and technology to advance in a given civilization, two conditions are required: a thriving economy and a stable political division. That is, a rich and stable states system is needed. Western Europe enjoyed growing trade and manufacturing, and was divided between long-lasting competitive kingdoms, during the whole 2nd millenium; this is why it succeeded the way it did. – A wealthy economy fosters scientific and technical progresses in several ways: 
1) it generates a surplus which can be invested in non-immediately profitable activities, as science and arts. 
2) merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs have a strong bent towards accuracy, numbers, (ac-)counting, weighting, timeliness, measurement. When successful, they impose gradually this kind of science-friendly mentality upon their social environment. 
3) merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs have a vested interest in science and technology: they support development in mathematics (accounting arithmetic, higher-degree equations for interest rate calculations, statistics for stock exchange trading and insurances, etc.). In the Middle Ages, they supported the development of accurate clocks for measuring manufacturing and travelling times, of accurate maps for travelling, of astronomy for navigation, and of course of all sorts of new technical devices, since increasing manufacturing productivity and decreasing transport costs brings profit. The mercantile community, when successful, would financially support individuals active in those fields. – Stable political division helps science and technology in several ways: 
1) It generates freedom. No center has a monopoly of power, no government can control everything. Suppressed in a given country, a scientist or a technician can shelter into another one. Same for ideas and techniques. 
2) Competition between states generates a profitable stimulation. Every government want to do better (or at least not worse) than neighbouring countries. Hence governmental support for science academies. 
3) War exercices a continuous pressure towards modernization, it creates a strong government interest for new technical devices and for improving technical knowledge and education. War does not wreak too much havoc in the case of durable states, hence the need for a stable political division. In particular, the smart European scientific professional structure, the institutions that allowed scientists to make a living while doing research – universities, royal academies, private mathematical schools, etc. – could come to life and survive only thanks to the existence of the wealthy and stable Western European states system. In this context, the XVIth-XVIIth century Scientific revolution is interpreted as the outcome of the economic boom and military revolution that Western Europe underwent in the same period 1500-1700. The difference between the two parts of Europe becomes clear here. Western Europe had a favourable economic and political background during the whole 2nd millenium, that is, it enjoyed a rich and durable states system. Eastern Europe suffered from bad economic and political conditions. Eastern Europe’s states were unstable, they underwent fast boundary moves. Moreover, trade was weak, manufacturing rickety. Merchants never thrived half as well as their Western equivalents. Chapters 3, 4, 5 – The Economic and Political Theory (Middle East, India, China) 
Chap 3, 4, 5, demonstrate that the rich states system theory explains quite well the different stages of the scientific evolutions of the Middle-East, India and China. Each time prosperity and stable division are there, scientific knowledge flourishes. In all other cases (political unity, fast-changing boundaries and/or economical doldrums), science recedes. 
Each civilization is studied century after century, period after period, because they do not experience a constant economic and political situation. So, to get a clear picture, one must consider each period separately. 
The book devotes 110 pages to analyze the political and economical histories of the Middle East, India and China in relation to the evolution of science and technology. This is arguably the most original element in the book’s approach, since, generally, authors studying scientific history focus on the West, devoting only a few pages to other civilizations, without distinguishing between the (very) different periods. 
For example, the rich states system theory solves neatly the mysterious ups and downs in Chinese scientific history. The interval from 750 to 1280 was highly productive in scientific and technical progress because China enjoyed a rather stable division and a very dynamic trade and manufacturing. After 1280, political unity set in and science stopped. Chapter 6 – The Coastline Shape Hypothesis 
In chap 6, I find out why only Western Europe benefited from prosperity and stable division during such a long time: the main cause is the shape of its coastline. The Western part of the European continent is the only densely populated area in the Earth boasting as many peninsulas, gulfs, straits, inland seas, while still being for the most part an interconnected land. Such an articulated coastline enhances trade, because sea accessibility makes maritime transportation easier. The sea route is much better than river or land transportation. Before modern times, it was safer, quicker, freer and tremendously cheaper. Moreover, an articulated coastline defines naturally limited core areas within which polities can live their lives without being too much disturbed – Britain, Ireland, Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Italy are regions well delimited by the sea. The long-term stable political division stems from that advantage, as the sea is the best possible boundary for a state. 
In mathematical terms, the quality of a coastline is measured by Mandelbrot’s fractal dimension of the coastline. The higher the dimension, the better the shore articulation. I made some measurements on maps and obtained that Europe has a fractal dimension of 1.46, much higher than China (1.26), India (1.14) and the Middle East (1.13), which is significant because this figure can only take values between 1 and 2. 
Eastern Europe does not enjoy as good a shore profile as Western Europe: it is a mainly landlocked area. Vast surfaces are deprived of sea access: the seas are too far-away, they are often closed or ice-blocked seas. Hence, trade could not take off, and no natural boundary protected the regions’s states, which were brittle and short-lived. This is the reason why this region did not perform well in science and technology. Chapter 7 – The Greek Miracle Explained 
Chap 7 shows that the rich states system theory explains the ancient Greek miracle as well. The Greeks formed a lasting states system, enlivened by a brisk trade, both element thriving on the very indented and articulated coastline of the Aegean sea. Only the Southern part of Greece nurtured the miracle, because it had abundant access to the sea. The mostly landlocked Northern part of Greece stayed apart from the scientific adventure. So the Southern/Northern opposition in ancient Greece mirrored the Western/Eastern opposition in modern Europe. 
The miracle lasted until military technological progress overshot the possibilities of the Greek geographical platform. Then, the scene extended to the whole Eastern Mediterranean region, which the Greeks conquered. Huge states formed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia minor, which could follow the competition, but only for a while: the new territories did not have an articulated coastline. The economy slumped down (this was compounded by demographic decline) and a more and more unstable division settled, ruining the Greek world and ending the “miracle”. Chapter 8 – Evolution of the West, 19th and 20th Centuries 
In chap 8, I apply the theory to the 19th and 20th centuries. The states system of Western Europe continued on its course, generating scientific progress at a fast pace, until the first part of the 20th century, when technological progress in the military domain (essentially tanks and airplanes) rendered the European continent too small. At this stage the states system destroyed itself (2nd world war). Greater states were required for the competition to continue. The USA and USSR, luckily, were there. They continued the battle until, again, the military technology (thermonuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles) exceeded the possibilities of the geographical platform. But this time, technology was so powerful that war simply became impossible on Earth between great powers, ushering the nuclear peace in which we live now. Chapter 9 – Present Situation and Near Future 
In chap 9, I develop several contemporary topics, like the Asian boom and the sharp drop of science in Russia. I show that, today as ever, only two forces prop up science: stable division and prosperity: governments, companies and donators are the funders of science. They can assume that role only if the necessary ressources are there, hence if the economy fares well. Also, only the freedom of a multicenter world allows research to go on unfettered (think of cloning, assisted fecundation, and so on). Furthermore, inter-state prestige or trade competitions are a crucial motivation behind that financing. 
As a consequence, one can take scientific progress for granted in the future as long as some region in the world will enjoy prosperity and stable division – this progress shall be a bit weaker, however, with the waning of the military pillar. Epilogue 
Finally, the epilogue generalizes the theory for the space age (that never came). Planet Earth has become too small to stand large conflicts between great powers, but wars with missiles and nuclear bombs could still be waged in the interplanetary medium. I briefly study the quality of our stellar system in that respect. In the same way as not all coastline profiles allow for long-lasting rich states systems, similarly, not all “planetographies” foster such lush combination at the space age level. The result of this investigation is that, unfortunately, our neighbouring planetary environment seems hopelessly forbidding. We are not going to experience in the future another full-fledged “miracle”, like the Greek and the European ones in the past. ========

    (more…)

  • “It’s So . . . Complex?” Not Really.

    MEGAN MCARDLE at the Atlantic, posted an essay question by Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry.

    Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

    The thesis is false. Luddite on top of false. But false. 1) Governors are simply unable to possess sufficient knowledge. In the absence of knowledge governors do the one thing we charge them with: make laws. They make laws without knowledge. It is the system of regulations that breaks down, not technological complexity. Lawmakers cannot make good laws because they lack the ability to possess or integrate the knowledge necessary to make economic laws. Why this is the general critique of socialism (central planning) but we do not apply the same logic to republican government (central legislation) is an more interesting topic of study. Knowledge and incentives. You need both. Government has neither.

    [callout]Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it.[/callout]

    2) His analysis of complexity is erroneous. There is no evidence of marginal decreases in effectiveness. And any such analysis belies a misunderstanding of technical and epistemic progress. It is not LINEAR or STATIC. As is biology, innovation functions by punctuated equilibria. In other words, random, large shifts occur due to accumulated minor innovations, whereby all previous innovations are disrupted, and all social orders reorganize around the large shifts. 3) The context is erroneous. Western dominance rose because of changes in trade routes. The USA became dominant by selling off a continent to immigrants, and concentrating that capital in military and political conquest. A republican government is the only government dynamic enough (incorporating enough people) to sell off a continent. We did not make an excellent country. We simply sold off a continent and funded technological development with the proceeds. These proceeds are now in the form of intellectual capital. That intellectual capital is fluid, and open to unfettered replication. The world is copying that technology at a low cost. This low cost is allowing vast increases in population and vast increases in the structure of production, allowing people to move from subsistence farming to a suburban and urban working class. This migration is creating a vast pool of available labor. Since people are NOT EQUAL in ability, this means that the USA is specializing in productive efforts open only to the top two quintiles. It means that the bottom three quintiles are not able to participate in the production of the USA’s specialisms (creative marketing, medicine, education, product development, financial innovation) and the specializations are no longer sufficiently profitable to assist the lower quintiles by redistribution. Free Traders were wrong. Nations cannot specialize because people in them are unequal. CLASSES within NATIONS must specialize. Free trade is dangerous to the stability of advanced societies between whom differences are not sufficiently marginal. 4) We do not need simplicity. We need innovation and reorganization. We need the assistance of the government to concentrate capital in industries where we can be competitive, and to retain all possible capital inside the country, so that the lower quintiles do not so much suffer from the affect of increased competition from around the world. The Author of your essay is yet another Luddite. The way is not back, it is forward. 4) we have taken over the policing of trade routes from the British empire. We have built a political empire, if not an economic one. And we could afford that empire when Europe was in tatters, and the rest of the world languished in pre-capitalist technologies. We cannot afford to run this empire any longer. Any more than England could after the war. However, there will be no gains to be realize for the purposes of redistribution. The USA will no longer be able to borrow, nor productive enough to export it’s way to prosperity. We will not have either empire, nor our previous wealth. SUMMARY Societies failed because the were no longer able to coordinate. People must have coordinating myths. Myths are the means by which codify what we pay for social order: respect for some form of property or another. Every ‘respect’ of some form of property is a forgone opportunity. These forgone opportunities are costs. These costs are very expensive. The most advanced societies contain people who forgo great opportunities to ‘disrespect’ property. The primitive societies do not forgo those opportunities. This behavioral development is a very high cost. The first myths were simply conventions. They were formalized into Religions. Religions finally failed when the middle class developed, and societies became large enough that people could visibly ‘cheat’ with anonymity. Lawmaking developed in order, largely, to legitimize government (and it’s social order) by standardizing punishments for similar crimes against life and property. That technology of Lawmaking has failed (although our government does not recognize this.) Because laws are too many and too irrelevant and too impossible to police. Our politicians knowingly state that they do not understand nor have they even read, many of the laws that they implement. They leave this process to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy serves it’s own purpose. And it is the bureaucracy that citizens learn to loathe. “Revolutions are built from the accumulation of petty violence by the bureaucracy, not the heinous crimes of a few politicians, princes, or kings.” The next form of government after lawmaking is banking and credit. The reason being that only that system will allow us to ‘sense’ the world, and only that system will allow the state to engage in the increase in capital so that redistribution is possible. Rather than the (current) assumption that capital will continue to accumulate and the government must simply confiscate enough of if to keep the citizens happy. To survive, we will become even more capitalist, not less. We must. Because only property, pricing, and numbers can provide us with the information to coordinate in vast division of knowledge and labor. THE STATE OF THE UNION Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it. This is why our society is failing. It is why previous societies have failed: the inability to regulate consumption and concentrate capital for production because the social orders did not develop a level of granular management. That management is visible to us in the private banking, credit and finance systems. Our governments must realize that they are banks first. You can’t redistribute something if you have nothing to start with. The first purpose is defense and property definition (order) The second purpose of the state is productivity (competition) The third is redistribution. (the result of order and competition) They must exist in that order. A state that does not focus on productivity will eventually be unable to redistribute, compete, or maintain order. SPECIOUS ARGUMENTS BY LUDDITES Arguments about complexity are specious. A division of labor is by definition complex. A market is complex, or we would not need it. Pricing systems are complex or we would not have had them. If we became less complex we would have to return more people to farming, and possibly, kill off billions of existing human beings. Complexity is our friend. The accumulated social and legal hindrances to reorganization, and the accumulated ERRORS in political philosophy that prohibit the concentration of capital behind innovative productive ends, is the problem. Our institution of government, as we practice it today, is the problem. It is predicated upon erroneous myths. It is structured to make laws for farmers. It is burdened with assumptions of productivity that may never be met. The institutions of government that are more socialist are even worse. They pretend knowledge of a future that cannot be known. And Luddite solutions are appeals to create a certain future, whose only certainty is destruction and poverty.

  • The Dystopian Future Of Cities – Concrete And Rubble VS Star Trek

    As I spend more of my time trying to understand the different ways by which the USA will degenerate from its position of trade-empire, I have been working on the future of cities, which will even more dominantly influence the future culturally, morally, economically and politically. There is a healthy literature on it. And it’s quite the opposite future that the libertarians fantasized about. Writings on our Dystopian Future: The Feral Cities Paper http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_56/ai_110458726/?tag=content;col1 (Local copy for reference)The Building Blog and Cities Under Siege http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/cities-under-siege.html The Books The Fires by Joe Flood Planet of Slums by Mike Davis Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham Urban Nightmares by Steve Macek The Unheavenly City by Banfield

    Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”

    The future of the world is the south american model. It is quite different from the future envisioned by the Protestants, Libertarians and liberals. It certainly isn’t the orderly civility and sterility of star trek – as if the upper middle class ran the world rather than the proletariat.

    Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-repeated remark that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.”

    Be careful what you wish and plan for, if what you wish and plan for is counter to human nature. The approach to Natural Law combined with heroic aspiration is different from the myth of equality and heroic aspiration. We’re going to see the south american model.

  • The Wheel? It’s Part Of A System Of Innovation. Or It’s Pointless.

    Peter Gordon notes in passing that the pre-columbians had wheeled toys, despite leaving no record of using the wheel for carts. He directs us to evidence, where the authors posit the reasons for not having adopted wheels. They give a number of reasons with the seventh being the closest:

    With a abundant human workforce throughout Ancient America, and without large beasts of burden, wheeled vehicles would have been redundant and unnecessary. In practical terms, it is easier to carry goods, than to pull the good and the wagon, if the terrain is not well suited to wheeled vehicles.

    Actually, the wheel, the chariot, the horse, wheat, and bronze were the set of tools that made the wheel possible in eurasia. They are the symbols of the spread of western civilization. And none are valuable without the rest. (Yes, even bronze.) If you don’t have a horse, or at least a bull, a cart is a waste of energy. Carts are heavy. They are far too heavy for humans to benefit from hauling. Simple math. It’s not that carts were unnecessary. It’s that they were a bad idea. Especially in jungles and hills instead of plains and on roads. Anthropologists should study a little economics.

  • Why Are So Many Equatorial Nations ‘Failed States’?

    This posting is in response to “Postcards From Hell: Images fom the world’s most failed states” and commentary on The Agitator. Why are so many equatorial nations ‘Failed States’? “All happy families are the same. All unhappy families are different.” Which means that a lot of things go into making a successful state, and there are a number of reasons why successful advanced cultures develop. And if any one of them goes wrong, a state can fail. Although it will most likely be conquered once it has failed. And there is one particular reason why most of the failed states are currently failing: the legacy of colonialism. But let’s look at the reasons why cultures progress differently: 1) disease gradients are higher (safer) in the cold and lower in the warm. 2) physical effort is difficult in hot weather, which hampers the creation of built capital. (Core body temp also affects IQ during exertion) 3) Agrarian cycles in the north encourage cottage industry in winter, farming in spring and fall and war in summer. This creates certain social orders that foster human, built and technical capital accumulation. Compare to the brutal survival farming of the Chinese and their rice. 4) Rivers and sea: rivers in particular provide safe, easy and low cost product transport. The opposite is true: some areas are simply geographically resistant to trade. Europe is gifted with east-west rivers. 5) Unequal distribution of terrain, water, useful plants and animals favors certain regions in agrarian productivity. Mineral deposits favor certain technologies (europe, coal, wood and iron.) 6) Access to trade means access to knowledge, and greater availability of resources and technology. This increases the probability of innovation, and the development of ‘virtues’ as we understand our commercial and moral code. 7) The abstract thing we refer to as social order, that is embodied in accumulated traditions and habits, are the most important and expensive forms of human capital. These habits facilitate the unspoken normative goals of all social and economic cooperation and coordination. We pay for social institutions by forgoing opportunity: the set of things that we don’t do: the opportunities we do not seize. We pay for infrastructure and governance with the results of trade made possible by those forgone opportunities. These institutions include our different definitions of public and private property, manners, ethics, morals and rituals. Manners, ethics and morals are economic codes just as are written laws, most of which, in all of human history, proscribed punishments for violations of manners, ethics and morals. (A vast oversimplification, but an informative one.) 8) The availability of general technical knowledge (how to craft things) and general systemic knowledge (how the natural world operates). We often confuse education with practical knowledge and scientific knowledge. ( The Muslim world is full of Islamic studies which do nothing except perpetuate ignorance. Some of the sub Saharan world is still in the embrace of magical thinking.) Commercial apprenticeship and on the job learning, not education, (imitation of practice) is the primary means of knowledge transfer. Most knowledge (in the USA as well) is political or secular-theocratic rather than useful knowledge. This is the reason the comparative ignorance of our working classes compared to that of europeans. 9) Concordant technologies. Civilizations need to accumulate a greatdeal of human capital by adopting certain technologies before they can adopt others, else these technologies are not disruptive, and do not increase the division of knowledge and labor. Otherwise tyrants simply use it to institutionalize corruption and profiteering. This isn’t any different from children but on a larger scale. If people do not forgo the opportunity to misuse a technology, they will never be able to gain its productive benefits. You don’t give a child a gun. 10) social orders. The west was built by fraternal orders of city/market joint stockholders, partly because of the high cost of equipment and training. This is the source of our republican sentiments, as well as our tools of argument,reason and science. Other societies have not been so lucky. East asia is largely historically oriented. The northern-west is largely future oriented, the greek, greco (southern) italian and eastern block Mediterranean is largely present oriented, and the near east and Indian continent are magically (‘spiritually’) oriented. Social classes have different time preferences, with the highest classes most future oriented, and the lowest classes most present oriented. 11) Political Institutions: what we call ‘rule of law’ is probably the most important for a market economy – because it permits creative disruption and speculation. But more importantly, it requires the ability to concentrate enough power that the political elite can suppress violence in a geography well enough that people can accumulate capital and trade can develop. If trade can develop productivity can increase, and eventually enough extra production can develop that there is something to redistribute to people, first for the purpose of increasing their productivity, and second for increasing the quality of their lives. We avoid discussing the reality of violence, but without the ability to project violence there is no ‘state’. Because that’s what a state is: a territorial monopoly on violence that forces people to use either the market (good) or to become the victims of exploitative totalitarianism (bad). Now we get to how westerners condemned some cultures: 1) Creating political boundaries and political systems across tribes destroys their ability to create human capital because this uncertainty over-stimulates the need for group persistence and impedes the development of market friendly habits. Thievery and tribal banditry is much easier and cheaper than creating trade and infrastructure. Even today, there is no small sentiment among males that suggests civilization has limited their potential access to mates, and their potential joy, by suppressing their desire for tribal banditry. In certain areas of the globe (in which the USA is fighting) tribal banditry is the primary means of status achievement. And the alternative is the grinding poverty of subsistence farming in an arid landscape. Progress is not always as desirable as it may seem. 2) Colonialism under England was effective in creating stability. In fact the hallmark of the Anglo model is stability. In the entire anglo civilization. In the anglo colonies as well. Stability fosters the accumulation of all forms of capital. If you were colonized by someone else, then you will suffer for it. If you were colonized by the french in particular you will have suffered for it. Anglo social technology is as important as the development of Greek science and reason. That technology, unbenknownst to most of us, is the development of abstract principles that allow calculation and coordination. (Even law is a form of mathematics or calculation. This is a very complex topic for this forum so I’ll leave it at that.). French colonies are a disaster. In fact, the unspoken question is, why were some cultures able to be colonized? It was possible to do terrible things to China via trade, but not to colonize it. And while even the Japanese conquered china, they could not hold or colonize it. 3) Economic interference, and in particular interference by way of charity. This is a hotly debated problem. But individual and local assistance by devoted people seems to make a difference, while insertion of capital is extremely harmful to developing economies that must transform from tribal to market economies. Why we understand that socialism is devastating to economies yet we interfere with primitive and less flexible economies with much less capital, is a mystery of western behavior. Unpleasant realities : 1) Mystical Religion: Unfortunately, there are also ways to manufacture ignorance. Some religions are regressive. In fact it could be reasonably argued that many are simply dangerous. Some have argued that they all are dangerous. The reason one is out gunned out germed and out steeled, so to speak, is a function of a culture’s willingness to adapt disruptive technologies. Luddites perish. Most of the scriptural religions are Luddite systems of thought. 2) The Problem Of IQ: Despite the objections of the inequality-deniers, the one factual reality that the vast body of people will fail to accept in the face of overwhelming objective scientific evidence: that IQ’s are unequally distributed in different races — and in clases within those races. 3) The Problem of Status and Racism: All people are racist in that they prefer acting within and with their race. And this will never change simply because of man’s need to learn, his learning by imitation, and his desire to learn from those he most easily can imitate, and his need to identify WHO to imitate. And the consequential need for visible evidence of status in order to choose who to imitate. Status is a necessary epistemological property of human existence. We cannot exist without it. 4) Mate Selection: The hard reality is that women are hypergamic (marry up). This reality is made more complex because men have a wider IQ variance than women, who are more centered around the mean. This situations presents men with the need to compete for mate selection, while women are increasingly selective about their mates, until they reach a point of either opportunity or resignation. (ie: more women are forced to ‘settle’ than are men.) Furthermore, this status economy requires a diverse range of status symbols within each race and class that inform the eternal search for demonstrable differences in status. Furthermore, this means that within races and within classes, except at the margins, greater status is available WITHIN race than without, and therefore people are incentivized to prefer to act and associate within their races. Racism is as permanent as is classism. The dirty secret of the human genome project is that class is genetically determinant. While economic classes are semi randomly plastic, social classes (which are readily evidenced in the postings on this and other blogs) are decidedly inelastic. (spoken as a member of the upper middle class). Furthermore IQs are different in consequence between groups. A white, Jew or east Asian with a 60 IQ is perceptibly broken. A sub saharan African is not – he or she just has a higher barrier to the learning of abstractions. But otherwise is perceptibly healthy. And IQ distributions affect what can be invented, what can be produced, and what can be maintained in a society. In general, To maintain machines requires an IQ of at least 105. To get a liberal education requires an IQ of 110. To design machines requires an IQ of at least 122 . To design abstractions requires an IQ above 130. To innovate upon a system of thought requires, it appears, an IQ above 140. Everyone else simply uses the tools created by others. It is demonstrably true that the top quintile has more influence on productivity of the society than all the rest combined. And it is the number of people with these IQ’s in the population who are educated enough to employ them, in a society with sufficient capital and division of knowledge and labor to make use of their talents. (For this reason, a capitalist china should rule the world in productivity simply because they have so many people above the mechanical threshold, and so much of the population can participate in complex production.) Since all societies are run by minority elites (even ours) the composition of elites in government, speculative intelligence and innovation in the middle classes, and capable mechanics in the proletariat determine the competitive rates of innovation and change in a society. Despite Racial, national, and class differences in IQ distribution, it does not take a genius to run a market economy. As our pliticians demonstrate daily. What is important is that in any sufficiently large body of people exist sufficient numbers to adopt the rule of law, the institutions of trade, and some form of capital production. The problem is one of numbers: getting the barbarians and potential corrupt bureaucrats to forgo opportunities for personal gain in order to fund the development of their human capital. The problem of coordinating production in a division of knowledge and labor requires a great deal of sacrifice. It is the is a sufficient set of principles govern the progress and adaptability of cultures. As other readers have commented, colonialism is perhaps the greatest determinant today of the relative state of failed nations. I hope this was helpful in providing food for thought.

  • thinking about density. In the office. In cities. In civilizations. “Human densi

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/I’m thinking about density. In the office. In cities. In civilizations.

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/

    “Human density is not the panacea our planners and utopians think it is. Density is toxicity, it decreases the disease gradient, and it leads to political tyranny and instability, and it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate capital and therefore productivity.”

    Source date (UTC): 2010-04-13 12:17:00 UTC

  • A Little Family History For those that don’t know family history, here is a litt

    A Little Family History

    For those that don’t know family history, here is a little of it from memory:

    1) our direct ancestors can be traced to the 1400’s. We know the lineage and location from that time, and there are period maps that include the homes and names of these individuals. It appears that our ancestors were part of the Norman conquest in 1066 – reasonable documentation exists at least to infer it. There is some ‘constructed’ evidence that Doolittles were part of ‘Rollo And His Vikings’ invading northern France.

    2) The national geographic society’s “Genographic Project” will do a genetic test for $100 that will show your maternal or paternal genetic history. Those I’ve seen so far don’t contradict the hypothesis. Nothing can truly prove it however. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html

    We should note that current genetic mapping of the UK, shows that nearly all brit’s are of Celtic descent. and very few scandinavian despite the mythology of viking invasion. Most Icelanders are of mixed scandinavian and irish gene pools, apparently because the scandinavians picked up Irish women on the way to settlement. The very northern islands off of scotland are heavily scandinavian. But that is a rarity. Most brits are Celts.

    3) There is no good history of the origin of the Doolittle name. Lots of ideas, but mostly the work of bad amateur historians. It’s actually kind of fun to collect all the hypotheses people in the family have.

    4) There are multiple historical mentions of our family name. Mostly as members of armies, including letters and memoirs. Our ancestors were often literate. There is a record of at least one monk donating his goods to the church as he joined the monastery. (A monastery was the closest thing to a fortune 500 company in medieval times. It wasn’t that you needed to be religious, they were centers of industrial production, because they were centers of capital.) There is another mention in memoirs from the Napoleonic era of a a quiet and small soldier named Doolittle, ‘who was short and stocky’ listening to some fool rant intolerably and then dispassionately, and calmly killing him for the crime of being too annoying to have in camp.

    5) Historically, English society was fully militarized, (leading to the mercantilist English State where the state became a commercial empire) and Doolittles appear to have been sergeants and captains, assumedly all the way back to the Norman conquest: essentially, the military’s ‘middle managers’. There are claims in the family literature to being ‘lesser nobility’ but think of it more that our ancestors were middle class, and responsible for small groups of men in battle, and had that more moderate position in society.

    6) There is a good book about the Doolittles of Lescestershire that is available on amazon or from the publisher. Reading it can make history feel very real.

    7) living in central England, (the Midlands) our ancestors were part of the losing side of the English civil war. As middle class business people and craftsmen, farmer and small home business owners, and summer soldiers, it was ‘safer’ and more profitable to move to the colonies where land was effectively free. While much has been made of ‘puritans’, the fact is that most ‘puritan’ immigrants were losers of the english civil war.

    8) Three branches of the family split during that time as individuals moved to ireland, europe, and america. All american Doolittle’s are descended from Abraham Doolittle. He was the first sheriff of the New Haven Colony. He became a minor legislator in Connecticut. His tombstone is in the small (and somewhat seedy) town north of New Haven. (As an aside, it is somewhat criminal that Connecticut, and in particular the Connecticut River Valley, which in the 1700’s was considered ‘the finest and most beautiful place ever inhabited by man, and possibly the best place and time ever to live as man’ now is home to some of the most horrid, poor, hopeless, nihilistic, drug and crime ridden cities in America: Danbury, Meriden, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford.) He had wives die in childbirth, fought in wars, and was approximately age 20 when he arrived and took on these duties. That is another statement of the difference in our times. He was a man when most of us are still boys.

    9) As immigration to the colonies continued, land prices increased, and so many of the early immigrants to New England like the Doolittles, sold their holdings in new england and moved prior to the revolutionary war, to the Ohio river valley with it’s exceptional farm land. They settled, and dispersed to the rest of rural america from there. The family penchant for military service seems to have further distributed our genes around the country over the following two centuries. A google map of the name ‘doolittle’ will show a concentration in new england, and the corresponding westward migration. (Another good book is the “nine nations of north america” which accurately breaks the US into separate cultures, and explains regional differences in social and political preferences.)

    9) Class values, along with the IQ to carry those values are (whether people like it or not) inherited, and society is often organized according to IQ, family values and physical fitness. Most Doolittles have, over the centuries, maintained a certain class position. Understanding family history is an interesting way of seeing how families maintain social positions over centuries. We have produced a significant military commander, a poet, a few minor politicians, an awful lot of small business people, and a plethora of soldiers. We are an ongoing testament to our ancient history. “Men with IQ’s over 125 invent machines, Men with IQ’s over 105 repair machines. Men with IQ under 105 use machines.”

    10) There is an old book on ‘Ancient Families Of New England’. Doolittles are one of the early political families mentioned in the book. It is in some new england libraries. During this period, because we preserved colonial records, there is a solid understanding of 17th and 18th century in the colonial period. It’s fascinating. As a humorous bit of trivia: there was a genetic study conducted in the early 20th century during the Eugenics movement that purports to show the Doolittles as social malcontents in Vermont as ‘Building Better Vermonters”. This book is sometimes available on the web. It turns out that the authors of the study, in order to obtain the consent of the family it actually interviewed and documented, which was NOT a Doolittle family but another name and family altogether (Dooley I think?), changed the name to ‘Doolittle’ to hide their name. And having done so, quite by accident, stigmatized the family in that area of Vermont, and doomed them to long term ostracization. Bad press matters.

    11) Like most people of Norman cum-protestant ancestry, Doolittles do not seem to breed in great numbers – we are still a relatively small family. (Normans were very good administrators. Which is one of the reasons they were good soldiers.) One of the reasons that protestants were middle class, and catholics poor, seems to stem from this control of breeding, and the requirement that a man be able to support his own home before marrying and having children. “He who breeds wins”. We have not been winning the battle of numbers so to speak.

    12) Doolittle Family crests are likely fakes. There are at least three common representations of the Doolittle family crest, and all are fictitious. There is no record of any promotion to nobility of any Doolittle family member that we are able to find in pre-colonial history. Very often, late in history, the middle class, as it rose to replace the landed nobility in political power, especially in france, but no less in england, purchased ennoblement by donations to the crown. Others simply fabricated them out of false claims. If you want to represent the Doolittle family in a crest, then the Saint George’s Cross, and the English and American flags are about as close as you can get, because from our family history’s perspective, we are the makers of those flags.

    (There is one from ireland I think, that has roosters, and one from England I think, that has three silver spheres on stripes. But I have seen no evidence that these are anything other than fashionable fabrications.)

    13) In the early 1900’s, a number of Doolittle women started working on the Doolittle Family History. This book is now in at least eight large volumes. It is available from the family genealogist. It costs real money. But it is very fascinating to read. REaders must remember that in the 1800’s the enlightenment was ending, and northern european civilization was attempting to cast off the last vestiges of catholicism and to develop an new history for itself. This period is called ‘romanticism’ as if it was a fashion, but it was effectively a failed attempt to recreate a european religion from the remnants of our polytheistic germanic past. (this is what the greeks did in the hellenic age, having lost reading and memory of Mycenean greece – they reinvented themselves after their ‘dark age’.) Instead of succeeding in creating this new religion, the commercialism and materialism of the english merchant class prevailed, and England (ie:Athens – the naval merchant state) and Germany (ie: Sparta – the farming Army State) went to war, creating the Great European Civil War that we call the “world wars”, and ending the attempt to recreate a new northern european model and mythology. The James Bond character is an ‘Ode To Lost Empire’. To some degree, these ancestry efforts are an ode to lost ‘identity’. Our time, as a family who rowed the oars of society’s trireme, preserved it’s liberty, and crafted it’s goods, may have passed.

    14) The Secretary of the Doolittle Society will give you a printout of your entire family history back to the 1400’s if you ask (and pay for it.) You can contact him and update your family data. He can be reached at http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/

    15) The book “The Doolittle Family In America” can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&index=books&field-keywords=Doolittle%20family%20America.

    16) In Index Washington, on the opposite side of the country from the Plymouth Colony, is a small park named “Doolittle Park”, in memory of it’s founder – now forgotten other than for the bronze plaque that states his name. The village has been advertising, hoping to attract people to move there, since it was in danger of losing it’s charter during the 1990’s because so few people live there. The village was used either for mining or logging. It’s little more than a signpost. The park is little more than a patch of dirt next to the river, not even sufficient for grazing a few sheep, cows or horses. The remnants of small summer camping huts line one of the feeder creeks leading to the river.

    Some Advice I Found Valuable:

    “Knowledge of your ancestors can not only make history seem real and tangible, but it can be used as a guide by which to judge your journey through life. It’s folly to take pride in their achievements, you should instead take pride in the record yours: Leave the world better than you entered it. If possible, do better with your life, and build as good or better a character than did your ancestors. And at the very least, do nothing to besmirch their honor if they had any. By knowing and improving on the record of your lineage, you can make the best of what you started with, and add to your ancestor’s history. See yourself in them, and you will better understand yourself. They are you. You are them. “

    Source date (UTC): 2010-02-15 13:42:00 UTC

  • those that don’t know family history, here is some from memory: 1) our direct an

    http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/For those that don’t know family history, here is some from memory:

    1) our direct ancestors can be traced to the 1400’s. It appears that our ancestors were part of the Norman conquest in 1066 – reasonable documentation exists at least to infer it. There is some ‘constructed’ evidence that Doolittles were part of ‘Rollo And His Vikings’ invading northern France.

    2) The national geographic society will do a genetic test for 100$ that will show your maternal or paternal genetic history. Those I’ve seen so far validate this hypothesis. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html

    3) There is no good history of the origin of the name. Lots of ideas, but mostly the work of bad amateur historians. It’s actually kind of fun to collect all the hypotheses people in the family have.

    4) There are multiple historical mentions of our family name. Mostly as members of armies. But there is a record of at least one monk donating his goods to the church as he joined the monastery. (A monastery was the closest thing to a fortune 500 company in medieval times. It wasn’t that you needed to be religious.) There is another in the napoleonic era of a a quiet and small soldier named Doolittle, listening to some fool rant for hours then killing him for the crime of being too annoying

    5) Historically, english society was fully militarized, (leading to the mercantilist English State) and Doolittles appear to have been sergeants and captains: essentially, the military’s ‘middle managers’. There are claims to being ‘lesser nobility’ but think of it more that our ancestors were middle class, and responsible for small groups of men in battle.

    6) There is a good book about the Doolittles of Lescestershire that is available on amazon or from the publisher. Reading it can make history feel very real.

    7) living in central England, (the Midlands) our ancestors were part of the losing side of the English civil war. As middle class business people and craftsmen, farmer and small home business owners, and summer soldiers, it was ‘safer’ and more profitable to move to the colonies where land was effectively free. While much has been made of ‘puritans’, the fact is that most ‘puritan’ immigrants were losers of the english civil war.

    8) Three branches of the family split during that time as individuals moved to ireland, europe, and america. All american Doolittle’s are descended from Abraham Doolittle. He was the first sheriff of the New Haven Colony. He became a minor legislator in Connecticut. His tombstone is in the small (and somewhat seedy) town north of New Haven. (As an aside, it is somewhat criminal that connecticut, and in particular the Connecticut River Valley, which in the 1700’s was considered ‘the finest and most beautiful place ever inhabited by man’ now is home to some of the most horrid, poor, hopeless, drug and crime ridden cities in America: Danbury, Meriden, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford.) He had wives die in childbirth, fought in wars, and was approximately age 20 when he arrived and took on these duties. That is another statement of the difference in our times.

    9) As immigration to the colonies continued, land prices increased, and so many of the early immigrants to New England like the Doolittles, sold their holdings in new england and moved prior to the revolutionary war, to the Ohio river valley with it’s exceptional farm land, settled, and dispersed to the rest of rural america from there. The family penchant for military service seems to have further distributed our genes around the country over the following two centuries.

    9) Class values, along with the IQ to carry them are (whether people like it or not) inherited, and society is often organized according to IQ, family values and physical fitness. Most Doolittles have, over the centuries, maintained a certain class position. It is an interesting way of seeing how families maintain social positions over centuries. We have produced a significant military commander, a poet, a few minor politicians, and an awful lot of small business people. We are an ongoing testament to our history. “Men with IQ’s over 125 invent machines, Men with IQ’s over 105 repair machines. Men with IQ under 105 use machines.”

    10) There is an old book on ‘Ancient Families Of New England’. Doolittles are one of the early political families mentioned in the book. There is a genetic study conducted in the early 20th century during the Eugenics movement that purports to show the Doolittles as social malcontents. This book is available on the web. It turns out that the authors of the study, in order to obtain the consent of the family it actually interviewed and documented, which was NOT a Doolittle family but another name and family altogether, changed the name to ‘Doolittle’ to protect the not-so-innocent. And having done so, stigmatized the family in that area of Vermont, and doomed them to long term ostracization. Bad press matters.

    11) Like most people of Norman cum-protestant ancestry, Doolittles do not seem to breed in great numbers – we are still a relatively small family. (Normans were very good administrators. Which is one of the reasons they were good soldiers.) One of the reasons that protestants were middle class, and catholics poor, seems to stem from this control of breeding, and the requirement that a man be able to support his own home before marrying and having children. “He who breeds wins”. We have not been winning the battle of numbers so to speak.

    12) Doolittle Family crests are likely fakes. There are at least three common representations of the Doolittle family crest, and all are fictitious. There is no record of any promotion to nobility of any Doolittle family member that we are able to find in pre-colonial history. Very often, late in history, the middle class, as it rose to replace the landed nobility in political power, especially in france, but no less in england, purchased ennoblement by donations to the crown. Others simply fabricated them out of false claims. If you want to represent the Doolittle family in a crest, then the Saint George’s Cross, and the English and American flags are about as close as you can get, because from our family history’s perspective, we are the makers of those flags.

    13) In the early 1900’s, a number of Doolittle women started working on the Doolittle Family History. This book is now in at least eight large volumes. It is available from the family genealogist. It costs real money. But it is very fascinating to read. REaders must remember that in the 1800’s the enlightenment was ending, and northern european civilization was attempting to cast off the last vestiges of catholicism and to develop an new history for itself. This period is called ‘romanticism’ as if it was a fashion, but it was effectively a failed attempt to recreate a european religion from the remnants of our polytheistic germanic past. Instead of succeeding, the commercialism and materialism of the english merchant class prevailed, and England (ie:Athens – the naval merchant state) and Germany (ie: Sparta – the Army State) went to war, creating the great european civil war, and ending the attempt to recreate a new northern european model and mythology. James Bone is an Ode To Lost Empire. To some degree, these ancestry efforts are an ode to lost ‘identity’. Our time, as a family who contributed to the oars may have passed.

    14) The Secretary of the Doolittle Society will give you a printout of your entire family history back to the 1400’s if you ask (and pay for it.) You can contact him and update your family data. He can be reached at http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/

    15) THe Doolittle Family In America can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&index=books&field-keywords=Doolittle%20family%20America

    Source date (UTC): 2010-02-15 09:43:00 UTC

  • We Doolittles have a two thousand year history of being soldiers. So spelling, w

    We Doolittles have a two thousand year history of being soldiers. So spelling, which is a dainty thing after all, isn’t as important as killing people, breaking things, and blowing stuff up. There is a particular honor in that. And we seem to survive our battles.

    However, to keep that honor intact, please change the title of this group from “The Doolittle Familey” to “The Doolittle Family” There is no E in Family. It will also help prevent the more educated part of the family from changing their name. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2010-02-15 08:30:00 UTC