States Can Always Just Be Dumb
They won't always, but they can.
The more you study history, the more you learn that governments1 can always make bad decisions. No, even if the mistake is obviously too stupid to make. No, really. Even if they’re leaving a lot of money on the table. We don’t need to look at modern countries, where the badness might be debatable or politically controversial. History provides a lot of examples!
- States don’t need to pay attention to logistics: A republic can invade someone wildly out of reach of its armed forces, then when that fails do it again instead of reconsidering. Monarchs can march huge armies out onto the steppe and get them destroyed. Generals invade Russia!
- States can be dumb about world politics! They can disband their very successful armies and then get conquered. They can drop out of wars they’re winning because the other side is too cool to fight. They can start wars against all the world’s leading powers simultaneously.
- States don’t need to pay attention to economics. They can hyperinflate the currency. They can fix arbitrary prices. They can ban all trade.
- States don’t need to pay attention to their people. They can raise taxes so much the population plummets. They can imprison thousands of biologists for telling them they’re bad at agriculture. They can sack their own empire’s second-largest city because they heard the citizens were saying mean things about them.
There is a floor. If you are running a government, you did not lose control of the government yesterday. You might lose it today! The day is young! But the army hasn’t overthrown you yet, so it probably doesn’t hate you that much. And your neighbors haven’t conquered you, which means your army is clearly capable of fighting them off, so you are probably still paying them. A government that holds power for a long time clearly is doing enough right to not lose power.2 But that’s the only restriction on how incompetent governments can get: They have to keep power. A few useful rules for locating the competence floor:
The more wars a state picks, the more likely it is the government is good at winning wars. Governments that pick wars and lose don’t stick around for very long. (What if you want to be a great war hero but are bad at your job? Pick the right wars!)
If everyone is living in peace and harmony together, your neighbors will probably not overthrow your government. Sounds like a drag. In a peaceful world, nobody has to be good at war to not be overthrown.
If you are a democratically elected government, and you screw up too blatantly, you don’t just have to worry about a military coup. You have to worry about losing an election. Democracies can produce mediocre governments, but they can’t produce Caracalla.3
Now, this incompetence doesn’t mean governments don’t care! They often care a lot! But they tend to care about things like “winning elections” and “living in nice houses” and “proving our rivals wrong.”4 They are often too focused on that to solve problems like, say, zombie invasions.5
Governments aren’t being stupid to be stupid. No writer went up to the Prime Minister and said “here, take this nice idiot ball.” Usually there’s reasons for it; here’s three common ones:
- Everyone is used to being in Situation A. Now they’re in Situation B and can’t adapt. This can be because they’re all used to trying to optimize for getting power in the socially constructed world6 of the court and don’t know how to operate in the real world.7 It could be because they’re elderly and have trouble updating their beliefs. It can be that they’re just dealing with an unprecedented situation, like the Aztecs when the Spanish showed up.
- Principal-agent problems, a.k.a., “what’s good for the king isn’t always what’s good for the people.” This can be “the state is actively evil, and has decided to turn a plan to save the country into a plan to get cheap slaves.” this can be “nobody is considering the welfare of the guy on the ground because they are too busy,” this can be “if we don’t become war heroes we might get overthrown.”8
- Sometimes people make important decisions because they are really angry or scared or in love9 and not thinking straight. Oddly enough, giving them crowns or Cabinet seats does not fix this problem!
This doesn’t mean governments will always make bad decisions. Sometimes governments make good decisions! But they can always be dumb instead.
Or anyone else, really.
The more history I read, the more I feel like states usually fall to internal weakness at least as much as internal threats. This might just be because I’m on a China kick, but I don’t think so. Instead I think I probably owe you all a post on this.
The bar is underwater.
The best book I’ve read on state failure is Inadequate Equilibria, though you might find Eliezer more wearing than I do.
I really like A Song of Ice and Fire.
I probably need to do a post on this general concept.
My favorite case of this is that China in the 19th century was pretty bad at making decisions because it was socially impossible to admit China had fallen behind “barbarian” countries, since this was mildly treasonous.
My favorite case of this is that a book I read on the First Anglo-Sikh War says that the Punjabi government started a fight with the Brits as a deliberate plan to get their own army destroyed before it overthrew them. (It overthrew a lot of governments.) I don’t know if this is true or not, but it’s a very professional-looking book.
One of the greatest stories about people making terrible strategic decisions for emotional reasons is that apparently the Austrian Minister of War in WW1 was in love with another man’s wife, and thought that if he was a war hero she’d leave her husband for him, so he supported the war declaration. On such things does history turn…