This is a guide to dropping weight super fast with minimal effort.

One month. $200. More than 20 pounds of fat loss – guaranteed.

There are five key elements to this method: The Low Carb Diet; Cold Exposure; PAGG Stack; Kettlebell Swings; and last but not least, body monitoring.

It is based on the methods described in the book The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris, a “body hacker” who spent a decade figuring out the quickest, most effective formulas for acquiring superhuman strength and fitness so you don’t have to.

This guide is the cheat sheet to his cheat book for the truly lazy: sixty pages condensed into just six, with 90% of the ideas in 10% the content. It’s 80/20 all the way, baby – Enjoy!

Eating The Caveman

The Low Carb Diet is the lynchpin of the Four Hour Body system.

You absolutely MUST follow it.

1. Avoid “white” carbohydrates. This includes foods such as bread, rice (inc. brown), cereals, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, fried food with breading.
2. Eat the same few meals over and over again. Keep it simple and eat as much as you want – good ideas include egg whites, spinach, chicken breast, grass-fed beef, fish, lentils, black, pinto and red beans (canned are OK), broccoli, cauliflower, other mixed vegetables (frozen are OK), sauerkraut, kimchi.
3. Don’t drink calories. No fruit juice, soft drinks or milk. Instead, drink A LOT of water, as well as unsweetened tea, coffee with cinnamon, and/or one-two glasses of red wine in the evening.
4. Don’t eat fruit. Exceptions include tomatoes and a little avocado or guacamole.
5. Take one – and only ONE – day off per week and go nuts. “Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate… doesn’t downshift from extended caloric restriction.”

There are some other important tips.

• Eat breakfast within one hour – preferably 30 minutes – of getting up.
• Go protein heavy (esp. at breakfast – use two-three egg whites).
• Drink lots, lots of water.
• Taking vitamin and mineral supplements is fine, but without iron!
• Buying organic beans, or soaking them in water for a few hours, prevents farting.
• To add flavor: garlic, balsamic vinegar, black pepper, cayenne, most herbs, olive oil, salsa.
• For heating, use ghee butter or macadamia oil.
• These are OK in moderation: almonds, Brazil nuts, chickpeas, hummus, peanuts, macadamias.
• Good “dry” red wines include Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.
• There’s a special art on how to binge while losing weight. In one sentence – eat grapefruit with coffee before second meal; drink citric juices; 2.4g of cissus quadrangularis plant and 90 seconds of air squats a few minutes before meals; and consider fermented foods such as cheese, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, fermented fish, or kombucha tea.
  

Experience The Ice Age

Leveraging the laws of thermodynamics to burn more calories can be more effective than exercising your ass off. Why not let the Ice Age do the hard work for you?

• EASY – POLAR EXPLORER: “Place an icepack on the back of the neck or upper trapezius area for 20-30 minutes, preferably in the evening.” Do this five times a week, e.g. when working on a computer or reading. It’s 60% as effective as an ice bath.
• EASY – ICE ON THE ROCKS: Drink a half liter of chilled water right after waking up.
• MODERATE – COLD DRIZZLE: “Take 5-10 minute cold showers before breakfast and/or before bed.” They’s also cool for increasing lean muscle gain, immune resistance, and treating depression!
• HARD – ICEMAN: “If you’re impatient, and can tolerate more, take 20 minute baths that induce shivering.”
• EXTREME – HUMAN POLAR BEAR: Take inspiration from Lewis Pugh, shown above, whose idea of a nice vacation is swimming with the icebergs!

Carry The PAGG Stack

This is a cool new supplement that turbocharges fat loss and accelerates muscle gain.

1. 20-25mg Policosanol.
2. 100-300mg Alpha-lipoic acid
3. 325mg+ decaff Green tea flavanols (or Epigallocatechin gallate)
4. 200mg Garlic extract

Take AGG’s before every meal and a PAGG before bed.

Take one day off per week, and ONE WEEK off every two months.

You can purchase a month’s supply for c.$55 by buying separately, or make things easy and order the whole joint from PAGGStack.com for $92. Quoted costs may change and exclude shipping.

PS. If you’re really hardcore you can try the ECA Stack, which is more effective than PAGG, but be forewarned that it produces bad side effects and dependency.

Kettlebells Will Get You Ripped

Buy a kettlebell (гиря) for c.$50-80.

Girls – 35-44lb (16-20kg, 1-1.25 pood), guys – 44-53lb (20-24kg, 1.25-1.5 pood).

The Russian kettlebell swing.

• Position feet as shown to the right.
• The lowering movement is a sitting-back-on-a-chair movement, not a squatting-down one.
• Generate swing power using the hips, thigh and lower back muscles – and NOT the arms.
• Squeeze ass cheeks at the peak of the swing.
• Shoulders are pulled back and NOT in front of the knees at any time.

Do 75 swings in five reps. Increase to 150 and then weight with time.

Do Russian kettlebell swings twice a week – and NO MORE.

Once you get to 12% body fat, build a sixpack by following up kettlebels with 10 reps of myotatic crouches over a Swiss ball and 10 rept of the “Cat Vomit” exercise. You can watch a video of these 4HB exercises here.

Monitoring Body Hacking

No, that’s not the latest horror movie – at least we hope!

Improvements by the numbers will encourage you to keep on the right path, and give you advance notice if something isn’t working. So track or fail!

• Get tape measure and calipers to measure body fat.
• Create a spreadsheet with dates and columns for weight, Total Inches, and body fat.
• To get Total Inches, add up lengths of: both upper arms (mid-biceps), the waist (navel), hips (widest below waist) and both legs (mid-thigh). Use calipers instructions to estimate body fat.
• Update your spreadsheet at least once a week and draw graphs to visualize your progress.
• Get some friends to compete with you in losing weight fast. Nobody wants to be the public loser!
• Take a “before” swimsuit photo of yourself, in order to enjoy the “after” photo all the more!
• Photograph everything you eat if diet discipline isn’t your thing.
• And if you ever lose enthusiasm, then gaze at the picture above – and it will come back to you stronger than ever!

Photo Acknowledgements

1. Four Hour Body cover – Amazon.
2. Food photo – my own.
3. Lewis Pugh – National Geographic.
4. The PAGG Stack – from its sellers.
5. Kettlebell swing – Fitness Bootcamps Arizona.
6. Body fat through MRI scan – HealthHabits.ca.

The Author

Anatoly Karlin runs the site Arctic Progress, which provides the latest news, expert analysis, and travel and investment opportunities in this exciting region.

Not surprisingly, he’s particularly enthusiastic about the Ice Age parts of the Four Hour Body!

He also runs a personal blog at Sublime Oblivion about Russia, geopolitics and peak oil.

Read The Four Week Body Guide in PDF! (no links)

Yes, I know. Most self-help books are unreadable trash, written by authors hoping to make a quick buck off their unfortunate readers by inserting the latest buzzwords and exploiting online marketing. But there are several golden exceptions and I’m pretty sure I’ve identified a few of them. Let’s rip.

Ferris, Tim – The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (2010).
Category: self-help; health; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: By the author

Ferris, Tim – The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content. (2007)
Category: self-help; productivity; psychology; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: Wikipedia

Now I know you’re beginning to feel like I’m a shill for this Tim Ferris guy, but honest to Jove, he’s the real deal. I don’t mean to write a book summary, but here’s maybe 20% of the most (immediately) useful stuff in 4HB.

• The 80/20 rule. 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. A few of your friends give you the most trouble. 2500 words, or 2.5% of the total, give you 95%+ understanding of any human language.
• Eating carbohydrates gains you weight. Eating fats loses it the quickest. Surprising, counter-intuitive – but true. So get on the low carb diet and relive the caveman experience!
• Kettlebell swings twice a week, four weeks, get you ripped. Most gym exercises are fairly ineffective. Some even do more harm than good!
• Take an “ice bath” and you triple your rate of fat loss. Sounds too hardcore? Applying an icepack to the back of the neck or upper shoulders for 20-30 minutes produces 60% of the same effect.

Once you’ve set about optimizing your body, it’s time to stop being office plankton to the Man, outsource your job to India and get out into the sunshine.

The core concepts in 4HW are the 80/20 rule and Parkinson’s Law. Remember that 20% of what you do constitutes 80% of your real, accomplished work? The other 80% of your time is filled up by useless makework and artificial distractions, e.g. checking your email once every half-hour. Your task is to maximize and replicate what you do in that golden 20%, and cut out the useless 80% (or outsource it, on which there’s an entire chapter).

BTW. A ghastly image from 4HB. Probably the single best argument against obesity in world history. Worth any number of insipid “5 fruit a day” commands or essays expounding the virtues of a fat tax!

Strauss, Neil – The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005).
Category: self-help; seduction; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: Wikipedia

Strauss, Neil – Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life (2009).
Category: self-help;survivalism; collapse; Rating: 5/5
Summary: LA Times

Have trouble picking up girls? Neil Strauss’ The Game is what you’ve been waiting and hoping for (see the “Player Guide” for just the tips). Useful for girls too, for identifying those nefarious “players”. Strauss also wrote Emergency, perhaps the best popular account of modern survivalism.

Unlike Tim Ferris, Strauss doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of how to seduce a “10″ or evade pursuers in a hostile urban environment. But the story-telling is first class, the examples inspirational, and are conductive to further exploration.

King, Stephen – On Writing (2002).
Category: self-help; writing; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: Wikipedia

Bell, James Scott – Plot & Structure: Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish (2004).
Category: self-help; writing; Rating: 5/5

Many S/O readers are involved in blogging, journalism or other writing-related fields of work. Just for them, my two most useful books on writing.

On Writing, besides having many tips (e.g. write at least 1000 words a day – and TRACK them!), is itself a work of art, as could be expected from an autobiography of one of the world’s leading popular novelists. It has everything Strunk’s book has but unlike his it is actually readable.

The second book, Plot & Structure, is required reading for aspiring novelists. But it would benefit all writers, including journalists, because of its well-argued lessons on how to sustain tension and keep your readers awake (use the LEAD structure; create characters you can identify with; etc).

Finally, the benefits of brevity can’t be emphasized enough: if you can’t get to the point after 30 seconds of explanation, your partner will tune out or make an excuse for leaving. Readership plummets after 1000 words. Keep it short or you must hook your audience.

How To Read Self-Help Books & Other Odds And Ends

(1) As Ferris recommends: Be POSITIVELY SKEPTICAL. Don’t take everything at face value or make a cult out of any “lifestyle guru”. Use your independent judgment. But DON’T let doubts become an excuse for avoiding action.

(2) Don’t read self-help books like you would novels and forget about them (and you will because they just aren’t inspiring enough to stick out in your memory). Highlight important passages and then SUMMARIZE them.

(3) Apply ideas across the board to your particular objectives. Need to learn a new programming language in a weekend? Think of how you would go about learning a human language, centered around memorizing the most frequent words and reading its texts (note: if online and on Chrome, I highly recommend Bubble Translate). How could you transfer this to Java, or Python?

(4) When you own too much stuff, it begins to own you. Clutter in your living space, and clutter on your virtual space (too many unused icons on the desktop; thousands of bookmarks you will never open), are distractions that sap the will to change. Purge them all mercilessly.

(5) Visiting too many useless websites? Get a browser add-on that will automatically block them or only let you on for a few minutes per day.

(6) If you want, subscribe to a couple of self-help blogs, but make sure they’re good and readable (test it by scanning their last 5 posts). You could start off with Zen Habits and Life Hacker, and for game, Citizen Renegade (warning: gratuitous misogyny).

(7) Any first-class self-help books you would recommend? If so, please feel free to share them here. Only 20% of the genre can be expected to be any good, and narrowing them down is too hard for one person – especially in specific fields such as programming, public speaking, or creating your own hedge fund. So I’m going to crowdsource this process! Over to you…

You say "fascist", as if it's a bad thing. But dude, people love fascists!

Depressingly fatalist, morbidly truthful, irresistibly Nietzschean. That’s Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle” in a nutshell: a meandering trawl through disciplines such as genetics, psychology and culture that culminates in a theory of evil, purporting to explain its historical necessity, its creative potential and the possibility of it ever being vanquished. The odds do not appear to be good. For in the world painted by Bloom, peace is submission, social hierarchies are natural, ideas are polarizing, and liberal individualism is invidious to the collective “superorganism” that both oppresses, nourishes and saves us. Fascism really is the “natural state” in every sense of the term.

Bloom, Howard – The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995)
Category: human society, psychology, history; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Amazon reviews, James Schultz

More S/O material on related topics:

• Violence is Reality – the grisly reality of prehistoric war.
• If Malthus and Ibn Khaldun were to meet for coffee… – the overwhelming importance of social cohesion, or Asabiyah, to national success.
• The Belief Matrix – my own ideas on the role of sobornost’.

Superorganism, or: The Whole is Greater than its Parts

Bloom starts off by providing reams of evidence on why it is completely logical for nature to be “red in tooth and claw”. Selfish genes need to replicate and it is no great loss if they doom billions of individuals to untimely deaths in the struggle for evolutionary survival. Hence, creatures battle for the “privilege of procreation”. High-ranking gorilla females kill their harem rivals’ offspring. Existence in primitive societies is so brutish and short that it is as if they were fighting World War Two every year and life eternal (the myth of the “noble savage” really is just that). The wellspring of Western civilization, the Romans, have the rape of the Sabines as one of their proudest foundational myths. In short, violence is reality.

[The Rape of the Sabine Women, Pietro da Cortona.]

One interesting theory he mentions is that of the triune brain, according to which the human mind is actually composed of three brains – the reptilian (stimuli, mating, territoriality), mammalian (loyalty to family and clan) and primate (reasoning faculty). The reptilian component makes creatures nasty and violent, while the mammalian reinforces the power of social groups. It is only the latter that allows man to dream about peace, even as they hack each other to pieces in the waking world.

In the next section, Blooms asks why people commit suicide. He cites a lot of research showing that isolation is the ultimate poison – without social approval, people not only tend to become depressed, but their physiology goes on self-destruct mode, encouraging illnesses, insanity and suicidal tendencies. This is a negative feedback loop because once you are depressed, other people no longer want to be around you or make friends with it (but that, too, works in the interests of the group). He ties this in to the larger idea that just as cells, sponges and ants can only survive as constituent particularly of a greater whole or not at all, so humans are part of a greater “superorganism” that is society.

Paradoxically, the logic of “group selection” encourages loyalty to the superorganism that cares little if at all for the individuals that owe it their fealty. For instance, upon seeing a pride of lions beginning to stalk a herd of gazelles on the African savanna, the beasts that notice the predators begin prancing about in warning. This actually diminishes their individual chances of survival, since lions are likeliest to go for animals that are acting unlike the rest of the herd. The best outcome for the individual gazelle upon noticing the lions would be simply to retreat slowly to the safe center of the herd. However, over the evolutionary eons, groups with many individuals exhibiting these self-preserving tendencies presumably got weeded out, for self-interest is the bane of group interests. Hence in real life we do get a lot of genuinely altruistic loyalty to the group – amongst ants, gazelles, humans.

Humans who are no longer needed by the group really are no longer needed and might as well wane and die (“the Moor has done his duty, he can now go home”). Durkheim suggested suicide was essentially individuals altruistically relieving society of their own burden to it, and I would suggest that this is especially evident in societies like Japan without the traditional Western Christian guilt. I would also suggest that this is the reason why ostracism and exile were so much more fearful punishments in the pre-industrial world than they would seem in today’s global rootless cosmopolitanism. In an age when bonds were strong and essential, but geographically tied to small regions, being shorn of human contact would have been psychologically crippling.

All this of course has a more than passing resemblance to Turchin’s and Ibn Khaldun’s work on social cohesion and Asabiyah. There’s a reason why through the ages soldiers have willingly charged cold steel pikes and machine gun fire for the glory of their nation. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and far more important too – and the superorganism knows this.

[The Battle of Gettysburg. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!]

Though shalt not kill… but only as long as they’re members of your tribe. Otherwise it’s cool. Note that primitive societies believe “humans” to be only their own tribe or clan (in fact if you look at the etymology, many ethnicities call themselves “the people” in their own tongues). Civilization has expanded the definition of those considered to be human to their own nations: in the case of the Jews, to the Israelites; in the case of later “universal” religions, potentially to all humanity (except inveterate heathen, of course). Even many modern liberals are intolerant of those who don’t share their liberal ideals. Why these divisions? Having enemies is really good for social consolidation (see “castle identity”, “residential fortress”, “siege mentality”); human societies are defined not by what they are, but by what they oppose and hate. Or as Orwell would say, war is peace.

There is always a deep wellspring of frustration in any society. Bloom quotes interesting research showing that fro cells to ants to humans, each unit performs a preordained role. In any ant colony, there are industrious workers and lazy workers, soldiers and queens. Separate the industrious and lazy workers into separate group and new social roles are created as some former busybodies become idlers and former idlers become industrious. In observations of summer campers, it was noted that after a few hours, bunk-mates assumed four specific social roles: dominant “alpha male”, unpopular “bully”, “joker” sidekick and the over-eager “nerd” who is kicked around by everyone.

All human minds possess thousands of unrealized personalities which could have been but aren’t. This results in an undercurrent of frustration, which can be channeled into the hatred of the interloper that binds it together. Early cellular lifeforms discovered that they could dispose of calcium, poisonous in high quantities, by using it to build shells. In similar fashion, common hatreds glue societies together, such “that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture addresses the demon of its hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose”.

From Genes to Memes, Yet Us vs. Them Always

In another chapter full of worthy insights, Bloom notes that the main vector of evolution shifted from genes swimming through “the protoplasmic soup of the early earth” to memes floating through a “sea of human brains”. Both genes and memes mercilessly exploit their hosts in their struggle for survival and bid to overspread the earth. Though rat broods are normally loving to each other, insert a rodent from a different clan that smells different, and they tear the unfortunate apart – even if he carries their genetic stock (rats tell who is who by smell). Humans are more advanced: they have language, culture and religions that bind closer than any uniform. The Hebrew genocide of the Canaanites was just and splendid, for their ethno-genetic stock was chosen by the LORD God.

Over the millennia of ancient history, memes gradually divorced themselves from the genetic level altogether, appearing in “universal” religions like Zoroastrianism and Christianity after St. Paul. Competing universal religions and ideologies now encompass nearly the whole world. The confer several advantages. First, the effective illusion of control, which is good guarantor of health and mental agility (note that most medical procedures even today are based on getting the patient to believe she will recover and hence doing so). Second, memes help consolidate huge communities, and hence ensure their own long-term survival.

A society is, in effect, a vast, problem-solving neural net – humans are to it like brain cells are to a mind. As a swarm of individuals interact in limited and simply ways (bees, humans), an extraordinarily complex structure emerges (a beehive, the modern economy). One feature of human society is male expendability – from cradle to old age, men have weaker immune systems, are more accident-prone and die quicker. This is especially marked in primitive societies where warfare is brutal and incessant.

The reasons are biologically obvious: whereas one man can inseminate dozens of women, one woman can only reproduce about once a year at most. So Mother Nature can afford to play with men as dice, ensuring that only the fittest survive. Interestingly, life is most brutal and profligate in the south, where resources are plentiful. In the tropics, male birds tend to have bright plumes to attract female attention (which also makes them highly visible to predators); but in the north, birds have grayer colors designed to blend into the surroundings, and their sex tends to be indistinguishable to the human eye. That is because the female needs male help to rear her chicks through the hard winter months of dearth. Likewise with humans, polygamy has been most prevalent in southern cultures – even if many guys die in battles for prestige, territory and slaves, the women can continue the race without most of them.

Most men failed, and died early or had little reproductive success (in primitive societies only 50% of men end up having offspring, compared to 80% of women). But those who made it, like Chinggis Khan, became the biological fathers of millions (King Saud was probably the last such very influential warlord). But as history progressed, memes steadily took center place. The generators of successful memes, like St. Paul, Marx or Sayyid Qutb, took the center place in the lives of millions and billions!

The Pecking Order: Hierarchy is Good

Stalin was right: the weak get beaten. That’s what happens to those at the bottom of the pecking order, the phenomenon observed in the 1920′s where chickens formed a fixed hierarchy that determined priority access to food and shelter. While the top hen was well fed, warm and respected, the one at the bottom was ostracized and pecked by everyone else. Likewise, those at the top are most sexually successful in primitive societies. In a series of experiments in which three male rats and three female rats were brought together in a cage, some 92% of offspring accrued to the dominant male!

Success breeds success, failure breeds failure. Low ranking baboons suffer increased levels of glucocorticoids, a stress hormone that acts as a slow poison, and walk around slouched and defeated. The same thing operates in human societies – being at the bottom of the pecking order is bad for you, as you suffer from increased rates of depression, blood pressure, heart attacks, etc – obviously this also makes you unattractive and entrenches your gutter status. In contrast, higher ranking monkeys people walk upright and their testicles hang down further. (So consequently no wonder that that is the reason why men are recommended Alexander posture and walking with one’s legs wide apart… it is to project the image of the physical aspects of the alpha male; on third thought that would explain society’s dislike for the “pick-up artist”, since their craft essentially cheats the naturally emergent hierarchy by getting men to mimic alpha traits instead of actually being one).

There’s a very good reason for the existence of these feedback loops that reinforce social hierarchy – the alternative to hierarchy, with its inherent, diffuse coercion, is anarchy. This entails a state of constant expenditure of previous, limited energy on banditry and defense. In this situation, the weak and friendless get trampled down even more quickly and ruthlessly than if they were (merely) oppressed within a hierarchic system. So it is actually in the interests of everyone, including even its lowliest members. (The exceptions are, of course, those who believe that their position in the hierarchy is unjustified on the basis of their abilities or beliefs, e.g. the Bolshevik insurrectionist, the Islamist cell member, etc, who would like to level the current hierarchic system in a cleansing purge before rebuilding it in their own image). Bloom notes that “superior chickens make friends”, not only within societies, but within the community of tribes and nations. Just as powerful Yanamamo tribes attracted allies and clobbered the weak and friendless tribes, and Rome maintained coalitions awed by its political and military prowess, so the modern US draws on the loyalty of many of its allies in the West and elsewhere through the visibility of its hegemonic power. (It even gets financial credit at low prices due to an effect called American alpha!)

In the last few chapters, Bloom ingeniously – or in an act of unintentional hypocrisy, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt – shows “us vs them”, memes and hierarchy at work in his own book! He states America’s refusal to support France and Britain in their neo-colonial 1956 endevour to seize back the Suez Canal was morally wrong, proclaims the superiority of the West over the cultures of the Third World and labels Islam a “killer culture” harboring the next barbarians. (Of course, the Islamist crazies promptly did their best to prove him right). No, you don’t need to be a PC-head to realize that in the last hundred pages Bloom strays from his fascinating insights into a morass of opinion(ated) projections of his social theories onto modern geopolitics and the “clash of civilizations”. They can be skipped. The only more or less useful additional point he makes is that giving gifts is insulting, like the World Bank does with Africa, because it created humiliating cultural dependency relationships (e.g. demands to Africans to do things the way armchair economists with no practical experience there want them to). China’s straightforward infrastructure or cash for resources approach is better for Africans, both spiritually and probably even economically.

The Lucifer Principle: Superorganism, Memes & Hierarchy

These elements combined form the Lucifer Principle. The superorganism – be it body, village, nation (“imagined community”) or civilization – curtails your individuality, and has no qualms about throwing your life and health away if doing so would serve the greater good. It can throw you against another superorganism so as to weed out the weak, identify the strong, and consolidate itself internally and ideologically (war is peace). It can – and does – trample your mental and physical health under the social stratification it requires to maintain its own complexity (peace is submission). But it also nurtures and protects you with a love harsh but true… for while you can surmount the burdens and realize yourself (slavery is freedom), without society, that would be impossible… survival itself is impossible (freedom is death). I would say that the essence of the Lucifer Principle is that fascism is the natural state.

[The essence of the book in one comic. Translation: "What's the matter, you fat monkey?" "Fuck off, fucking fascist!" "You say 'fascist', as if it's a bad thing. But dude, people love fascists. Have you ever met a woman who fantasizes about being tied up and raped by a *liberal*?"]

Though Rome “had been an oppressor, it was also “the source of nourishment and peace”. It’s end brought not freedom, but death, says Bloom, as roving bandits moved in to pick its carcass. (Though I would make the caveat that by its end the Western Empire armies were themselves no better than bandits). In conclusions: “Superorganism, ideas, and the pecking order – these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle”.

There were several problems with the book. It was tied in loosely with the book and while chock full of fascinating details, many of them did little or nothing to advance or support the argument. The poor organization made writing this review rather tedious. The two chapters at the end, in which Bloom tried to apply disjointed elements of the Lucifer Principle onto modern politics and geopolitics, were largely irrelevant and should have been split off into a separate volume.

Warre bringeth ruine, ruine bringeth poverty, poverty procureth peace, and peace in time increaseth riches, riches causeth statelinesse, statelinesse increaseth envie, envie in the end procureth deadly malice, mortall malice proclaimeth open warre and bataille, and from warre again as before is rehearsed.

Turchin, Peter – War and Peace and War (2006)
Category: history, cliodynamics, war; Rating: 4/5
Summary: Amazon reviews

Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, and Saint Matthew meet up for coffee

1) According to the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, empires only form when a tribe, nation, or religious sect attains a high degree of asabiya, – the ability of a group’s members to cooperate with each other, to maintain their identity and discipline in the face of adversity, and to impose their beliefs, values, and control over other groups. Other similar expressions are social cohesion or “social capital”. As Ibn Khaldun wrote, “royal authority and dynastic power are attained only through a group and asabiya. This is because aggressive and defensive strength is obtained only through… mutual affection and willingness to fight and die for each other”. (To put this in context, this is similar to Lev Gumilev’s theories of “passionarity” / пассионарность (willingness to sacrifice oneself for one’s values) or my own ideas on the sobornost’-poshlost’ / rationalism-mysticism belief matrix, in which a state of sobornost’, of course, refers to a high level of asabiya).

This is not surprising – military cooperation and morale is an important factor in military success. See the stunning successes of the early Islamic armies spreading the revelations of Mohammed, or of Nazi Germany. Later in the book, Turchin references the work of Trevor Dupuy, who showed that the Germans had a “combat efficiency” of 1.45, compared to the British 1.0 and American 1.1, in the battles on the western front of 1944 – in other words, excluding equipment and terrain, each Germany soldier was militarily “worth” 20% more than an Anglo-Saxon one.

Now why do some societies have higher asabiya than others? Ibn Khaldun’s analysis covered the dynamics of the desert / settled boundary in the North African Maghreb. Amongst the desert Bedouin tribes, constant inter-tribal warfare exerts group selective pressure favoring the emergence of tribes high in asabiya. These selective pressures are much weaker in settled civilizations with rule of law. Now these defects are more than made up for civilizations’ greater population density and better technologies, which can normally yield much bigger, better-equipped armies than anything the barbarians can muster. However, should civilization fall into a state of internal strife and social dissolution, it becomes “vulnerable to conquest from the desert” by a coalition of Bedouin tribes organized around one group with a particularly high asabiya. However, as soon as the barbarians become ensconced within their new domains, they gradually assimilate into the urban civilization, the high asabiya of the core group dissipates, and the cycle begins anew.

Turchin extends Ibn Khaldun’s beyond the Maghreb into a general theory of the rise of empires, almost all of which arise along “meta-ethnic frontiers” featuring bloody conflicts between starkly alien peoples. The constant military pressure and hatred for the Other binds the borderlanders together, fostering the relative economic equality, social solidarity, and discipline that will in time build an empire. Examples of this include the conflict of the Roman farmer-warriors against the Celtic barbarians of the Po Valley that melded the Latin peoples into the Roman Empire, the centuries-long struggle against the raiding, slave-taking steppe Hordes that incubated Muscovy’s rise, and the violent frontier wars against the Native Americans that formed the “melting pot” identity of the United States. The entire history of Europe from the Roman Empire to Poland-Lithuania has been characterized by the millennial, north-eastern drift of the meta-ethnic frontier between Rome/Christianity and tribal pagans, a frontier which repeatedly spawned new states and empires (Rome itself, the Caroliangian Empire, and the myriad Germanic and Slavic states.

2) The author notes that Ibn Khaldun’s blaming of “luxury” and “senility” for the degeneration of civilizations is an inadequate explanation, being nothing more than a biological metaphor with questionable applicability. Instead, Turchin lays out the theory of cliodynamics, the “mathematized history” that attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of the “secular cycles” of imperial rise and fall by modeling Malthusian dynamics, i.e., when a great empire arises the resulting stability and prosperity produce overpopulation, which results in dearth, rising inequality (i.e. the old middle-class shrinks, while oligarchs and the landless indigent veer into prominence), and an intensified struggle for scarce resources that undermines social solidarity. Eventually, a severe shock such as a disastrous harvest, peasant uprisings, civil war, or foreign invasion provokes a full-fledged Malthusian crisis that triggers the collapse of the empire. I’ve already written about cliodynamics in detail here.

(Incidentally, I’ve also connected the decline of asabiya (or in my terminology, the transition from sobornost’ to poshlost’) to the socio-demographic cycles of cliodynamics. The theme of The Ages of Man, in which the bounteous Golden Age of the first dynasties (imperial rise) degenerates into the “immorality” and dearth of the Iron Age (social atomization, Malthusian stress, decline), – finally followed by an apocalyptic “cleansing” and start again (Malthusian collapse, barbarian invasions, Dark Ages, etc), is common to all civilizational traditions. See my Musings on the decline and fall of civilizations and explanation of the Malthusian Loop.)

3) Matthew 25:29: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”. In other words, there is a natural tendency for wealth to become concentrated in the hands of the few, called the Matthew Principle. In other words, if a pre-industrial civilization enjoys socio-political stability, has ineffective redistributive mechanisms, no free land / overpopulation, and a social mentality that accepts (or even glorifies – see “conspicuous consumption”) big levels of wealth inequality, within several generatons it will develop prodigal levels of social stratification. Wealth inequality tends to reach a maximum just before a collapse of the entire system: for instance, the Roman Empire fell for the last time just decades after reaching “peak inequality” in 400AD. Similar things can be said about the end of republican Rome, the decline of medieval France, and even Russia 1917 or Iran 1979.

Why does the Matthew Principle operate so strongly in Malthusian settings? In agrarian societies, private property is the normal way of storing inherited wealth. If a family has lots of children, each one will inherit ever smaller plots. To make ends meet, they will be eventually forced to borrow loans; if they can’t, their land is taken over by their creditors, and they now have to hire themselves out as agricultural laborers or drift into the cities where they can try to join a trade (hence the reason why cities expand so much in times of subsistence stress). Meanwhile, those who have land can 1) rent it out at exorbitant rates (since the demand for it is so high in an overpopulated country) or 2) they can sell the grain their tenants or serfs produce at high prices (again because there are more mouths to feed). The resulting accumulation of drifting unemployed are matchwood for social unrest (e.g. see the role of the sans-culottes in the French Revolution).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the social spectrum, the elites or nobility grow at a faster rate than the commoners because they have better access to food and can afford more children, and die less quickly. Those with land benefit from cheaper labor and the rise in rent prices, while manufactures become easier to afford thanks to the increase in trade and urban artisans. However, intra-elite inequality also increases, and there is increasing tension as some poor nobles see peasant arrivistes rising above them in social status. Because the king depends on the nobles for governing his kingdom, state institutions must be expanded to “feed” all those nobles who are left out of inheritances, fostering corruption, aristocratic intrigues, and social stratification. Those at the very top of the social pyramid engage in the most extravagant conspicuous consumption, provoking envy amongst the have-nots. All these widening social chasms reduce the society’s asabiya.

The plagues, wars, and internal violence unleashed by Malthusian collapse tends to kill off most of the top and bottom of the social period. The landless indigent starve to death, or their weakened immune systems succumb to disease, or they get carried away as the cannon fodder in the uprisings that wrack the failed state. The nobles also die fast, thanks to their status as a military caste. Generational cycles of violence and wars and political purges carry many of them off. After the collapse, land becomes cheaper and labor becomes more expensive. Subsistence stress largely subsides and society becomes much more egalitarian. The cycle begins anew.

Criticisms and Consequences

I think Turchin’s book is a good introductory text to the new science of cliodynamics, one he himself did much to found (along with Nefedov and Korotayev). However, though readable – mostly, I suspect, because I am interested in the subject – it is not well-written. The text was too thick, there were too many awkward grammatical constructions, and the quotes are far, far too long.

More importantly, 1) the theory is not internally well-integrated and 2) there isn’t enough emphasis on the fundamental differences separating agrarian from industrial societies. For instance, Turchin makes a lot of the idea that the Italians’ low level of asabiya (“amoral familism”) was responsible for it’s only becoming politically unified in the late 19th century. But why then was it the same for Germany, the bloody frontline for the religious wars of the 17th century? And why was France able to build a huge empire under Napoleon, when it had lost all its “meta-ethnic frontiers” / marches by 1000 AD? For answers to these questions about the genesis of the modern nation-state, one would be much better off by looking at more conventional explanations by the likes of Benedict Anderson, Charles Tilly, or Gabriel Ardant.

Nowadays, modern political technologies – the history textbook, the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, the radio and Internet - have long displaced the meta-ethnic frontier as the main drivers behind the formation of asabiya. Which is certainly not to say that meta-ethnic frontiers are unimportant – they are, especially in the case of Dar al-Islam, which feels itself to be under siege on multiple fronts (the “bloody borders” of clash-of-civilizations-speak), which according to Turchin’s theory should promote a stronger Islamic identity. But their intrinsic importance has been diluted by the influence of modern media.

Turchin has an interesting discussion of the future of the US, China, Russia, and the European Union based on the conclusions of War and Peace and War. In particular, one very relevant point he made is that to become a true empire, the EU requires 1) the development of a European-wide loyalty towards it, willing to shed blood for it, and 2) its core state, Germany, must continue to underwrite it financially. None of these conditions, I think it is safe to say, will be met. As I’ve recently pointed out, Germany is most emphatically not prepared to sacrifice its national interests in favor of a European project over which it does not have direct control; the Germans have their own problems, foremost among them the demographic aging of the population. Furthermore, only 37% of Germans are today prepared to fight for their own country, according to the findings of the World Values Survey*; if that is the case, then how many Germans would fight (and risk death) for the Brussels bureaucracy? 5% would probably be generous. Quite simply the EU does not have any foundations for an imperial future, nor the will to create one; it is very fragile and will start unraveling at the smallest shocks.

Another major problem with the book that makes it incomplete is that although Turchin touches and speculates about the modern world and the future – in particular, he notes that the rising inequality, crime rates, slower growth, etc, of the post-1960′s industrialized world is similar to the traditional symptoms of an emerging Malthusian crisis – he does not connect the dots with the Limits to Growth, the theory that explicitly states that we are being swept into a Malthusian crisis due to global overpopulation and resource depletion. This is a far more important development than the techno-hype he devotes much of the last chapter to.

In the end I gave a 4/5 for this book, although it could have potentially gotten 5*/5. Turchin did valuable work in emphasizing how the material (e.g. the Malthusian) interacts with the spiritual (asabiya) in history, whereas many lesser theorists regard the latter as a “mystical” factor unworthy of serious attention. However, the book suffered from 1) poor writing, 2) too many marginal details that should have been edited out, and 3) unsuccessful application of the theory to the current, post-agrarian era. He should either have left it out entirely, or spent a lot more time doing it better.

* From the latest “wave” of the World Values Survey, “Of course, we all hope that there will not be another war, but if it were to come to that, would you be willing to fight for your country?” I think this question is an excellent way of gauging asabiya in a nation, since it directly addresses the issue of life, death, and self-sacrifice. The results are very interesting.

The Scandinavian countries – limp-wristed feminist socialists that they are – all say a resounding “yes” (Sweden 86%, Norway 88%, Finland 84%). Similarly, for all the problems of the post-Communist transition, Eastern European nations also retain high levels of asabiya (Poland 75%, Russia 83%, Georgia 70%), though Serbia 61% is lower (maybe because they’ve already fought) and so is Ukraine 69% (its Russophones aren’t as loyal as West or Central Ukrainians). Most of the Muslim countries say “yes” (Iran 81%, Egypt 80%, Morocco 77%), including a whopping 97% in Turkey. Iraq 37% is the sole outlier. Similarly, the Asian nations also have high levels of patriotism (China 87%, India 81%, South Korea 73%).

The United States 63% isn’t as high as one might think, and curiously close to France 61%, Great Britain 62%, and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world. The nations of Latin America tend to have similar figures. The Mediterranean countries, the old countries, and the countries defeated in World War Two are the last willing to put their lives on the line for their nation (Italy 43%, Spain 45%, Japan 25%, Germany 37%).

Meadows, Donella & J. Randers, D. Meadows – Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004). BUY THE BOOK!
Category: world systems, resource depletion, pollution; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: wiki; synopsis; WSJ story.

The first book was published in 1972, commissioned by a circle of statesmen, businesspeople, and scientists called the Club of Rome. The LTG models, using the latest advances in systems theory and computer modeling, suggested that business-as-usual economic growth on a finite planet would eventually lead to stagnating and then falling living standards, as ever more industrial capital has to be diverted towards mitigating the consequences of growth, e.g. soil degradation, resource depletion, and runaway pollution.

Cornucopians and establishment “experts” have tried to discredit LTG by claiming that its predictions of global apocalypse failed to materialize; instead, hasn’t the world seen remarkable economic growth since 1972? These criticisms are unfounded. First, the LTG modelers did not make any concrete forecasts, but merely a range of scenarios based on varying initial conditions (e.g. global resource endowments) and future political choices. Not all the scenarios led to collapse – a reasonable global standard of living is preserved under scenarios in which humanity makes a transition back below the limits towards sustainable development.  Second, none of those scenarios projected a collapse before 2015 at the earliest, so the claim is invalidated even if you treat the worst case scenario as a prediction. As such, we can only conclude that these critics are either liers or haven’t actually read the book.

In this 30-year update, the authors note that their more pessimistic conclusions are already coming true – for instance, in per capita terms, global grain production peaked in 1984 and the marine catch reached an all-time high in 1988. Both have been on a slow, downward plateau since. (This finally culminated in the global foot riots of 2008 and rising “food protectionism” on the part of agricultural net exporters). Contrary to the hype surrounding globalization, the “new economy”, the flat world, etc, global GDP growth rates peaked in the 1960′s, and have since settled down to a lower level practically everywhere outside emerging Asia (and they may yet go into outright stagnation in the 2010′s due to the convergence of peak oil, geopolitical stresses, and the decline of the West). Furthermore, this slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality, between and within countries. Overall, the authors believe that humanity’s ecological footprint overtook the carrying capacity of the Earth sometime around 1980, ushering in “overshoot”.

A few things we should note before going further. LTG is not about particular phenomena, such as peak oil – though in itself very important, it is but a symptom of much deeper, underlying trends (the limits to growth). Second, the models indicate that growth will only begin to really falter once the system is in severe overshoot, so for the 1970-2010 period the LTG authors did not expect any major divergence between the unending growth predicted by neo-classical macroeconomics, and their own biophysical / systems dynamics models which account for the vital role of energy and ecological factors to sustaining growth. As the authors note, “we must all wait another decade for conclusive evidence about who has the better understanding” (and so far the economists are off to a bad start).

Exponential Growth, Limits, and Overshoot

The definition of exponential growth from the Sublime Glossary.

Exponential growth: Occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function’s current value, e.g. x = exp(t). In other words, self-reproducing entities exhibit exponential growth, as do any further entities driven by them. When you have both exponential growth and limits to growth, the eventual result is overshoot and collapse. (AK, see Wiki fables for allegories)

The human population naturally exhibits exponential growth. Whenever total fertility rates are substantially above the 2.1 children per woman needed for simple population replacement, the population will usually grow very rapidly. In Malthusian, pre-industrial societies, this population growth typically exceeded the rate of growth of the carrying capacity; when the two drew level, population growth ceased as lower wages, elite predation, and food dearth raised mortality rates and lowered fertility rates. This increasing brittleness of the system, which made it vulnerable to shocks like poor harvests or peasant uprisings, is the single most convincing explanation for the cyclical emergence and collapse of empires.

In modern industrial societies, the effects of exponential population growth are modulated by the demographic transition, the tendency for fertily rates to transition to or below population replacement rates with increasing wealth. However, the effects of these gains on reducing the human impact on the environment is more than balanced out by the growth of the stock of industrial capital. This growth is inherently exponential, because the machine tool building sector that constitutes the base of the industrial ecosystem essentially reproduces itself, i.e. you need machines to build more machines. Labor and capital factor inputs, in their turn, are the motors of exponential growth in all other spheres of the human economy – food production, goods production, resource extraction, pollution emissions, services provision, etc.

[Representation of the industrial system].

Therefore, population and industrial capital can be said to have “an inherent system structure to produce the behavior of exponential growth”, which in turn drive increases in the food, energy, goods, and services needed to sustain that same growing population and industrial system. This increases the system’s level of physical throughput, the “continuous flows of energy and materials needed to keep people, cars, houses, and factories functioning”. However, both the materials-providing planetary sources (hydrocarbons, metals, minerals, etc) and the pollution-absorbing planetary sinks (soils, oceans, air, etc) needed to sustain a certain level of physical throughput are limited (the former can be depleted, the latter can be overfilled). There are hard planetary limits to the “rate at which humanity can extract resources (crops, grass, wood, fish) and emit wastes (greenhouse gases, toxic substances) without exceeding the productive or absorptive capacities of the world”. Once those limits are breached, development becomes unsustainable and we enter a state of overshoot.

To overshoot means to go too far, to grow so large so quickly that limits are exceeded. When an overshoot occurs, it induces stresses that begin to slow and stop growth. The three causes of overshoot are always the same, at any scale from personal to planetary. First, there is growth, acceleration, rapid change. Second, there is some form of limit or barrier, beyond which the moving system may not safely go. Third, there is a delay or mistake in the perceptions and the responses that try to keep the system within its limits. The delays can arise from inattention, faulty data, a false theory about how the system responds, deliberate efforts to mislead, or from momentum that prevents the system from being stopped quickly.

Although the planetary sources usually appear large on paper, only a small fraction of them tend to be economically recoverable due to the law of diminishing returns. All the low-hanging fruit are picked first, such as “supergiant” oil fields, rich copper ore deposits, etc, or in other words energy sources with high energy return on energy invested (EROEI), thus leaving only remoter, deeper and more dilute resources such as polar oil, unconventional liquids, etc. Their extraction costs soar exponentially and requisition an ever greater share of the industrial base, leaving less room for consumer products (vital for political stability), the agricultural base (to prevent starvation), investment in capital stock renewal (to prevent the depreciation of the industrial base), and environmental mitigation (to prevent runaway pollution from wrecking other sectors).

Due to the dropping EROEI of newer energy sources, ever greater volumes have to be excavated and processed just to keep standing in place (e.g. coal’s gross energy content peaked in 1998 in the US, despite that volumes have continued increasing since). These diminishing returns per unit of capital employed towards resource extraction lead to rising pollution, which negatively feeds back into the agricultural base and human health. We could divert resources from other sectors to combat this pollution, e.g. through emissions reductions or geoengineering. Alternatively, rapid climate change coupled with declining oil and fertiliser output may lead to catastrophic falls in agricultural output, which could only be mitigated for a time by diverting capital and energy into this vital sector – but which would hurt the long-term prospects for renewal in the energy extraction and industrial sectors! And so goes our Faustian trap…

Below are four examples of these phenomena in action.

An example of diminishing returns / lowest fruit being picked first. The quality of copper ore being mined is falling, and more and more energy needs to be expended to get the same quantity of copper. Eventually, the returns may become so low that mining it will no longer be at all profitable, at which point the system collapses to a lower level of complexity and salvage becomes an attrative strategy.

PS. Note the counter-intuitive spike in the early 1930′s, correlating to the Great Depression. Economic retreat forces the shutdown of the least efficient mines, because the efforts they have to expend on extraction now surpass what they get back in profits. Unless the state takes increasingly coercive measure to maintain physical output at all costs, requisitioning labor and capital in a last-ditch Stakhanovite effort to prolong industrialism in a game of “last man standing”, the end of the industrial age will see the same general pattern.

As the ore grade falls, more and more material has to be extracted and processed to get the same amount of copper. This naturally results in soaring pollution emissions, which will put increasing stress on regional and global biocapacity.

An explanation for the drastic improvements in air quality, river health, fuel economy, etc, in advanced industrial nations in the 1970′s-1980′s – picking the lowest-hanging fruit is pretty cheap. But beyond a certain point, reducing pollution becomes without a direct fall in physical output becomes prohibitively expensive.

One more example of limits (the main ones, resource depletion and CO2 pollution, are covered elsewhere in this blog) - arable land availability. The amount of land devoted to agriculture has remained constant in recent decades, though its quality has decreased as good land becomes exhausted and more marginal lands were brought into exploitation. Crop yields have risen and continue to rise, but 1) they are overly dependent on the intensification of farming, e.g. using (natural-gas dependent) fertilizers that mask the decline in natural soil fertility and 2) as noted above, they have not kept up with population growth since the 1980′s.

The graph shows possible food futures: if no more land is lost and crop yields double, then the world’s 8bn people can be fed on a comfortable West European diet. If on the other hand “erosion, climate change, costly fossil fuels, falling water tables… reduce yields from present levels”, then there will be a global Malthusian crisis. Possible solutions: “farming methods that conserve and enhance soil – such as terracing, contour plowing, composting, cover cropping, polyculture, and crop rotation”, and in the tropics, “alley cropping and agroforestry” – all methods that achieve high yields, improve the soil, and don’t require prodigious fossil fuel and fertilizer inputs.

Basically, LTG gives one a valuable sense of how interconnected all these global systems are, about just how universal the law of diminishing returns is, and how the failure to move decisively towards a sustainable economy now will lead to collapse further down the road (and the later we postpone this transition, the greater will be the eventual collision).

The most important thing is to make the human industrial ecosystem a closed loop, in which population ceases to grow, and a recycling sector feeds back wastes as inputs into the system instead of continuing drawdown to maintain an unsustainably-high “phantom” carrying capacity.

Why recycling matters: “undiscovered reserves” (sources) and the sinks for “solid waste” are both limited; hence, a high standard of living can only be preserved by 1) redirecting most wastes back within the loop and 2) directly reducing material throughput by technological innovation (energy efficiency, ecotechnology, informatics).

The World3 Scenarios

All of these are feedback loops that I’ve described form the basis of the World3 computer models that the LTG authors used in making their scenarios. They are reproduced below, in concise detail.

The central feedback loops of the World3 model govern the growth of population and of industrial capital. Two positive feedback loops involving births and investment generate the exponential growth behavior of population and capital. The two negative feedback loops involving deaths and depreciation tend to regulate this exponential growth. The relative strengths of the various loops depend on many other factors in the system.

Some of the interconnections between population and industrial capital operate through agricultural capital, cultivated land, and pollution. Each arrow indicates a casual relationship, which may be immediate or delayed, large or small, positive or negative, depending on the assumptions included in each model run.

Population and industrial capital are also influenced by the levels of service capital (such as health and education services) and of non-renewable resources.

The “initial conditions” and assumptions are overall rather optimistic, for instance, the ones dealing with the power of the environment to clean up toxic pollution.  The model leaves out corruption, military expenditures, wars and political disruptions – although vital, they are too hard to model with any degree of rigor (I write about these in my posts on Collapse Ethics and Ecotechnic Dictatorship). Chronic food and energy shortages will lead to civil unrest and political instability, necessitating greater expenditures on law enforcement and assorted populist gimmicks (e.g. the tinpot dictatorships that will rise up in the pre-Collapse period), taking away industrial capital and managerial resources from the industrial base, agriculture, and other critical sectors.

Statistical bodies will manipulate inflation and GDP growth figures to preserve an image of stability, even as creeping normalcy converges to an ever darker reality. There will be a scramble to secure the world’s remaining sources of high-density resources, which will lead to a greater share of the industrial base being devoted to (unproductive) military production. Elites will mobilize support for permanent war and surveillance by citing the moral imperative of fighting freedom-hating terrorists, evil empires, and/or maintaining global peace, security and stability. And so on.

Basically, by excluding these political and geopolitical variables, the World3 model presents the uppermost possibilities for the “real” world, even in the standard run which leads to collapse. This standard run is reproduced below.

[LTG standard run. Click to enlarge.]

As you can see, it leads to overshoot and collapse. Why? Because signals and responses to problems are delayed, and limits are erodable.

Examples of erosion – 1) as hunger returns, resources are concentrated into intensifying agricultural exploitation at the cost of preserving longterm soil fertility, 2) as more industrial capital is needed to maintain a certain level of resource extraction, pollution abatement, and agricultural production, less is left over to counteract the depreciation of the industrial capital stock, which begins to wither away, 3) worst of all, increasing pollution can erode the pollution absorption mechanisms themselves, thus increasing the rate of pollution buildup – this is already evident in the reduced ability of the biosphere (forests, oceans, etc) to soak up human carbon emissions.

Symptoms of overshoot, many of which are already becoming self-evident:

Primary Physical Symptoms – Resource stocks fall, and wastes and pollution accumulate.

• Capital, resources, and labor diverted to activities compensating for the loss of services that were formerly provided without cost by nature (for example, sewage treatment, air purification, water purification, flood control, pest control, restoration of soil nutrients, pollination, or the preservation of species) – AK: In the worst case scenario, geoengineering would mean that the most basic function previously performed by Gaia, maintaining planetary homeostasis, becomes a human responsibility.
• Capital, resources, and labor diverted from final goods production to exploitation of scarcer, more distant, deeper, or more dilute resources. – AK: See the declining EROEI of oil sources, talk of seabed mining, the increasing emphasis on unconventional & remote energy sources like tar sands, deep-sea, polar oil, shale gas, coal seam gas, etc…
• Technologies invented to make use of lower-quality, smaller, more dispersed, less valuable resources, because the higher-value ones are gone. – AK: See greentech (greenwash?), the “hydrogen economy”, electric batteries, etc.
• Failing natural pollution cleanup mechanisms; rising levels of pollution. – AK: See climate change.

Resulting Physical Symptoms - As resource stocks fall and wastes accumulate the behavior of natural systems may change with consequences for ecosystems and human communities.

• Growing chaos in natural systems, with “natural” disasters more frequent and more severe because of less resilience in the environmental system. – AK: More heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, etc, are already observed.

Resulting Social Symptoms - Society tries to live with, compensate for, and adapt to the primary physical symptoms  (note: these symptoms do not include responses that address the decline of the resource base in the first place,  such responses are catalogued in Signs of Life Within Limits).

• Capital depreciation exceeding investment, and maintenance deferred, so there is deterioration in capital stocks, especially long-lived infrastructure. - AK: See US infrastructure problems, paralleling that of the late Soviet Union.
• Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor used by the military or industry to gain access to, secure, and defend resources that are increasingly concentrated in fewer, more remote, or increasingly hostile regions. - AK: See resource wars, of which Iraq 2003 is one of the first in a long series to come; the US, China, and Russia have all ramped up military spending since about 2000.
• Investment in human resources (education, health care, shelter) postponed in order to meet immediate consumption, investment, or security needs, or to pay debts. - AK: We’ll see plenty of that in the next few years as Western states fall into insolvency like dominoes.
• Debts a rising percentage of annual real output. – AK: Debt levels have exploded throughout the developed world since 2000, and went into overdrive following the 2008 economic crisis & bailouts of politically-connected corporate groups.
• Eroding goals for health and environment.
• Increasing conflicts, especially conflicts over sources or sinks. - AK: Conflicts over sources = resource wars (see above), over sinks = “ecological warfare” (PLA colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote about this in their prophetic book on Unrestricted Warfare).
• Shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford. – AK: That is basically another way of saying people will become poorer.
• Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base. - AK: Predatory elites always become a heavy burden on the peasantry and middle classes during times of imminent Malthusian dearth. Applied to the modern world, see the rise of the “surveillance state”, the emphasis on waging a (by definition endless) “war on terror”, the creeping militarization of internal security forces, universal databases, etc… Meanwhile, internal inequality has risen in every major region of the world – the US, Eastern Europe, Japan, China, India, etc – since 1970.

Do you observe any of these symptoms in your “real world?” If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot.

Finally, here are the central assumptions in World3 that give it the tendency to overshoot and collapse: 1) growth in the physical economy is considered desirable and central to our socio-political systems; this growth tends to be exponential, 2) there are “physical limits to the sources of materials and energy that sustain the population and economy, and there are limits to the sinks that absorb the waste products of human activity”, 3) the world system receives signals about these physical limits that are “distorted, noisy, delayed, confused, or denied”, and responses are hence delayed and non-optimal, and 4) the “system’s limits are not only finite, but erodable when they are overstresses or overused”, and furthermore, there are “thresholds beyond which damage rises quickly and can become irreversible” (e.g. see tipping points in climate change). The authors note that if you want to refute LTG, you will have to show that one of the statements above is invalid.

Markets and Technology to the Rescue?

Maybe not. Here are three explanations. First from one of my older posts.

The criticisms from markets and technology also fall flat on their faces. Markets are implicitly modeled in World3 as resource allocations are typically automatically transferred to the sector of most pressing need. (Actually, if anything the models are more market-driven than our own world, since we don’t have perfect information and instant responses in the real world, as opposed to the model). As for technology, unless concrete steps are taken to reduce material throughput, improvements are simply soaked up by the Jevons paradox. Unless technological progress is extremely rapid (e.g. as envisioned by singularitarians), there will sometime come a tipping point when efficiency improvements no longer make up for decling agricultural and resource yields and soaring pollution, and world population and human welfare collapse.

Second from Limits to Growth synopsis.

The most common criticisms of the original World3 model were that it underestimated the power of technology and that it did not represent adequately the adaptive resilience of the free market. Impressive —and even sufficient— technological advance is conceivable, but only as a consequence of determined societal decisions and willingness to follow up such decisions with action and money.

Technological advance and the market are reflected in the model in many ways. The authors assume in World3 that markets function to allocate limited investment capital among competing needs, essentially without delay. Some technical improvements are built into the model, such as birth control, resource substitution, and the green revolution in agriculture. But even with the most effective technologies and the greatest economic resilience that seems possible, if those are the only changes, the model tends to generate scenarios of collapse.

One reason technology and markets are unlikely to prevent over shoot and collapse is that technology and markets are merely tools to serve goals of society as a whole. If society’s implicit goals are to exploit nature, enrich the elites, and ignore the long term, then society will develop technologies and markets that destroy the environment, widen the gap between rich and poor, and optimize for short‑term gain. In short, society develops technologies and markets that hasten a collapse instead of preventing it.

The second reason for the vulnerability of technology is that adjustment mechanisms have costs. The costs of technology and the market are reckoned in resources, energy, money, labor, and capital.

Third from my post on ecotechnic dictatorship to criticize the technology element of Korotayev’s cliodynamics model, but which happens to apply somewhat to LTG as well.

However, a closer examination shows that 1) their models of technological growth are flawed – they do not account for the diminishing returns seen for technological progress in recent decades, nor 2) do they note that in most cases post-industrial technology has not been in the form of low-maintenance knowledge, but embodied in the (fossil fuel-dependent) machines of industrial civilization.

I.e., 1) to get technological growth, you have to divert resources from industrial capital and services to sustain it, 2) many spheres of technological growth themselves show diminishing returns on investment, e.g. electricity-generating turbine efficiency has more or less plateaued, electric batteries are showing signs of plateauing, etc, 3) a lot of the technology we did create in the fossil fuel age is not even at all suitable for sustainable development and are thus essentially worse than useless, i.e. only ecotechnologies can be sustainably supported, and 4) technology requires a electro-industrial base for its very sustenance: if the latter gives way, so will technology, and we will see a collapse in spheres like energy efficiency, made even worse by the fact that the available energy sources would be increasingly depleted and low-EROEI.

Conclusion. Since technology itself relies on a material base for its sustenance, which in turn requires energy inputs to sustain itself. Thus, it will probably be one of the first things to be downsized when physical limits start pressing down on the economy. The hen that lays the golden eggs will probably be the first to get cooked. Second, there may be sudden and catastrophic increases in pollution. Climate change may be abrupt and catastrophic. A collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels by several meters and wipe the world’s ports and more importantly, much of its prime agricultural land. The Amazon is increasingly vulnerable to a conflagration that will turn it into desert, releasing more CO2 than I care to look up in the scientific literature. Increasing temperatures may unleash uncontrolled methane emissions from melting Siberian permafrost and oceanic clathrates.

Past the point of irreversible decline a controlled retreat to sustainability becomes ever more and more unlikely, because of a) the inertia of past pollution emissions and capital investments, b) political crisis in a society predicated on permanent growth will lead to short-term thinking and ever more exclusively stopgap solutions and c) eventually institutional collapse will make it impossible to fund and implement new energy-efficiency or pollution-control technologies on any sufficiently large scale or even maintain already existing infrastructure devoted for those purposes.

That is why we need an ecotechnic transition to begin now.

Further Reading:

• A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality (Graham Turner) – It adds up.
• Peak Oil and “The Limits to Growth”: two parallel stories (Ugo Bardi) – explores the parallels.
• A New World Model Including Energy and Climate Change Data (Dolores García) – model run incorporating more detail on climate change in particular on Vensim, conclusion: ”if the world continues behaving as we have so far, decline is inevitable in the long run”.
• New World Model – EROEI issues (Dolores García) – explains how to incorporate EROEI with the World3 model, update of above post.
• Mind-sized Hubbert (Ugo Bardi) – LTG without too many graphs.
• Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (Tom Tietenberg)
• Russia and Limits to Growth – my old post on LTG.
• Qu’y a-t-il donc dans le “Rapport du Club de Rome” ? – synopsis of LTG and World3 for Francophones.

One could (rightly) quibble at the film’s ahistoricity, selective coverage, and slanted rhetoric. It is questionable that the West’s plundering of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade was what spurred the development of European capitalism, and so is the assertion that the fundamental cause of Byzantium’s final defeat to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was due to its recognition of papal supremacy. The arguments eschew rigorous analysis, instead relying on “mystical” explanations based on “life and death biological growth analogies of life and death and vaguely defined concepts of “vigor” and “decadence””, which are unscientific, albeit aesthetic (and hence persuasive). So it is justifiable for the academic historian or the “Western chauvinist” to dismiss the film out of hand.

However, that is to miss the point, which is that the film is political, following in the Russian Orthodox Church’s long tradition of legitimizing the Russian state. It is also a reflection of the feelings of the current Kremlin elites and a majority of the Russian population.

Below is the film, as well as some good expositions and reviews, after which my own review is continued.

• The fall of an empire—the Lesson of Byzantium (Leoš Tomíček).
• A Byzantine vision for Russia (Dmitry Shlapentokh)
• The text of the film “The fall of an empire—the Lesson of Byzantium”
• A Byzantine Warning (Anna Prokrovskaya)

In the film, Father Tikhon expounds on importance of a strong power vertical, family values, control over oligarch predation, suppression of separatism, martial values, and state support for agriculture, manufacturing, and the Church. He likewise condemns the court intrigues, corruption, and promotion of Greek ethnic dominance that undermined the administrative power and ideological cohesiveness of the late Byzantine Empire. Above all, he stresses the dangers of adopting an uncritically submissive attitude towards Western cultural imports, which tended to erase older values (along with faith in the future), and which furthermore tended to be very inefficiently applied.

The implications for today’s Russia are perfectly clear. In Father Tikhon’s vision, the state should play an active role in effecting a spiritual revival in Russia, to transform it into an Orthodox-Eurasian Empire, which could be characterized by producerism, derzhavnost, and sobornost, and one unbeholden to the West.

This is not to say that it should reject Western innovations entirely, but it should apply them gradually, moderately, and with level-headed consideration. Furthermore, they must be avoided entirely if they challenge its core civilizational values. The Bolshevik importation of Marxism unto the Russian lands is mentioned as a regrettable example of the consequences of deviating from this philosophy. (Though at the end of the film, he even makes a qualified accolade to Stalin for the 1943 rehabilitation of Byzantinism, which had previously been suppressed, during the wartime patriotic revival).

As such, the film should not be viewed as a Byzantine history, but as an insight into the restorationist, conservative, and neo-Tsarist nature of Putinism… and as a guide to its possible future evolution. An evolution whose outlines are already emerging in trends as disparate as rising Russian protectionism, the clampdown on the oligarchs, neo-imperial rhetoric, Medvedev’s anti-alcohol measures, and incipient military revival. An evolution that is fast returning Russia to its past-and-future Empire.

This state of affairs, however, is slowly ebbing away. Of course, from the earliest times, civilizational theorists like Ibn Khaldun, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee dreamed of rationalizing history, and their efforts were expounded upon by thinkers like Nikolai Kondratiev, Fernand Braudel, Joseph Schumpeter, and Heinz von Foerster. However, it is only with the most recent crop of pioneers like Andrei Korotayev, Sergey Nefedov, and Peter Turchin that a true, rigorous mathematized history is coming into being – a discipline recently christened cliodynamics.

As an introduction to this fascinating area of research, I will summarize, review, and run an active commentary on one of the most comprehensive and theoretical books on cliodynamics: Introduction to Social Macrodynamics by Korotayev et al (it’s quite rare, as there’s only a single copy of it in the entire UC library system). The key insight is that world demographic / economic history can be modeled to a high degree of accuracy by just three basic trends: hyperbolic / exponential, cyclical, and stochastic*.

Korotayev, Andrei & Artemy Malkov, Daria Khaltourina – Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends (2006)
Category: cliodynamics, world systems; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: Andrei Korotayev (wiki); review @ cliodynamics.ru; a similar text на русском.

Introduction: Millennial Trends

Google Books has the first chapter Introduction: Millennial Trends.

In 1960, von Foerster showed that the world’s population at any given time between 1-1958 CE could be approximated by the simple equation below, where N is the population, t is time, C is a constant, and t(0) is a “doomsday” when the population becomes infinite (worked out to be 13 November, 2026).

(1)     N(t) = C / ( t(0) – t )

According to Korotayev et al, this simple formula of hyperbolic explains 99%+ of the micro-variation in world population from 1000 to 1970. Furthermore, a quadratic-hyperbolic equation of the same type accurately represents the increase in the GDP. Why?

He discusses the work of Michael Kremer, who attempted to build a model by making the Malthusian assumption that “population is limited by the available technology, so that the growth rate of population is proportional to the growth rate of technology”, and the “Kuznetsian” assumption that “high population spurs technological change because it increases the number of potential inventors”.

(2)     G = r*T*N^a

(3)     dT/dt = b*N*T

Above, G is gross output, T is technology, N is population, and a, b, and r are parameters. Note that dT, change in technology, is dependent on both N (indicates potential number of inventors) and T (a wider technological base enabled more inventions to be made on its basis). Solving this system of equations results in hyperbolic population growth, illustrated by the following loop: population growth → more potential inventors → faster tech growth → faster growth of Earth’s carrying capacity → faster population growth.

Korotayev then counters arguments dismissing such theories as “demographic adventures of physicists” that have no validity because the world system was not integrated until relatively recently. However, that is only if you use Wallerstein’s “bulk-good” criterion. If one instead uses the softer “information-network” criterion, noting that there is evidence for the “systematic spread of major innovations… throughout the North African – Eurasian Oikumene for a few millennia BCE” – and bearing in mind that this emerging belt of cultures of similar technological complexity contained the vast majority of the global human population since the Neolithic Revolution – then this can be interpreted as “a tangible result of the World System’s functioning”.

Then Korotayev et al present their own model that describes not only the hyperbolic world population growth, but also the macrodynamics of global GDP in the world system until 1973.

(4)     G = k1*T*N^a

(5)     dN/dt = k2*S*N

(6)     dT/dt = k3*N*T

Above, T is technology, N is population, S is surplus per person (and S = g – m, where g is production per person and m is the subsistence level required for zero population growth), and k1, k2, k3, and a are parameters. This can be simplified to:

(7)     dN/dt = a*S*N

(8)     dS/dt = b*N*S

(9)     G = m*N + S*N

As S should be proportional to N in the long run, S = k*N. Replace.

(10)     dN/dt = k*a*N^2

Recall that solving this differential equation gives us hyperbolic growth (1).

(11)     N(t) = C / ( t(0) – t )

Furthermore, replacing N(t) above with S = k*N gives (12), allowing us to work out the “surplus world product” S*N (13).

(12)     S = k*C / ( t(0) – t )

(13)     S*N = k*C^2 / ( t(0) – t )^2

Hence in the long-run, this suggests that global GDP growth can be approximated by a quadratic hyperbola. Other indices that can be described by these or similar models include literacy, urbanization, etc.

One finding is that after 1973, there world GDP growth rate itself falls (rather than just a slowing of the growth of the GDP growth rate, as predicted by the original model): the explanation is, “the literate population is more inclined to direct a larger share of its GDP to resource restoration and to prefer resource economizing strategies than is the illiterate one, which, on the one hand, paves the way towards a sustainable-development society, but, on the other hand, slows down the economic growth rate”. To take this into account, they build a modified model, according to which, “the World System’s divergence from the blow-up regime would stabilize the world population, the world GDP… technological growth, however, will continue, though in exponential rather than hyperbolic form”.**

The consequences for the future are that though GDP growth will reach an asymptote, technological improvements will continue raising the standard of living due to the “Nordhaus effect” (e.g. combine Moore’s Law – exponentially cheapening computing power, with the growing penetration of ever more physical goods by IT).

“It appears important to stress that the present-day decrease of the World System’s growth rates differs radically from the decreases that inhered in oscillations of the past… it is a phase transition to a new development regime that differs radically from the ones typical of all previous history”. As evidence, unlike in all past eras, the slowing of the world population growth rate after the 1960′s did not occur against a backdrop of catastrophically falling living standards (famine, plague, wars, etc); to the contrary, the causes are the fall in fertility due to social security, more literacy, family planning, etc. Similarly, the decrease in the urbanization and literacy growth rates is not associated this time by the onset of Malthusian problems, but is set against continuing high economic growth and the “closeness of the saturation level”.

(AK: This rosy-tinged analysis is persuasive and somewhat rigorous, but there is a gaping hole – they used only “technology” as a proxy for the carrying capacity. However, as Limits to Growth teaches us, part of what technology did is open up a windfall of energy resources – high-grade oil, coal, and natural gas – that have been used to fuel much of the post-1800 growth in carrying capacity (disguised as “technology” in this model), yet whose gains are not permanent because of their unsustainable exploitation. Furthermore, the modern technological base is underpinned by the material base, and cannot survive without it – you can’t have semiconductor factories without reliable electricity supplies – and generally speaking, the more complex the technology, the greater the material base that is needed to sustain it (this may constitute an ultimate limit on technological expansion). This major factor is also neglected in Korotayev’s millennial model. As such, the conclusion that the world has truly and permanently reached a sustainable-development regime does not follow. This is not to say that it is without merit, however – it’s just that it needs to be integrated with the work done by the Limits to Growth / peak oil / climate modelers.)

Chapter 1: Secular Cycles

Korotayev et al conclude that these millennial models are only useful on the millennial scale (duh!), and that typical agrarian political-demographic cycles follow Malthusian dynamics because in the shorter term, population tends to growth much more rapidly than technology / carrying capacity, which led to a plateauing of the population, growing stress due to repeated perturbations, and an eventual tipping point over into collapse / dieoff.

The basic logic of these models is as follows. After the population reaches the ceiling of the carrying capacity of land, its growth rate declines toward near-zero values. The system experiences significant stress with decline in the living standards of the common population, increasing the severity of famines, growing rebellions, etc. As has been shown by Nefedov, most complex agrarian systems had considerable reserves for stability, however, within 50–150 years these reserves were usually exhausted and the system experienced a demographic collapse (a Malthusian catastrophe), when increasingly severe famines, epidemics, increasing internal warfare and other disasters led to a considerable decline of population. As a result of this collapse, free resources became available, per capita production and consumption considerably increased, the population growth resumed and a new sociodemographic cycle started.

He notes that newer models are far more complex and predict the dynamics of variables such as elite overproduction, class struggle, urbanization, and wealth inequality with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy (e.g. see A Model of Demographic Cycles in a Traditional Society: The Case of Ancient China by Nefedov). Korotayev et al then list three major approaches to modeling agrarian political-demographic cycles: Turchin (2003), Chu & Lee (1994), and Nefedov (1999-2004).

1. Turchin has constructed an elegant “fiscal-demographic” model, in which the state plays a positive role by by a) maintaining armed order against banditry and lawlessness, and b) doing works such as roads, canals, irrigations systems, flood control, etc, – both of which increase the effective carrying capacity. However, as demographic growth brings the population to the carrying capacity of the land (in practice, the population plateaus somewhat below it due to elite predation), surpluses diminish. So do the state’s revenues, since the state taxes surpluses; meanwhile, expenditures keep on rising (because of the reasons identified by Tainter). Eventually, there sets in a fiscal crisis and the state must tax the future to pay for the present by drawing down the surpluses accumulated in better days; when those surpluses run out, the state can no longer function and collapses, which leads to a radical decline of the carrying capacity and population as the land falls into anarchy and irrigation and transport infrastructure decays. Applied to Russia, as I wrote in Russia’s Sisyphean Loop:

For the Empire is, at root, a social preservation mechanism to allow Russians to enjoy the benefits of sustained socio-political complexity – internal peace, a degree of security from foreign marauders, a large contiguous market space permitting economies of scale and autonomous economic development, and the aesthetic trappings of imperial splendor.

… once [crises] occur – given the amount of stress holding the system together – they tend to be extremely catastrophic… the real Russia outside the Kremlin crumbles reverts back to its natural state – the natural state, an anarchic state of stasis, decentralized Chaos; abandoning its cities, laws, and other accoutrements of civilization for the primeval mysticism of its endless plains, dark forests and Slavic skies.

2. The Chu and Lee model consists of rulers (including soldiers), peasants (grow food), and bandits (steal food). The peasants support the rulers to fight the bandits, while there is a constant flux between the peasants and bandits whose magnitude depends on the caloric & survivability payoffs to belonging in each respective class. However, it’s not a fully-formed model as its main function is to fill in the gaps in the historical record, by plugging in already-known historical data on warfare and climatic factors; they neglected to associate crop production with climatic variability (colder winters result in lesser crop yields) and the role of the state in food distribution (which staved off collapse for some time and was historically significant in China).

3. Nefedov has integrated stochasticity into his models, in which random climatic effects produce different year-to-year crop yields. One result is that as carrying capacity is reached, surpluses vanish and the effects of good and bad years play an increasingly important role – i.e. a closed system under stress suffers increasingly from perturbations. One bad year can lead to a critical number of people leaving the farms for the cities or banditry, initiating a cascading collapse. However, he neglects the “direct role of rebellion and internal warfare on cycle behavior”, so as the model is purely economic, each demographic collapse is, implausibly, immediately followed by a new rise.

The ultimate aim of Korotayev et al is to integrate the positive features of all three models (Chapter 3), but for now the take a closer look at the political-demographic history of China, the pre-industrial civilization that maintained the best records.

Chapter 2: Historical Population Dynamics in China – Some Observations

This chapter is available in Russian – Историческая макродинамика Китая.

Below is a graph of China’s population on a millennial scale. Note the magnitude and cyclical nature of its demographic collapses. Note also that such cycles are far from unique to Chinese civilization (see collapse of the Roman Empire), and reflect for a minute, even, on the profound difference between the modern world of permanent growth, and the pre-industrial, “Malthusian” world.

Since it would be futile to repeat the fine details of every political-demographic cycle in China’s, I will instead just list the main points.

• The cycles tend to be ones of a fast rise in population, when surpluses are high and people are prosperous. It plateaus and stagnates when the population reaches the carrying capacity, when there is overpopulation, much lowered consumption, increasing debilitation of state power, and rising social inequality and urbanization.
• Sometimes, such as in the middle Sung period, population stress did not lead to a collapse, but instead to a “radical rise of the carrying capacity of the land” through administrative and technological innovations. This increased the permanent ceiling of Chinese carrying capacity from 60mn to around 120mn souls, and in doing so alleviated the population stress until the early 12th century (AK: e.g. in Early Modern Britain, the problem of deforestation was solved by coal). At that point, China may have once again solved its problems, even escaping from its Malthusian trap (AK: some historians have noted that it had many of the prerequisites for an industrial revolution). That was not to be, as “the Sung cycle was interrupted quite artificially by exogenous forces, namely, by the Jurchen and finally Mongol conquests”.
• The Yuan dynasty would not reach the highs of the Sung because of the general bleakness of the 14th century – the end of the Medieval Warm Period, unprecedented floods and droughts in China, etc, which lowered the carrying capacity to a critical level. The resulting famines and rebellions led to the demographic collapse of the 1350′s, as well as the de facto collapse of the state, as China transitioned to warlordism.
• Carrying-capacity innovations under the Ming did not, eventually, outrun population growth, and it collapsed during the turmoil of the transition to the Qing dynasty. The innovations accelerated throughout the 18th century (e.g. New World crops, land reclamation, intensification of farming). Indications of subsistence stress as China entered the 19th century were a) declining life expectancies, b) rising staple prices, and c) a huge increase in female infanticide rates in the first half of the 18th century. By 1850, China was again under very severe subsistence stress and the state grew impotent just as Europeans began to encroach on the Celestial Empire.
• Huang 2002: 528-9, worthy of quotation in extenso. “Recent research in Chinese legal history suggests that the same subsistence pressures behind female infanticide led to widespread selling of women and girls… Another related social phenomenon was the rise of an unmarried “rogue male” population, a result of both poverty (because the men could not afford to get married) and of the imbalance in sex ratios that followed from female infanticide. Recent research shows that this symptom of the mounting social crisis led, among other things, to large changes in Qing legislation vis-à-vis illicit sex… Even more telling, perhaps, is the host of new legislation targeting specifically the ‘baresticks’ single males (guanggun) and related ‘criminal sticks’ of bandits (guntu, feitu), clearly a major social problem in the eyes of the authorities of the time”. See Diagram V.13. (AK: Interestingly, China’s one-child policy, by artificially restricting fertility in order to ward off a “Maoist dynasty” Malthusian crisis, has led to many of the same problems in the past two decades).
• Speaking of which… China had further dips in its population after during perturbations in the 1850′s (the millenarian Taiping Rebellion), the 1930′s (Japanese occupation), and 1959-62 (the Great Leap Forward), each progressively smaller than the last in its relative magnitude. For instance, the latter just formed a short plateau.

Korotayev et al conclude the chapter by running statistical tests on China’s historical population figures from 57-2003. In contrast to linear regression (R^2 = 0.398) and exponential regression (R^2 = 0.685), the simple hyperbolic growth model described in “Introduction: Millennial Trends” produces an almost perfect fit with the observed data (R^2 = 0.968). So in the very, very long-term, the effects of China’s secular cycles are swamped by the millennial trend of hyperbolic growth.

Finally, the authors describe in-depth the general pre-industrial Chinese demographic cycle. Below is a functional scheme I’ve reproduced from the book (click to enlarge).

The main points are:

• Fast population growth until it nears the carrying capacity, then a long period (100 years+) of a very slow and unsteady growth rate, accompanied by increasingly significant, but non-critical fluctuations in annual population growth due to climatic stochasticity (positive growth in good years, negative growth – along with dearth, minor epidemics, uprisings, etc – in bad years). These fluctuations get worse with time as the state’s counter-crisis potential degrades due to the drawdown of previously accumulated surpluses.
• According to Nefedov’s model and historical evidence, the fastest growth of cities occurred during the last phases of demographic cycles, as peasants were driven off the land and there appeared greater demand for city-made goods from the increasingly affluent landowners (who could charge exorbitant rates on their tenants). Furthermore, some peasants are drawn into debt bondage because the landowner had previously given them food at a time of dearth. Other peasants turn to banditry.
• Re-”elite overproduction → over-staffing of the state apparatus → decreasing ability of the state to provide relief during famines”. The system of state relief had been very effective earlier, e.g. in 1743-44 a state effort to prevent starvation in the drought-stricken North China core was successful. However: “By Chia-ch’ing times (1796-1820) this vast grain administration had been corrupted by the accumulation of superfluous personnel at all levels, and by the customary fees payable every time grain changed hands or passed an inspection point… The grain transport stations served as one of the focal points for patronage in official circles. Hundreds of expectant officials clustered at these points, salaried as deputies (ch’ai-wei or ts’ao-wei) of the central government. As the numbers of personnel in the grain tribute administration grew and as costs rose through the 18th century, the fees payable for each grain junk increased [from 130-200 taels per boat in 1732, to 300 taels in 1800, and to 700-800 taels by 1821]“. Similarly, the Yellow River Conservancy, whose task it was to prevent floods, degenerated into hedonistic corruption in the early 19th century; only 10% of its earmarked funds being spent legitimately.
• So what you have is an increasingly exploited peasantry, a growing (and volatile) urban artisan class – e.g., the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, and more banditry. The bandits create a climate of fear in the countryside and force more outmigration into the cities, and the abandonment of some lands. At the same time, state power – military and administrative – is on the wane, displaced by corruption. The effects of perturbations are magnified due to the system’s loss of resiliency. There eventually comes a critical tipping point after which there is a cascading collapse that involves a population dieoff, the fall of centralized power, and a prolonged period of internal warfare.
• Fast population growth does not resume immediately after collapse because things first need to settle down.

(AK: Pause for a moment… do you think this demographic cycle applies to modern China, or another country you can name, or even the world in general? If so, which stage are we at? And can you associate the stages of the above demographic cycle with the stages  of the psycho-spiritual “Malthusian Loop” within the Belief Matrix?

In my Facebook Note, Musings on the decline and fall of civilizations, I draw a link between the fast population increase / abundance of the “rise” period, and the concept of the “Golden Age” common to all civilizations. Also ventures a theory as to why cities (hedonism, conspicuous consumption, etc) have such a poor reputation as a harbinger of collapse… because they are, it’s just that the anti-poshlost preachers haven’t identified the right cause (i.e. overpopulation, not “moral decadence” per se).

Furthermore, a tentative explanation of the reason for differential Chinese – European technological growth rates (compare and contrast with Jared Diamond’s explanation):

Incidentally, a possible reason why Western Europe emerged as the world’s economic hegemon by the 19th century, instead of China, a civilization that at prior times had been significantly more advanced. But in China, the depth of the Malthusian collapses was deeper and more regular (once every 300 years, typically) than in W. Europe… Once the Yangtze / Yellow River irrigation systems failed, tens of millions of peasants were doomed; nothing on an equivalent scale in Europe, which is geographically and politically fragmented into many chunks and nowhere has anywhere near the same reliance on vulnerable hydraulic works for the maintenance of complex civilization (control over water was at the heart of “Oriental despotism” (Wittfogel); the Chinese word “zhi” means both “to regulate water” and “to rule”).

This theory that the reason China began to lag behind Western Europe technologically was because of its more frequent collapses / destructions of knowledge should be explored further.

Finally, about the nature of perturbations in a closed system under increasing stress… That is our world in the coming decades: even as Limits to Growth manifest themselves, there will be more (and greater) shocks of a climatic, terrorist, and military nature. The stochasticity will increase in amplitude even as the System becomes more fragile. As a result, polities will increase the level of legitimization and coercion, i.e. they will become more authoritarian.)

Chapter 3: A New Model of Pre-Industrial Political-Demographic Cycles

To address the shortcomings of other models and taking into account what happens in typical pre-industrial demographic cycles, Korotayev with Natalia Komarova construct their own model that includes the following three main elements:

(1) The Malthusian-type economic model, with elements of the state as tax collector (and counter-famine reservoir sponsor), and fluctuating annual harvest yields; this describes the logistic shape of population growth. It explains well the upward curve in the demographic cycle and saturation when the carrying capacity of land is reached. (2) Banditry and the rise of internal warfare in time of need are the main mechanism of demographic collapse. Personal decisions of peasants to leave their land and become warriors / bandits / rebels are influenced by economic factors. (3) The inertia of warfare (which manifests itself in the fear factor and the destruction of infrastructure) is responsible for a slow initial growth and the phenomenon of the “intercycle”.

Reproducing the model in detail will take up too much space, so just the main conclusions: “the main parameters affecting the period of the cycle are a) the annual proportions of resources accumulated for counter-famine reserves, b) the peasant-bandit transformation rate, and c) the magnitude of the climatic fluctuations. Hence, the lengths of cycles – and this is historically corroborated – is increased along with the growth of the counter-famine (more reserves) and law-enforcement (repress banditry) subsystems.

Chapter 4: Secular Cycles & Millennial Trends

Full version of Chapter 4: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends.

The chapter begins by modeling the role of warfare, and challenges recent anthropological findings that denser populations do not necessarily lead to more warfare.

• First, this is explained by the fact that it’s not a simple relation, but more of a predator-prey cycle described by a Volterra-Lotka equation. When warfare breaks out in a time of stress it leads to the immediate reduction of the carrying capacity and demographic collapse; however, warfare simmers on well into the post-collapse phase because groups continue to retaliate against each other.
• Second, the methodology is flawed because it treats all wars the same, whereas in fact they tend to be far less devastating for bigger polities than for small ones. This is because bigger polities have armies that are more professional, and the length of their “bleeding borders” relative to total territory, is much smaller than for territorially small chiefdoms, for whom even low-intensity wars are demographically devastating. As such, more politically complex polities fight wars more frequently more frequently than smaller ones, but tend to be far less damaged by them.
• Imperial expansions in territory coincide with periods of fast population growth and high per capita surpluses; later on, shrinking surpluses decimate the tax base and even defense proves increasingly hard (“imperial overstretch”). This correlation is very strong.

Now Korotayev et al combine their model from the last chapter with Kremer’s equation for technological growth (see the Introduction):

dT/dt = a*N*T

They also model a “Boserupian” effect, in which “relative overpopulation creates additional stimuli to generate and apply carrying-capacity-of-land-raising innovations”.

Indeed, if land shortage is absent, such stimuli are relatively weak, whereas in conditions of relative overpopulation the introduction of such innovations becomes literally a “question of life and death” for a major part of the population, and the intensity of the generation and diffusion of the carrying capacity enhancing innovations significantly increases.

Finally, they make the size of the harvest dependent not only on climatic fluctuations, but also on the level of technology.

Harvesti = H0*random numberi*Ti.

Running this model with some reasonable parameters produces the following diagram, which reproduces not only the cyclical, but also the hyperbolic macrodynamics.

Furthermore,

Note that it also describes the lengthening of growth phases detected in Chapter 2 for historical population dynamics in China, which was not described by our simple cyclical model. The mechanism that produces this lengthening in the model (and apparently in reality) is as follows: the later cycles are characterized by a higher technology, and, thus, higher carrying capacity and population, which, according to Kremer’s technological development equation embedded into our model, produces higher rates of technological (and, thus, carrying capacity) growth. Thus, with every new cycle it takes the population more and more time to approach the carrying capacity ceiling to a critical extent; finally it “fails” to do so, the technological growth rates begin to exceed systematically the population growth rates, and population escapes from the “Malthusian trap” (see Diagram 4.26):

MAFR = “minimum annual food ration, an amount of food that is barely sufficient to support one person forone year”.

AK: some confirmation for my rough explanation of why Chinese technological growth rate fell below Europe’s prior to the Industrial Revolution (see end of Chapter 2 in this post).

Of special importance is that our numerical investigation indicates that with shorter average period of cycles a system experiences a slower technological growth, and it takes a system longer to escape from the “Malthusian trap” than with a longer average cycle period.

Finally, they also add in an equation for literacy:

li+1 = li*b*dFi*li*(1 – li)

Which has the following effect on population growth:

Ni+1 = Ni*(1 + α × dF’)*(1 – l) – dRi – rob*Ni*Ri

And all added together, it produces the following stunning reproduction of China’s population dynamics from ancient past to today.

Of course, these models can be only regarded as first steps towards the development of effective models describing both secular cycles and millennial upward trend dynamics.

The Meaning of Cliodynamics

Turchin, Peter & Sergey Nefedov – Secular Cycles (2008)
Category: cliodynamics, world systems; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Read the whole book (PDF) or in chapters

This is a free online, quasi-popular book about eight different pre-industrial secular cycles (including Tudor England, the Roman Empire, Muscovy, and the Romanov Empire). Knowing the facts of history and the proximate causes of Revolutions – Lenin’s charisma, Tsarist incompetence, the collapse of morale and of the railway system, etc – is all well and good, but an entirely different perspective is opened up when looking at late Tsarist Russia through a Malthusian / cliodynamic prism. The interpretation shifts to one of how late imperial Russia was under a panoply of Malthusian pressure, and that the additional stresses and perturbations of WW1 “tipped” the system over into a state of collapsed anarchy – ushering in the vacuum that enabled Lenin to make his “Event”.

Finally, my reply to someone who sent me a message suggesting that cliodynamics may “make old school idiographic history redundant”.

I don’t think these trends will make idiographic history redundant, because there are many elements that are irreducible to mathematical analysis; furthermore, a major and inevitable weakness of cliodynamics is our lack of numbers for much of pre-mass literacy history. To the contrary, I think cliodynamics will end up complementing the “old school” rather than displacing it.

Footnotes

* Note that the null symbol ∅ – the logo of this site – can be said to represent both the exponential (a straight line on the logarithmic), which strives to break out of the cycle of repetition / Malthusian collapse / eternal return; whereas the circle, representing the cyclical, seeks to stifle any accumulative initiative that leads to exponential growth.

This makes it into a very universal symbol, in a sense. Back to its definition, it implies a profound nothingness (Void) – but all possible mathematical objects and their unions exist in the Void, including Reality. From What Might Be Is:

In a sense, the Void [nothingness] fulfills all the criteria of God. Null and unity, it transcends the human imagination, for human minds are finite in scope. It sidesteps the ‘who created the creator?” paradox, for it is. And was, and will be, though being outside Time, its directionality is meaningless. It is zero and infinity of cardinal infinity. What might be, is. All possible computations, exist, and are their own simulacra.

Yet at the ultimate scale, the cyclical is always dominant. No end to the loop.

Looking at this from the simple computational view, the state of the cellular automaton at the time of the Big Bang is perfect order. The immediate next state begins the transition to chaos with loss of entropy in the seething plasma of exotic particles. This mass cools down and forms itself into stars and planets. On some a localized growth in ordered complexity occurs, in contrast to the sea of randomness all around them, and perhaps culminating in the saturation of the whole cellular automaton. With time the delicate balance of order and randomness that is the intelligent universe will struggle to preserve itself against the crushing order of fire or the encroaching chaos of ice. In the former case, the loss in entropy will reverse and the universe will start contracting into the Big Crunch, with computation (and simulation of other worlds) soaring until the omega point is reached, closing the loop of existence. In the latter case, computation will slow down due to the unrelenting loss in entropy but will continue for a much longer time – until the last particles disintegrate, if reversible computing is perfected and utilized. Whether the universe dies by ice or fire, the end state reverts back to perfect order – and presumably, a new Big Bang and identical iteration, since all cellular automata will loop when they return to a state in which they once existed.

** Ray Kurzweil, one of the high priest of the singularitarian movement, extends Moore’s observations, to also model technological growth (computing power, to be precise) as double exponential, or even hyperbolic. See Appendix: The Law of Accelerating Returns Revisited,

On the other hand, Joseph Tainter noted that in many areas the rate of technological innovation is actually slowing down. This is an argument, mentioned above, that Kremer’s assumption that the rate of technological growth is linearly dependent on the product of the population and the size of the already-existing technological base is too simplistic.

These observations are supported by Planck’s Principle of Increasing Effort – “with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased” (i.e. you’re now unlikely to make new discoveries by flying a kite in a thunderstorm). Furthermore, “Exponential growth in size and costliness of science, in fact, is necessary simply to maintain a constant rate of progress”, and according to Rescher, “In natural science we are involved in a technological arms race: with every ‘victory over nature’ the difficulty of achieving the breakthroughs which lie ahead is increased”.

Diamond, Jared – Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
Category: world systems, history, anthropology; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel (wiki)

Having finished reading this book in November 2004, I came away impressed by its success in compressing 13,000 years of human history into a lucid and compelling explanation of why the rate of socio-economic development varied so significantly on different continents, without resorting to culturalist or racialist arguments. Jared Diamond succeeds spectacularly at proving why Eurasia had become by 1500 AD (the dawn of “Europe’s assault on the world”) the world’s most technologically advanced continent, far ahead of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and Australasia. In the final chapter, he extends the analysis to question why, within Eurasia, it was Europe that decisively overtook apparently better-endowed competitors (primarily China) within the next four hundred years and proceeded to “remake the world in its own image”.

The underlying thesis in this work is that the environment is the primary shaper of human societies – hence the title 0f Chapter 2, “A Natural Experiment of History”. Connected with Diamond’s general aim of transforming human history into a scientific discipline, it explains how the Austronesians who populated the Polynesian islands, despite sharing common ancestors in Fujian, China, went on to produce remarkably different societies – agricultural and hunter-gatherer, technologically adept and primitive, oligarchic and egalitarian.

In the next few chapters , he contends that the rise of statehood, and the consequent, self-catalysing technological expansion (producing steel and guns, amongst others) and evolution of germs, was linked to the shift of food-production away from hunter-gathering, which first happened in Eurasia. This is because Eurasia was blessed in possessing an abundant number of nutritious and highly-domesticable crops such as wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent and rice in China, and also because she possessed an area covered by the world’s largest and most varied Mediterranean climate in southern Europe and south-west Asia, and fertile soils and monsoon rains in China, India and Indochina. It is true that the Americas had corn, and the Africans sourghum – but the shift from hunter-gathering to food-production depends not on a single crop, but on a sufficient amount to offer a secure and balanced diet. The latter was lacking – for instance, of the world’s 56 large-seeded grass species, 32 were in the West Eurasian Mediterranean region, and only 11, 4 and 2 in the (geographically splintered) Americas, Africa and Australasia respectively.

Nor were the extra-Eurasian continents especially suitable for pastoral economies. Of the world’s 143 big wild herbivores, only 14 are domesticable and only five – sheep, goats, cows, pigs and horses – can thrive across a broad range of climates. These discrepencies are due to the so-called Anna Karenina principle, which states that a variety of factors can null the chances of an animal being domesticable – their growth rates, problems of captive breeding, nasty dispositions, tendency to panic, and social structure. According to Diamond, of the 5 major and 9 minor domesticable animals, 13 are indigenous to Eurasia and one (the llama) is indigenous to South America. Africa might have animals that could be tamed (e.g. the elephant), but none that has ever been domesticated. The dearth of big animals in general in the Americas and Australasia is due to the fact that humans, with refined hunting skills, arrived there only 11,000 and 40,000 years ago respectively, and hunted all of them down because the animals had not had time to get used to this. The “lethal gift of livestock” also gave Eurasian peoples germs (as most infectitious diseases originated from human interactions with animals – for instance, flu was derived from pigs and ducks, and measles, smallpox and tuberculosis all derive from cattle), and, consequently, stronger immune systems to the diseases. The resultant fact that the exchange of germs was virtually one-way largely explains successful European colonization of the Americas.

Eurasia, because of it’s main east-west axis, fostered much easier transferals of agricultural and epidemiological breakthroughs. Crops and livestock generally move much more easily along lines of latitude than lines of longitude – thus, Fertile Crescent agriculture spread relatively quickly to southern Europe, north Africa, Iran, north India at a rate of 0.7 miles per year, whereas Mexican corns and beans crawled north to the Mississipi chiefdoms at 0.3 miles per year. The same applied to livestock – “The cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the Andes. Yet the northward spread of these Andean specialities was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America.” Whereas crops and livestock can travel relatively easily from Ireland to Korea (despite obstacles such as the Tibetan Plateau, Gobi desert and the jungles of southern India and Indochina), to travel the much smaller distance from Peru to the southern USA, one has to go north and transverse the Darien rainforests of the Isthmus of Panama (only 40 miles wide at its narrowest) and the northern Mexican desert.

What applies to crops and livestock, must also apply to other forms of technology. Writing evolved independently in Sumer by 3000 BC and in Mesoamerica in 600 BC – however, whereas the former spread rapidly throughout Eurasia, the latter never reached the Incas or the Mississippi, where sedendaty food-producing civilizations might have made good use of it. Other examples in Eurasia included the wheel, door locks, pulleys, rotary querns, windmills and the alphabet, whereas the Mesoamerican wheel failed to reach the Incas in Peru.

In conclusion, Eurasian societies were intially much better endowed than their American, African and Australasian counterparts not only in terms of crops and livestock, but also geographically and climatically. Eurasia’s primary east-west axis fostered linked the entire continent economically and epidemiologically, especially after the establishment of the Silk Road in Roman times. More productive agricultural bases, supporting much greater and denser populations, ensured a continuously generated food surplus, to sustain an evolving state appratus and the investment, development of technology and military machine that went with it. Eurasia’s quiltwork of states ensured a competitive environment that put an imperative on change that could not be replicated in the isolated societies of the Americas and Australasia. As a result, by 1500 AD no Native Americans had managed to progress to the Bronze Age and had not developed any deadly germs for the Spanish conquistadores to carry back home. Australia (mostly desert and marginal scrubland) and New Guinea (flat or hilly rainforest) were still in the Stone Age in the second millenium. Tasmania, with its 4000 hunter-gatherers, totally isolated for 10,000 years, had on the eve of its discovery by Europeans in 1642 AD the “simplest material culture of any people in the modern world”. As a result, these differences in development meant that, throughout history, but particularly within the last five hundred years, more advanced Eurasians were able to expand and appropriate the territories of native primitive peoples – examples include Chinese expansion into southeast Asia and the Pacific, the Bantu expansion into sub-Saharan Africa and the European colonization of the Americas, Australasia and Siberia.

Diamond’s epilogue is concerned about why Europe, apparently one of the more backward super-regions on the Eurasian landmass as late as the High Middle Ages, nonetheless was the first to industrialize and dominate the world more fully in its heyday – from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century – eclipsing ostensibly more powerful medieval empires, primarily China. The author again made use of geographic arguments, leaving aside institutional and cultural factors and relying heavily on E.L. Jones’ “The European Miracle” thesis. Now Europe is, in essence, a highly fragmented continent, separated by numerous mountain ranges (Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, etc) and small rivers (Rhine, Po, Oder, Visla, Danube), which support small, scattered population centres in their valleys. Numerous peninsulas and islands (primarily Iberia, Scandinavia, Britain, Italy) have traditionally counter-balanced potential continental hegemons (usually Germany or France). Europe has many different climates – Mediterranean to the south, maritime to the north-west and continental to the east, which produce different products (stimulating trade) and create natural ethnic boundaries (a phenomenom noted as early as the 5th century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus). China is almost the exact opposite – a huge, round piece of flatland, with its population concentrated in the great river valleys of the Yangtze and Hwang Ho (providing a huge and easily controlled source of manpower) and relatively uniform climatic conditions in its historic heartland (the tropical Cantonese south, dry continental Manchuria and Sinkiang and mountanous Tibet are comparatively recent acquisitions and even today are of peripheral economic importance).

As such, China’s “connectedness”, to use Diamond’s term, encouraged political unity and autocracy; Western Europe’s fragmentation fostered a competitive states system, encouraging innovation and technological progress, and precluded the possibility of any single European state conquering the entire continent and stiffling it under a blanket of reaction. Hence, Columbus was able to find a financial backer in 1492 despite several previous rejections; however, court intrigues in Beijing brought to a permanent end Cheng Ho’s oceanic voyaging in 1433 and soon after closed dockyards across the whole Celestial Empire. As for the Fertile Crescent, intensive agriculture since 8500BC brought an ecological degradation that intensified due to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and subsequent destruction of complex irrigation infrastructure.

Two main arguments have been leveled against this book. The first is that China is not necessarily geographically more suited to unification than Western Europe, that the values of fragmentation are not necessaily greater than of unity, and most importantly that Europe owes its “miracle” more to its institutions – “the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control” (from David Frum’s review, “How the West Won: History That Feels Good Usually Isn’t“) – than to any geo-climatic conditions, which invoke the derogatory label of “historical determinism”. I’ll address these contentions one after the other. In his review of the book, J.R. McNeill in “The World According to Jared Diamond” wrote, “Europe may or may not have a geography that encourages greater fragmentation than does China’s (and I think this is open to question if one leaves out the Grand Canal, a man-made link). ” Apart from the evidence above, and the fact that the Grand Canal was constructed during the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD) and as such affected China for the majority of its history after the first unification in 221 BC under Shih-Huang-ti, we also know that the multitude of plains could support a might horseman army, which could exert political control over the huge, densely-clustered population centres of the Middle Kingdom. In fact this is the primary reasons why the Mongols (whose main strategic strength was in their speed and functionality without logistics) were able to conquer late Sung China, but wisely decided to stay away from Europe, where the land west of the Hungarian plains, containing only forests, mountains and areas of intensive agriculture, could not have supported a single tyumen. Hence, Europeans relied on decisively less mobile and more logistically demanding traditions of infantry and castle sieges, which made rapid conquests of vast areas practically unrealizable.

Slightly later, McNeill writes that, “political fragmentation is not necessarily an advantage, indeed in some circumstances, such as the presence of a powerful and aggressive neighbor, it is a weakness”. The argument is made that although Europe was always a political quiltwork, it only started to become formidable after the first milennium. There are several weaknesses to this position – Europe, especially the “barbarian kingdoms” north of the Alps, was before the first millenium extremely backwards in comparison with any other major Eurasian civilization – China, Byzantium, the Arabs and India, but by the 14th century at the latest the qualitative gap had closed even with China. This suggests average rates of development were much higher in feudal Europe than in Asia. Besides, Europe never truly had a life-threatening neighbor – the Arabs were halted at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel, the pagan Vikings were Christianized around the 10th century and it was Rus’ and Byzantium that took the brunt of nomadic assaults by groups like the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians (Cumans). McNeill draws an example with politically fragmented India, which however “did not generate highly efficient states and technologically precocious societies bent on expansion and conquest”. Admittedly, my knowledge in this area is shallow – and doubt the validity of that statement, given that India was the home of higher mathematics and that its port cities grew very wealthy off the trade of the Indian Ocean. Also, other factors may be more prescient at explaining this, such as India’s isolation from the main routes of the Silk Road, its stratified caste system (which discouraged innovation) and perhaps “Dark Ages” stemming from the plethora of outside barbarian invasions.

Finally, David Frum contributed the third and most important point to this institutional counter-argument. I will quote from his review in extenso.

At least in this century, the traditional account of the rise of the West has given credit to its propitious political and social institutions. That is not true only of recent times, when the institutions in question are liberal ones, but of more ancient history as well, when the West benefited from the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control. And that traditional account agreed, with varying degrees of certainty, that those traditions were more or less available to anyone else and would have more or less similar results wherever they were tried.

Again, however, numerous holes can be picked in the text. The Church might have been independent of political control, but it was dogmatic in its views and consistently anti-capitalistic (e.g. the ban on usury). This is the reason so much commerce was in the hands of Jews in medieval Europe. Independent thought as such would have been confined to universities which began to be founded in 13th century, and these tended to support the monarch over the Pope. As for feudalism, it was based on the self-sufficient agricultural economy of the manor, economically isolated following the collapse of Roman order. Although I think a period of feudalism, which develops the idea of the contract (in addition to the Roman idea of private property) is a very useful precedent to capitalism, we must ask ourselves, why did it develop in Europe, and not in China? After all, China does have a long history of “warring states’ periods, including the post-Han economic downturn and fragmentation from 220 to 581 AD, which coincided with the fall of Rome. However, conditions in European were far more suited for the emergence of a feudalistic societies – firstly, “barbarian kingdoms lacked the bureaucratic and literate resources to rule directly over great areas”, unlike the Confucian bureaucracy which held China together until the twentieth century. Secondly, it had precedents in the fusion of Roman concepts of property with the Germanic “blood-brotherhood of the warrior-companians of the barbarian chief”, which was respectively partially and completely lacking in China. Last but not least, that same geographical fragmentation and relative lack of plains frustrated assertative European monarchs attempting to bring to heel some remote rebelling vassal, let alone maintain effective political unity.

The second important argument was made by McNeill and contends that ultimately “the spread of useful species was usually a conscious act…determined by trade links, migration routes, and happenstance”. He argues as an example that a single line of latitude on Eurasia could vary greatly, from “the Gulf Stream-induced equability of western Europe, to the continental climate extremes of Kazakhstan, to the monsoon rhythms of Korea”, and consequently make the dispersion of animal and plant species very hard. He also attributes a lot of this dispersion as due to trade within Eurasia. Again, these criticisms have their flaws. For instance, jungles present much more of a barrier than continental plains or even desert, because of the greater number of diseases they harbor and because they are much more physically hard to pass. I think another crucial factor is that significant climate shifts, that have played a very large role triggering nomadic migrations and expansions within and out of the Eurasian Great Steppe, are lacking in rainforests, encouraging a more permanent existence. As for the second argument, it is downright irrelevant in the context of the book, because Eurasia as a continent only started to become contiguous with the genesis of the Silk Road during Roman times. By then, all the key crops and livestocks were already in place, that had generated the rise of the civilizations which were only then beginning to communicate with each other, albeit in rudimentary form, over thousands of kilometres.

Having attempted to disprove two existing criticisms of the book, I would nonetheless wish to make a few of my own. One is how he rather hypocritically claims New Guineans are more intelligent than Eurasians, after just having had condemned white racist theories whose argumentative style in their specialization are similar to his in this instance. And I think he could have covered the scope of the last chapter of his book beyond an analysis of why Europe “won” and China “lost” – Middle Eastern societies were mentioned little (and the argument of environmental degradation was admittedly somewhat lost on me, considering that Egypt has managed to sustain a massive agricultural base from pharaonic times to the present day), and India and Russia not at all. (At least in the latter case there is a plethora of geoclimatic factors that negatively affected its development and covered in such books as Andrej Parshev’s “Why Russia isn’t America”).

In conclusion, this is overall an excellent book which is a must-read for people in professions as varied as biology, geography, history, archaelogy, anthropology, sociology and economics, as well as the intelligent layman. Apart from the invaluable information and insights, it is written in concise, engaging and understandable language and one would be challenged to put it down after having read just a few pages. Finally, in order to assuage my love of quantifying things, I give the book a mark of 9.5/10.

Chang, Ha-Joon – Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002)
Category: economy; history; industrial policy; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Kicking Away the Ladder:How the Economic and Intellectual Histories of Capitalism Have Been Re-Written to Justify Neo-Liberal Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang)

Much has been said of the smug arrogance, cultural aloofness and end-of-history conceit characterizing the neoliberal Washington Consensus, the philosophy that a one-size-fits-all set of “good policies” (e.g. privatization, liberalization, deregulation) and “good institutions” (e.g. patent and IP protection system, etc) can – and must – be transplanted onto any country, irrespective of its historical or cultural traditions, if it were to ever join the developed “international community’. The general bankruptcy of this approach is evident from the facts on the growth, with global GDP growth during the 1960-1980 period of “bad policies” substantially higher than during the “good policies” 1980-2000 period. After seeing high growth during the earlier period, Latin America stagnated, and Africa and Eastern Europe declined during the latter; the major exception was mercantilist China. Though always disabused by reality, from 1998 Russia to the 2008 crisis, the neoliberals retain their intellectual underpinnings by continuing to claim, like Marxists, that history itself is ultimately on their side – after all, did not Britain and the United States, the world’s greatest economic successes, rise to global preeminence through the virtues of minimal government and free trade? Not at all, argues Ha-Joon Chang in this excellent book.

Britain: From Mercantile Struggle to Kicking Away the Ladder

Take the example of Britain, alleged to be the historical laissez-faire state par excellence, in stark contrast to the stultifying dirigisme of Colbertist France. This is actually an inversion of the truth, for the French state was generally laissez-faire and backward-looking in the period between the end of Napoleon’s Continental System and the post-WW2 years (after which the state began large-scale interventions in the French economy, which experienced burgeoning growth that saw it overtake Britain’s GDP by the 1970′s). On the other hand, Britain was highly protectionist up until it established and cemented its global industrial predominance by the middle of the 19th C.

British protectionism has a long history, stretching back to medieval import substitution designed to foster an indigenous wool manufacturing industry, instead of being reliant on raw wool exports to Europe. Henry VII tried to change this by taxing raw wool exports and poaching skilled workers from the Low Countries. This kick-started the industry that would come to constitute the key element of British industrial supremacy in the 19th C.

In 1721, Walpole expanded on previous Navigation Acts to encompass mercantile measures like lower tariffs on raw materials imports, duty drawbacks on the imported raw materials used for exports, the removal of export duties, the raising of duties in imported manufactures, export subsidies and a system of quality control to maintain the reputation of British exports. The colonies were treated as captive markets and resource appendages to fuel the commerce and industry of the mother country, by measures such as the 1700 ban on (better-quality) Indian calicos, which (possibly) stifled an incipient Indian industrialization. Britain fine-tuned the terms of trade between the US colonies itself to discourage industrialization in the latter, even resorting to overt illiberal measures like outlawing rolling and slitting steel mills on the American continent.

This is how Friedrich List, a leading economist of the German Historical School, described Britain’s rise to industrial dominance in his The National System of Political Economy in 1841:

Having attained to a certain grade of development by means of free trade, the great monarchies [of Britain] perceived that the higher degree of civilization, power, and wealth can only be attained by a combination of manufactures and commerce with agriculture. They perceived that their newly established native manufactures could never hope to succeed in free competition with the old and long-established manufactures of foreigners… Hence they sought, by a system of restrictions, privileges, and encouragements, to transplant on to their native soil the wealth, the talents, and the spirit of enterprise of foreigners. …

It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations.

Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development than no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she ha hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth.

Even the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws protecting domestic agriculture were justified by its British supporters on protectionist terms, e.g. Robert Cobden of the Board of Trade:

The factory system would, in all probability, not have taken place in America and Germany. It most certainly could not have flourished, as it has done, both in these states, and in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, through the fostering bounties which the high-priced food of the British artisan has offered to the cheaper fed manufacturer of those countries.

It was only in 1860, by which time Britain’s status as the workshop of the world was unquestioned, that it truly transitioned to a free-trade regime with the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty with France. Yet during the next fifty years it was undermined by German technological prowess and American economies of scale, and was obliged to reintroduce substantial tariffs in 1932 under the stress of the Depression-era protectionism scramble.

[International tariff rates 1820-1950, taken from Google Books].

The Protectionist Roots of Pax Americana

What about the US, then, today’s champion of free trade? This is an ironic position for it to take up, given that in the years after the Civil War and prior to the Second World War, America was the protectionist nation par excellence.

The “infant industry” theory was invented by Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary, and the American economist Daniel Raymond. With its history of being held as a resource appendage and captive market by the British and spurred on by the War of 1812, protectionism was firmly established from 1816. A US Congressman, a contemporary of Friedrich List, said of British liberal trade theory, “like most English manufactured goods, [it] is intended for export, not for consumption at home”. President Ulysses Grant, a Civil War hero, remarked of it, “within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade”. So the populist right-wing politician Pat Buchanan makes a perfectly valid point when he condemns free trade as being un-American.

Ha-Joon Chang stresses the importance disputes over the proper level of tariffs played over the start of the US Civil War. The crux of the matter was that northern industrial interests wanted high tariffs to protect themselves from British competition, whereas the South, which had no industries of its own and an idle, rapacious elite, wanted lower tariffs to make British goods more affordable. There were frequent spats on this matter from the 1830′s; slavery only provided the fuse. (Chang points out that Lincoln was deeply racist by modern standards and only emancipated the northern slaves in 1862 as a strategic move against the South). Lincoln’s top economic advisor, Henry Carey (described by Marx as the only American economist of any significance), argued that British free trade was an imperialist ploy to consign the US to a future of primary production.

Following the North’s political and military triumph, US tariffs between the Civil War and World War Two remained the highest amongst those of any industrial power, with the sole exception of Russia. As with its British imperial predecessor, the American superpower only ditched free trade once it achieved a global industrial dominance made possible by the wartime devastation of its European competitors. Though tariff rates are now very low, the US somewhat compensates with voluntary export constraints, (textiles) quotas, agricultural subsidies, and unilateral sanctions against countries suspected of dumping, so it remains far more protected than Britain was during the Victorian Golden Age of globalization. Likewise there is extensive state support for R&D, which enabled US success in hi-tech areas like computers, the Internet, aerospace, and biotech.

State Intervention Critical to Economic Sovereignty

The vast majority of other now-developed countries (NDCs) also employed extensive protectionism and state intervention during their periods of successful economic convergence. Though Germany eschewed the kind of “blanket protectionism” used in mercantile Britain and the pre-superpower US, the state was far more active in promoting modern technology, industrial espionage, technological “demonstrations”, teaching science at its world-class universities, and pioneering social welfare by the late 19th C to defuse social tensions. Though Japan was actually forbidden from raising its tariff rates above 5% in the first decades following the Meiji Restoration, it compensated by investing heavily in infrastructure, education, and the acquisition of foreign technologies and institutions. Sweden had high tariff rates (especially in the early 20th C), an unrivaled record in public-private cooperation, and “strategically used tariffs, subsidies, cartels, and state support for R&D to develop key industries, especially textile, steel, and engineering”. It also preserved social harmony through the Saltsjöbaden agreements of 1936, in which labor committed to restraining wage demands in return for the employers committing to building one of the world’s most comprehensive welfare states. As for some of the smaller nations:

There were some exceptions like the Netherlands and Switzerland that have maintained free trade since the late 18^th century. However, these were countries that were already on the frontier of technological development by the 18^th centuries and therefore did not need much protection. Also, it should be noted that the Netherlands deployed an impressive range of interventionist measures up till the 17^th century in order to build up its maritime and commercial supremacy. Moreover, Switzerland did not have a patent law until 1907, flying directly against the emphasis that today’s orthodoxy puts on the protection of intellectual property rights (see below). More interestingly, the Netherlands abolished its 1817 patent law in 1869 on the ground that patents are politically-created monopolies inconsistent with its free-market principles – a position that seems to elude most of today’s free-market economists – and did not introduce another patent law until 1912.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it was the open economies that failed to develop rapidly. Not much chance for European colonies / captive markets to develop an indigenous industrial base under the constant, unchecked pressure of superior European competition. Semi-independent countries like China and the Ottoman Empire were paralyzed by “unequal treaties” capping tariffs at a 5% flat rate and loss of tariff autonomy (Ha-Joon Chang points out that today the World Bank recommends a maximum 15-25% tariff rate, low and uniform, despite that the development differential between today’s poor and rich countries are vastly greater than they were a century ago). Finally, industrial leader nations (like Britain) tried to stymie the growth of competitors by preventing the outflow of skilled workers in the 18th century, machines in the 19th century, and enforcing intellectual property rights in the 20th century.

Institutions aren’t Everything

The author also points out that institutions today are far better in the developing world today, in most cases, than of NCDs at an an equivalent stage of development. For instance, despite the fact that Britain in 1820 had a similar level of development to India in 2000:

[Britain] did not have universal suffrage (it did not even have universal male suffrage), a central bank, income tax, generalised limited liability, a generalised bankruptcy law, a professional bureaucracy, meaningful securities regulations, and even minimal labour regulations (except for a couple of minimal and hardly-enforced regulations on child labour).

As such, the rich would should moderate their unrealistic demands for the developing nations to instantaneously reform their institutions to world standards. It is a difficult process that took centuries in the NDCs themselves, and besides in some cases the poor countries would be better off spending that money on other things. For instance, would it be better for Gabon to spend its (very limited) resources on hiring legions of (foreign) intellectual property lawyers to ensure a modern IP environment, or should it spend them on training its own primary school teachers? Tough choice, right?

As Tainter teaches us in The Collapse of Complex Societies, complexity isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

Conclusions & Lessons for the Present

The “official history” of capitalism has been highly distorted by neoliberals with little appreciation of economic history, either maliciously, or because of their ideological blinkers. The reality is that even today’s stalwarts of free trade and liberalization only got to the top though blanket protectionism and intelligent state intervention, a tradition that has been carried on by the East Asian tigers (Korea, Taiwan, etc) – the only major non-Western nations to successfully industrialize after Japan. After they had industrialized, the new leader nation – in modern times, the US – has an interest in creating a global free trade system which could reinforce its hegemony. The poachers become the gamekeepers. The climbing followers become leaders kicking away the ladder.

However, uninterrupted free trade does eventually undermine even its guarantors. Last century, it was Germany challenging Britain. Today, it is China challenging the US.

Leveraging its cheap, docile and decently-educated labor force, China used the window of opportunity thrown open by US trade policy to build up the world’s premier industrial base – as of now, it produced around half the world’s steel and cement. Though it’s economy is ostensibly relatively free-wheeling, China having ditched central planning three decades ago, in practice the state remains extremely active in building up infrastructure, improving human capital and industrial espionage. It couldn’t care less about intellectual property rights, given that it has almost none of its own to protect (you don’t need innovation when you’re at the point when you can just buy or steal the next technological levels), giving it a further competitive advantage. The sheer comparative advantage it has built up in manufacturing means that overt protectionism is simply unnecessary for it.

Open trade has led to the steady deindustrialization and “hallowing out” of the US industrial base, which no longer maintains a positive balance of trade in any manufactured goods category, with the marginal exception of (heavily-subsidized) aerospace. (The effects in some European countries have been as bad, e.g. Italy’s traditional artisanal manufacturing destroyed by cheaper Chinese competition). The US machine tool industry, the heart of any industrial ecosystem, has been decisively buried by European and Asian competition. From 1999 to 2008, US automobile production declined from 13.0mn to 8.7mn units, while in the same period this figure rose amongst its main competitors like Japan (9.9mn to 11.6mn), Germany (5.7mn to 6.0mn), Korea (2.8mn to 3.8mn), and China (1.8mn to 9.3mn).

The shifting winds of history are steadily unraveling Pax Americana‘s center of gravity, threatening to send the global system into a chaotic tailspin. The paradox is that though globalization sustained US hegemony, it also contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. America has overstayed in laissez-faire land, blinded by its own instruments of success to the dangers they pose to itself.

Russia has an exceptionally strong need for protectionism and state intervention, on account of its traditional economic backwardness, highly unfavorable geography, and innate tendencies towards illiberal anarchy (in which nothing gets done at all). Hence the reason for the forward-looking, dirigiste industrial policy pursued under the Putin administration (special economic zones, clauses obligating foreign automobile companies to source a percentage of their parts from Russian suppliers, nanotechnology, etc) - and the likelihood that the state will resume its old rule as the main driver of the Russian economy in the unstable decades to come.

(Also, Russia would do well to renationalize some industries, in particularly hydrocarbons).

A few criticisms of the book. It makes the blanket statement that growth was higher during the “statist” 1960-1980 period than the “open” 1980-2000 period, but fails to consider other possible factors behind it, such as: a) the end of hyperbolic growth in oil extraction, and more generally, energy production (energy and natural resources are indispensable and highly-neglected factors of economic growth) – i.e. the appearance of limits to growth to the global economy, b) the ebbing of the electro-mechanical / petrochemical cycle and c) the end of the Flynn effect (end of IQ rise), especially pertinent given that education is the elixir of growth. In other words, the scope of the book is rather narrow – state industrial policy as the be all and end all of economic development. That said, his arguments are intuitive and convincing, if not fully complete; though then again, I doubt comprehensiveness would have been one of his aims in a book of just 140 pages.

The ultimate conclusion is clear. The wretched of the earth must resist this economic imperialism of the North, as surely as Nikolai Trubetzkoy urged us resist Western cultural imperialism.

Werth, Alexander – Moscow War Diary (1942)
Category: history, Soviet Union, WW2; Rating: 4/5

On 22nd June 1941, the armed columns of Nazi Germany began rolling into Russia, heralding the start of the Great Patriotic War. For Alexander Werth, a correspondent for the British Sunday Times paper who had spent his childhood in imperial Russia, this was a deeply emotional event, stirring him ‘perhaps more deeply than any event since the war began’. Spurred by these sentiments and realizing that with the bulk of the Wehrmacht diverted to the USSR, how ‘the Russian people would resist Hitler’ would determine the outcome of this ‘totalitarian war’, he decided to go to Moscow. There, he observed how the military and the material, the media and the morale, aspects of the war interacted, wrote articles about it for readers in Britain (and occasionally the USSR) and recorded his impressions in a diary at ground zero that he edited for readability and published early 1942.

Werth considered the attitudes of some of his fellow journalists towards this war as just another ‘big story’ detestable. ‘Even more irritating, for its cold-hearted non-belligerent objectivity’ – for instance, the intention of an American journalist, Angelina, to remain in Moscow even should the Germans capture it, justifying it with, “You bet I’ll stay here; don’t you think it’ll be a swell story? Who’s to stop me? Aren’t we nootrals?” [sic]. He also lambasted another American journalist, Ingersoll, for whom the ‘war is an opportunity for a scoop’, as opposed to the ‘millions of Russians’ for whom it is a ‘matter of life and death’ .

He considers the Fourth Estate has a responsibility to promote Allied understanding – ‘whatever may be the…snags in future Anglo-Russian relations, we’ve got to support Russia; we’ve got to do away with the suspicions…’ . And at the end of book, after a succinct defense of the Soviet system and of Russian culture, an appeal for a post-war rapprochement between Britain and the USSR, and a call for the punishment of Germany, he bluntly states that that ‘all this would not mean much if in 1942 Russia were allowed to run short of equipment’ . This is telling – in other words, Werth does not consider himself a neutral and objective observer; he sees himself as a kind of combatant too, crucial for forming the kinds of bonds of trust that would allow the Allies to pool their resources, coordinate their actions and so bring the war to a more rapid close.

The publication date is very significant, for 1942 was the crucial year in which final victory could have been sealed by either side. Although the entry of the USA gave the Allies huge material preponderance over the Nazis during 1942, in practice the US would take time to get mobilized. Meanwhile, Germany had occupied much of the western USSR, including the Ukrainian breadbasket (albeit whose real importance to Soviet food security should not be overstated ), surrounded or occupied the industrial centers of Leningrad and the Donbass, and threatened to cut off the supply of Soviet oil from Azerbaijan. The ratio of Soviet to German GDP had tumbled from 1.1 in 1940 to 0.7 in 1942. As material stocks accumulated in the prewar period dwindled and military production was, despite all the difficulties, ramped up to several multiples of the German figure, the civilian stocks plummeted to dangerously low levels that could potentially fatally undermine the Soviet system to sustain war. According to Harrison’s model, during wartime the population splits into productive ‘mice’ and sabotaging ‘rats’ (e.g. black marketers, collaborators, etc). Initially, the payoff to rats is bigger, but as the number of rats increases that payoff decreases – when the payoffs to mice and rats again reach equilibrium, the state is close to collapse. Potentially, this could have happened in the USSR – after all, that had been the fate of tsarist Russia, and the Soviet regime certainly had no shortage of malcontents and wreckers (ex-kulaks, former White army officers, Trotskyites, etc – who were purged by Stalin, an action praised by Werth as necessary to Soviet stability ).

However, several key factors prevented that from happening – the efficacy of Soviet propaganda, support for the regime and the harshness of punishment for rats; the inefficiency of German propaganda and their cruel as well as appallingly stupid treatment of Slavic peoples in the ‘war of annihilation’; the extraordinary Soviet success in mass mobilization, in which the Soviet Union heeded Stalin’s call to become a ‘single armed camp’; the Soviet exploitation of their newly built-up industrial strength behind the Urals to decisively outproduce a Germany that pursued huge, useless investments in projects like the V-2 rockets and the Ahnenerbe, held ideological prejudices against employing women in armaments production, and above all indulged in the ‘polycratic chaos’ of rivaling ministries and sub-empires which, driven by self-interest, could never hammer out a war-winning grand strategy like the Allies; and Lend-Lease, which although small relative to overall Soviet production, nonetheless alleviated shortages of several key war-making components (rare metals, aviation fools, canned food) and helped plug the possibly narrow gap that separated Soviet society from collapse. Let’s examine each of these in turn.

Spymania and xenophobia were a feature of Soviet society, in which caution and watchfulness were encouraged to thwart the foreign forces seeking to sabotage the Soviet Union and its achievements – which incidentally caused Werth, a foreign journalist and before his flight to Britain after the Revolution, an incorrigible member of the St.-Petersburg bourgeoisie, no little amount of bother. Stalin was admired as a competent ‘captain of state’, a paternal bashka (thinker). Rumors of (retrospectively justified) Nazi atrocities, executions of POW’s and the dissemination of Hitler’s long-term plans for the subjugation of the Slavic peoples stirred popular anger and a willingness to fight to the end against the Germans – one woman remarked, in defense of the Stalinist regime, “What other regime can there be other than a German concentration camp? Our country has toiled for twenty years, in appallingly difficult conditions, but now we have achieved a standard of comfort and prosperity…the general level of education and culture and economic wellbeing has improved so very much…” A kolkhoz chairman expressed similar views – the Soviets had vastly improved the country, the Germans had invaded and wrecked it (“Damn the Germans! But for this war we’d be living in a world of ever-increasing plenty for everyone! ) and there was a determination to repay them ‘tenfold’. As Werth put it, those who insist the Russians were forced to fight by the GPU were idiots – there was a genuine groundswell of support for the regime for the most part and its promises of socialist democracy.

Supporting the above was a constant drumbeat of propaganda. At the simpler end, these consisted of crude but effective propaganda posters (“Crush the fascist reptile!” ) and uplifting martial songs. More fundamentally, the Soviet state changed it ideological outlook. Anti-clericalism was brushed away, to win the support of devout Orthodox believers and Western observers horrified by state-promoted atheism. Pan-Slavic themes were re-embraced , such as showing Eisenstein’s films about Alexander Nevsky (a Duke of Novgorod who beat the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lake Peipus in 1240, but whose socialist credentials are dubious), playing Shostakovich’s music (the dramatic 7th ‘Leningrad’ Symphony) and acting out plays like A Life for the Tsar (renamed Ivan Susanin, for its 17th century peasant hero who sacrifices his life to lead the invading Poles into a swamp). Though the Soviet papers took a bland and upbeat tone, as Werth insists, they included real information buried beneath their big columns and between the lines – this would have served the double purpose of helping preclude popular panic, but succeeding in informing vital decision-makers. Military chaplains were reintroduced and harsh, hierarchic discipline brought back into the Red Army, to the point of establishing penal battalions (shtrafbats) for gross dereliction of duty or unauthorized retreat (Werth doesn’t mention it, as it is unlikely to make a good impression on its audience – nonetheless, counter-intuitively, there is evidence that most soldiers supported these measures). In summary, there was ‘no longer a dividing line between “Soviet” and “Russian”’ – it was a ‘national regime’.

Meanwhile, German atrocities were a massive disincentive to becoming a rat. Contrary to the Cold War myths promulgated by the German generals after the war, the Wehrmacht was an active participant in them. There is a grlimp into this by Werth’s observation of a letter sent by a ‘Hausfrau of a bitch’ to a soldier asking him to seize a fur coat for her from Russia, amongst other things. German propaganda was generally ineffective, due to the disconnect between its ostensibly ‘good’ intentions (at least from some perspectives, e.g. liquidating the Jewish-Bolshevik cabal that ruled over Russia) to the reality of its massacres and criminal mistreatment of POW’s. In any case the Soviets had made sure to try to gather in all radios except those pre-tuned to only receive only Soviet frequencies. Soviet propaganda, which initially tried to differentiate between good and bad Germans, adopted a uniformly hardline, hostile position to them by August as popular resentment against them and military defeats stung more deeply. Werth himself frequently demonized Germans as a people in his diary, although this is justifiable in the context of the time he was writing in.

Werth does not dwell at length on the Soviet military-industrial complex and the evacuation of many manufacturing plants to the near impregnable Urals, where a basic industrial infrastructure had been foresightedly built up under Stalin. Together with Lend-Lease, which plugged many vital holes in the Soviet civilian and military sectors, and the full-scale mobilization of ethnicities and women, it played a vital role in assuring victory – Werth notes how supportive a ‘Mongol’ soldier (actually, probably a Central Asian) was for the war effort and how women were organized into patrols to watch out for ‘parachutists’ and exhorted to go work in the depopulated collective farms (women also fought successfully in segregated aviation and sniper units, as well as forming a large contingent of medics and other support units ). Werth himself contributed somewhat to improving Western images of the Soviet Union (he complained of unfair coverage, Russophobia, and criticized France and Britain for their lack of cooperation with the USSR before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), and as such in his own small way contributed to making Lend-Lease smooth and successful – as noted previously, he saw very much saw himself as an information warrior for the Allies. He expressed a pollyannish belief that Russia would eventually implement the Stalin Constitution, evolve a Soviet democracy, and maintain postwar friendship with Britain.

Werth does, of course, criticize the Soviet Union and military operations from time to time (to be convincing, one has to acknowledge contrary points of view before attacking them), although they are always qualified and explained away – but not always convincingly. Contrary to his assertions, the tactical performance and logistics of the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942 (these years accounted for two thirds of Soviet ‘irrecoverable losses, according to Krivosheev), and ‘radio communications were rudimentary’, radar generally unavailable and officers trained only to ‘undertake frontal assaults’. Werth also spent what appeared to me to be an inordinately large amount of time going to theater, music, and other cultural performances in wartime Moscow in 1941.

Werth viewed the struggle as a Manichean battle between Allied good and Nazi evil, and this, coupled with his own emotional stakes in the conflict, colored his objectivity. He saw journalists as a type of soldier too, bound to keep up morale by withholding deleterious information, or if necessary, releasing it in a low-key, gradual and qualified way. The margin for victory in 1942 was excessively narrow, and it is entirely possible than it was information control that prevented Soviet panic and a mass conversion into ‘rats’. Werth himself was an example of this, emphasizing the positive and maintaining a confident note throughout the book, and which was reflected in his journalistic pieces of the period that affected public opinion in Britain and to a smaller extent, in Russia (he published a few pieces in Russian). It is an intriguing, ground-zero portrayal of how it is sometimes necessary for journalists to ditch pure objectivity to serve a greater and juster cause.

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