On kleptocracies and meta-stable societies
11h ·
Okay, since nobody in the news is talking about anything other than Afghanistan today, I'll talk about Afghanistan, a subject I've been bored with for a while. To do so, I'm going to want to explain a concept in math first, not because this is a math problem, but because it's a great metaphor for why we got our butts handed to us by the Taliban, at least in my opinion.
In math, we call something "metastable" (prounced "meta stable," not "metast-able") if no matter what direction you push something, it rolls back to where it was -- but only as long as you don't push it too far. Imagine a steep hill, if you will, with a bowl or crater or valley at the top. Imagine dropping a ball anywhere inside that bowl. It rolls to the bottom of the bowl. You can push it anywhere in that bowl, and it's going to roll back down to the bottom of the bowl. Push it TOO far, though, and it's going to roll down the hill, instead. And once it goes down the hill, you're going have to push it a lot harder to get it back to the middle of the bowl.
I truly believe that there's a figurative hill in human affairs. That an almost entirely honest government AND private sector is a metastable state, at the bottom of that bowl at the top of the hill, up where safety and liberty and prosperity are. But if you aren't already in that bowl? The direction of gravity is not towards honest businesses and honest government, it's towards the maximum entropy state, the lowest effort state: tribal kleptocracy.
In a tribal kleptocracy, you assume that everybody steals the absolute maximum they can steal without collapsing the whole system, where everything only works as long as nothing goes wrong because all the money that was supposed to pay for resilience and public safety got stolen, and where the only point to politics, the only reason to vote, the only reason to serve in the army or police or any other government job is not so you can steal that money (it'll never be you), but to keep it from being stolen by people who hate you, who might use that money to hurt you. And once you get into that state, it's not just metastable, it's highly stable, because that kind of cynicism is self-enforcing.
And here's why I think we ended up handing Iraq to the local branch of Hezbollah and their mostly equally loathsome tribal allies, and we just ran out of any alternatives to handing Afghanistan to the Taliban:
Accountants who are more afraid of losing their license, for getting caught cooking the books, than they are afraid of getting fired or hungry enough to take bribes.
An independent, tenured judiciary who know that if they get caught ruling unfairly and get reversed, that's the end of their career advancement.
Well funded and popular adversarial investigative journalists who are hungry for the fame and prestige that comes from successfully proving government or private sector fraud, and who fear that no journalistic outlet would ever hire them again if they were caught going easy on someone or being unfairly hard on someone else.
Political parties, companies, and charities that, when one of theirs is caught stealing, they throw that person out and do what they can to keep anyone from ever putting any trust in that person ever again, no matter how useful or important or irreplaceable that person seems, even if it means losing in the short term, because they fear the long term consequences of being suspected of harboring fraudsters.
And I believe that if you have all four of those things, and maybe one or two more that I'm not even thinking of, then you have a country, a society, where fraud is at most an entirely manageable half of a percent, not the 20% to 35% that Transparency International reports is absolutely routine in tribal kleptocracies.
I don't think we even tried to set up honest accountant licensing bodies in either country. We made no serious effort at all to create an honest, apolitical judiciary in either country. Without those things to help prop them up, honest adversarial journalism, and political or tribal norms where you turn on your own if they're not honest, never had a chance to take root. We did not offer either country a credible alternative to tribal kleptocracy. It was too far uphill, and too many of our leaders are too cynical about it as a goal.
Theocracies are not terribly stable, either, and end up governing as badly as, well, Saudi Arabia or Iran. I don't think any such government is ever going to end up being actually prosperous and actually metastable. But the Taliban have this going for them, just like Iraq's Shiite theocratic parties do: they believe in pushing the ball up the hill from tribal kleptocracy and unlike the defenders of social democracy or industrial capitalism, they're actually putting in the effort. That's why they face so little opposition: because local people, no matter how little they love the theocratic militias, know that *anything* is better than tribal kleptocracy. And rolling down hill to tribal kleptocracy is too easy, and pushing the ball up hill in any direction, towards any metastable point above that awful baseline, is worth trying if they can find a big enough group putting in the work.
Sara Heck and I were just talking about this same thing, but hadn't been quite as thorough, and hadn't thought about the kleptocracy element
Lynn Carmichael I've had a lot of time to think about this because the ONE conservative humorist I can stand to listen to for more than a couple of seconds, P.J. O'Rourke, got a book advance in the late '90s from a publisher who wanted him to do the field research to prove that libertarian capitalism makes countries free and prosperous and safe, and any form of socialism makes countries poor and unsafe. This should have been an easy thing for him to do: he self-identified as a right-wing libertarian, proving that should have fit his confirmation bias.
But one reason I can stand to listen to O'Rourke is he occasionally succumbs to intellectual honesty, so he challenged people send him to even one poor, unsafe, miserable capitalist country and to even one wealthy, safe, happy socialist country. And after spending months in post-communist Albania, and in Sweden, he came back and wrote up his travelogue (he also spent months on Wall Street and most of a month in Cuba), he came back and wrote an entirely different book than the one his publisher had asked for.
To his horror, he felt that he had learned the hard way that neither libertarianism nor socialism make places good places. What makes them good places or bad places is whether or not they have honest journalists, honest judges, and honest accountants.
Brad Hicks Thanks for that, I'll have to check out the book.
Lynn Carmichael It's called /Eat the Rich./ I'm told there's a newly updated edition; if you read that one, let me know what the changes were, okay?
Brad Hicks As I recall, O'Rourke called the necessary condition "rule of law", which is related to honest accounting and probably logically prior to it.
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