Punishment, reward and the fortunes of states

Abstract

Existing theories explain the rise and fall of states either by random factors specific to each state or by a life cycle to which any state eventually succumbs. However, neither approach is able to explain systematic patterns such as the tendency toward smaller political units during the millennium from 400 to 1400 A.D. and the movement in the opposite direction over the last six centuries. Here it is argued that such changes are due to innovations in the technology of information processing and military control that alter the cost of generating rewards and imposing punishment.

Musket, Map and Money: How Military Technology Shaped Geopolitics and Economics

“…Bernholz and Vaubel (2004) are also unable to account for the failure of Southeast Asia to be at the forefront of human civilizations despite several potentially-advantageous factors: the continuous functioning of a Southeast Asian state system since the late classical era, the auspicious position of Southeast Asia as a crossroads of major civilizations, and the abundance of resources in Southeast 16 Kennedy (1987) has the same finding. The economies of scale in conflict (or the returns to scale in conflict, or military decisiveness, or the mass factor-terms which are used interchangeably in this book), are well-studied by scholars such as Dudley (1990Dudley ( , 1991Dudley ( , 1992 and Hirshleifer (1995). 19 It also occupies a prominent position in many grand strategy theories such as that of Wittman (1991).…”

“…On the other hand, if a larger force has about the same probability of victory as its smaller foe and victory could only be secured at the expense of great costs, then there is a small mass factor. Dudley (1990Dudley ( , 1991Dudley ( , 1992 expounds another way of looking at the concept of economies of scale in conflict: when there are greater economies of scale in conflict, a larger force will suffer fewer casualties when winning victory against a smaller enemy. At the extreme, when the economies of scale in the application of force are infinitely large, a larger force will suffer no casualties when crushing a smaller enemy.…”

Democracy, Federalism, and the Size of States

“…Various technological improvements in monitoring agents and citizens have also reduced the costs of collecting taxes in large jurisdictions over time (Dudley 1992;McNeill 1982). The argument is straightforward, but the precise effects of particular changes are hard to estimate since the costs of producing different public goods and extracting revenue are very difficult to measure.…”

Economic Integration and the Politics of Independence

“…First, beyond some threshold, because of the political costs of domestic control, states have to decentralise political management (Dudley 1992). This limit to the territorial extension of states in such a system suggests a tendency towards empire formation, rather than the incorporation of conquered territory within a unitary state.…”

“…Indeed the sensitivity of polling results to the description of the option (sovereignty versus sovereignty-association, for example) is quite consistent with the importance of cost-benefit calculations. 4 On the political and economic determinants of the size of nations, see: Alesina and Spolaore (1995), Anderson (1986), Dudley (1992), Friedman (1977), Wittman (1991).…”