They still delivered the goods, in most places, of rapid industrialization. Whether they are the /best/ way, is certainly debatable, but it's not what's best that gets implemented, but what is materially possible.
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Since Hamilton's days the quality of barbarians has been dropping off a cliff.
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You just can’t get good help these days. But as Gandhi advised, “Be the barbarian invasion you want to see in the world.”
End of conversation
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I think it's a bit upstream of that, where the important lever rests.
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What do you have in mind?
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Renaissance seems to begin as the rebound of a collapse (black death, etc.), but some cultures have had nice, long bounces before a second collapse. The surplus of a Renaissance can be converted directly into political squabbling, or into something less adverse.
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That’s rather downstream, then. Hamilton’s musings were on a millenial timescale, concerned with what kind of cultural or genetic blends were more likely to play a new game in a Malthusian recess, rather than merely live quantitatively better, or squander it entirely.
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Do you have a reference off-hand? That description seems to place his conjecture outside the field of agency.
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It’s a paragraph in “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man”, freely avl online. He observed rebirths ~800 yrs after invasions; theory that civ selects against innovators, so replenishment long-term beneficial. Practically? Don’t waste asabiyah; reward & replicate creators?
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So there's no benefit in trying to design a system that accommodates innovators, by his conclusion? I wonder if there isn't a way to give them space within a culture, though.
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No he wasn’t fatalistic, was def in favor of promoting desirable traits -he recognized that we couldn’t expect it to happen on its own.
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It’s worth thinking how to simulate that without the intervening dark age
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