As I was travelling I started to notice something that must have been obvious: there are more people living in some places (urban regions) and fewer people living in other(rural regions)? Why is that? I also noticed that there are virtually no societies without a government. If human beings value being free so much, why do they install governments for themselves? I always like to study things from first principles and I have been doing that for some time. So, I thought I would share with you my understanding of the process of evolution of human civilizations.
Imagine for a second that you are living in the fertile crescent during the time of the start of recorded history. Society has recently discovered farming. Instead of moving from one place to another in search of food and other necessities, you can simply plant some seeds in the soil, wait for a bit, and have food waiting for the taking in a short period of time. This ability to know where food will be available a year from now is useful, it helps you become more efficient. You no longer have to wander aimlessly in search of food hoping that you will find it before hunger gets the better of you. Hooray! Predictability! This means that you can settle down and have a nice quiet life.
All men want to eat and make merry. You realize that to do that, you have to do 4 simple steps:
- Step 1: Plant your crops (work).
- Step 2: Tend to the crops until it yields food (work).
- Step 3: Harvest (work).
- Step 4: Eat and make merry.
Lather, rinse, repeat!
But there is one problem: there is another way someone can ‘eat and make merry’ without having to go through steps 1, 2 and 3 which is a lot of work. That method goes something like this:
- Step 1: Wait for someone else to do the work of planting crops, caring for and harvesting them.
- Step 2: Use violence on them and take their stuff (work).
Step 2 can involve killing them, but if you kill them, they will not be around to plant crops for you in the future. So, prefer to not kill them, but in case they resist, kill a few of them in a public and brutal way to set an example. You are king and everyone works for your pleasure.
Let’s say that people who produce the crops are called Producers (P) and people who seize other people’s stuff for themselves are called the Warriors (W).
As long as the work of taking other people’s stuff is greater than the work of producing the stuff, warriors will take from producers.
If we denote the amount of effort required for Producers to be Work(P) and the amount of work required for warriors to be Work(W),
Work(W) < Work(P) => Seizure
Now, let’s say that workers notice that despite doing the hard labour of planting the crops, caring for them, and harvesting them, they do not get to ‘eat and make merry’. They realize that there is nothing that stops the warriors from taking their stuff. So, they decide to install a warrior clan for themselves and when another warrior clan tries to kill them and take their stuff, they turn around and kill them first. Therefore, to ‘eat and make merry’, there are now 5 steps:
- Step 1: Plant your crops (work).
- Step 2: Tend to the crops until it yields food (work).
- Step 3: Harvest (work).
- Step 4: Defend your harvest from others who may want to take their stuff (work).
- Step 5: Eat and make merry.
This means that each sedentary society develops a production clan and a warrior clan. This is the evolution of a state. The state has some territory (land) where it conducts economic activity such as production and some people which can be broadly divided into a production class and warrior class.
Within a state, there is law and administration of justice. The purpose of the law is to incentivize people to produce more and try to be more efficient in production. To do this, the state declares that only you have rights to the fruits of your own labour. If you work in a field to produce a harvest, only you are entitled to the harvest produce. If someone steals the fruits of your labour, they are punished (administration of justice). It should cost more to steal from others than to produce goods and services on their own. Thus:
Work(W) > Work(P) => No Seizure
This means that it becomes more profitable to become a producer and not a warrior within a state. This leads to more people producing more goods and services leading to prosperity within the state.
Other people notice the prosperity of such a state and install similar governments for themselves to ensure their own prosperity. Thus, similar states develop in other territories forming an international system. Within the international system, there is still the rule of the mightiest. Whenever it is profitable for a state to steal the wealth of its neighbours through violence, it does so. This process of violence between states is called war. At the end of a war, the victorious state can loot and plunder the vanquished state and over time this system stabilizes for a brief period of time when each major state is evenly matched.
State power and corruption
Governments are installed to administer justice. To administer justice, law enforcement officers need to be hired, rehabilitation centres need to be built, court systems should be established, and criminals should be caught, tried and punished. All of this costs money and these costs are borne through the collection of taxes. Here, there is another problem. What if law enforcement officers cooperate with the plunderers to steal from producers? If law enforcement officers can make more money from co-operating with thieves than they can make from enforcing the law, they will co-operate with thieves and make more money that way. This problem is called corruption.
Let’s denote the benefit of co-operating with people who steal from producers to be Benefit(Co-operating with thieves) and the benefit of enforcing the law to be Benefit(Enforcing the Law). The benefit of enforcing the law is usually the salary and benefits awarded to law enforcement officers.
Benefit(Enforcing the law) < Benefit(stealing) => Corruption.
It will almost always be more profitable to steal than it is to enforce the law. Therefore, it is important to have virtue as a requirement before people are installed as law enforcement officers. Otherwise, there will be no administration of justice and this will cause the state to become inefficient. It will eventually, get overrun by a different state where administration of justice is possible, leading to prosperity for them and more money for them to pay for soldiers and thus a better and stronger army. The stronger army should then make war on the weaker army thus defeating it and installing its system of justice on the vanquished people thus ending the corruption.
Development of cities and trade
As people become more secure in their environments, they aspire to become wealthy through specialization and trade. People who are better at certain arts and crafts specialize in their areas of expertise and then trade the products of their work with others.
Different people may have different costs for producing goods and services. People with the lowest cost can produce the goods and services and then trade them for goods and services with others who have lower costs of production for those goods and services. This makes everyone better off as goods and services are produced at the lowest cost possible.
However, it might be very inefficient for people to travel to everyone else’s homes for trading. Therefore, usually, a common area is designated as a marketplace where anyone who has anything to buy and sell is required to show up for trading. This area is usually called a town. Each town will usually have the products and services that are required to support the population in its surrounding area (also called a catchment area). More specialized services (such as brain surgery etc) might require a larger catchment area as the service require more people to support running costs. As a result, some of these towns develop into cities and offer more specialized services.
Learn more
Here are some of the links which were informative in this enquiry:
- “Kings and Generals: Rise of Sumer: Cradle of Civilization DOCUMENTARY”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHpmLrWBjnM
- “Wendover productions: Why Cities Are Where They Are”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWWtqfwacQ
Inevitability of imperfection
So, human civilizations seem to have evolved from an organic process that involves much competition and a search for efficiency. However, this process, like all organic processes is inefficient. Therefore, every human society is inefficient (with some injustice that cannot be eliminated) and the international system is always unstable as the capabilities of every country change through time thus disrupting the equilibrium. We just have to learn to live with all of it. However, I do hope that the system never delivers an unacceptable outcome, such as a nuclear holocaust or human extinction.