I have to go back to Carroll Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations for a moment.
Quigley develops the concept of the "instrument of expansion" (page 129 of 425), the mechanism that generates a civilization's growth:
The three essential parts of an instrument of expansion are incentive to invent, accumulation of surplus, and application of this surplus to the new inventions.
- For invention think "progress".
- For accumulation of surplus think "capital accumulation".
- For application of this surplus to new inventions think "investment".
The progress of a civilization depends on capital accumulation and investment of the accumulation.
"All three of these things are essential to any civilization," Quigley says:
Taken together, we call them an instrument of expansion. If a producing society has such an organization (an instrument of expansion), we call it a civilization, and it passes through the process we are about to describe.It needs the instrument of expansion so it can have the growth stage. If it doesn't have the growth stage, it's not a civilization.
The pattern of change in civilizations presented here consists of seven stages resulting from the fact that each civilization has an instrument of expansion that becomes an institution. The civilization rises while this organization is an instrument and declines as this organization becomes an institution.
Again, Harry Hogan distinguishes "instruments" from "institutions" in the Foreword of Quigley's book:
Quigley found the explanation of disintegration in the gradual transformation of social "instruments" into "institutions," that is, the transformation of social arrangements functioning to meet real social needs into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs.
When social arrangements stop serving real social needs and start serving their own purposes, it signals the onset of decline.
Come to think of it, Toynbee offered a similar thought: A "schism" arising in society, a schism "along lines of class", he says, is "a distinctive mark of the periods of breakdown and disintegration". When differences between classes start giving rise to troubles in society, civilization has reached the "breakdown" stage.
Quigley's version again: When
the mechanism that drives the growth of civilization becomes an
institution serving the purposes of wealth holders and ignoring real
social needs, class-based differences give rise to troubles in society,
and civilization has reached the breakdown stage.
We're living through it. I don't have to tell you. But I have to say that it is clearly laid out by both Toynbee and Quigley, with plenty of overlap of their explanations.
Wikipedia, too, is on top of it. From the Institution article:
In history, a distinction between eras or periods implies a major and fundamental change in the system of institutions governing a society.
Differences
between eras: That's what Crotty's paper is about -- he says Keynes
described the differences between different eras as a result of changes
in institutions. It's starting to make sense.
Differences between eras. That's what Crotty was talking about, and Keynes, and Quigley, and Toynbee.
From the same Wikipedia page, under Institutional persistence:
[Douglass] North argues that because of the preexisting influence that existing organizations have over the existing framework, change that is brought about is often in the interests of these organizations.
Exactly what we found in the Quigley Foreword: "social arrangements functioning to meet real social needs" transforming into "social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs." For example, billionaires who get to be the first to go into space in their own spaceships.
When I was in seventh grade, John Glenn was a hero for all of America, maybe for all the world. Now I'm 72, and Bezos and Branson are heroes in their own minds. I'm being petty? Yeah I know. But I'm not concerned about Bezos and Branson. I'm concerned because the system has been perverted to help people like them in their Pinky-and-the-brain, take-over-the-world, high-functioning-sociopath activities.
That's right: It's the "schism along lines of class". Our institutions have been corrupted. But that's their doing, not mine.
Look. The growth of civilization requires invention, capital accumulation, and investment. Let's say Quigley is right about that. But capital accumulation is its own reward: people become billionaires.
It is the task of government, in the age of capitalism, to provide policies that restore balance. Otherwise, inequality grows so great that capitalism begins to undermine its own progress, so that the age of capital must eventually give way to the next stage in the cycle of civilization, and life as we know it comes to an end.
3 comments:
Quigley, from above:
"If a producing society has such an organization (an instrument of expansion), we call it a civilization"
W. W. Rostow from The Stages of Economic Growth:
"The central economic fact about traditional societies is that they evolved within limited production functions... [L]imitations of technology decreed a ceiling beyond which they could not penetrate. They did not lack inventiveness and innovations, some of high productivity. But they did lack a systematic understanding of their physical environment capable of making invention a more or less regular current flow, rather than a stock of ad hoc achievements inherited from the past. They lacked, in short, the tools and the outlook towards the physical world of the post-Newtonian era."
Quigley says a primitive society needs inventiveness. Rostow says they have inventiveness, but lack the knowledge that creates technological advance.
(That reminds me of Richard Feynman's cargo cult tribe that made a mock-up of a landing strip, complete with "a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.")
But Rostow says inventiveness plus technology. Quigley says inventiveness plus accumulation of surplus plus investment of that surplus.
For Rostow, investment becomes key not in traditional societies but in the take-off stage (page 7):
"A result -- and one key manifestation -- of take-off is the ability of the society to sustain an annual rate of net investment of the order of, at least, ten per cent."
Dunno if Rostow puts enough emphasis on the increase of economic activity in the primitive and non-monetary stage of society. Given the competitiveness of human nature, the simple expansion of economic activity would generate technological advance of a sort. And the success of the economic activity of individuals would draw more people into that activity.
And then Charlemagne reinvents money, and things begin to move faster.
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