seangabb
Published 5 Mar 2021The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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May 20, 2022
The Crusades: Part 7 – The Third Crusade
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High and low “state capacity” illustrated
In Law & Liberty, Helen Dale recounts a miserable experience getting out of a major US airport and says this is an example of America’s low state capacity:
“TSA Checkpoint” by phidauex is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
At the other end, I found a stretch limo waiting for me. Getting ferried about in a limo after The Trip from Hell is something I’ve experienced before, in Damascus, before the Syrian civil war. Classic third world. Like Syrians, American hosts send limousines to the airport to pick you up because they know you flew in from JFK and will need to be appeased.
My experience is illustrative of something not confined to airports, however. Indeed, if it were only confined to airports, then the phrase I’m about to use (about the US) would be unfair (to the US). America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one.
State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s ability to achieve policy goals in reference to specific aims, collect taxes, uphold law and order, and provide public goods. Its absence at the extremes is terrifying, and often used to illustrate things like “fragile states” or “failed states”. However, denoting calamitous governance in the developing world is not its only value. State capacity allows one to draw distinctions at varying levels of granularity between developed countries, and is especially salient when it comes to healthcare, policing, and immigration. It has a knock-on effect in the private sector, too, as business responds to government in administrative kind.
Think, for example, of Covid-19. The most reliable metric — if you wish to compare different countries’ responses to the pandemic — is excess deaths per 100,000 people over the relevant period. That is, count how many extra people died beyond the pre-pandemic mortality rate on a country-by-country basis. For the sake of argument, drop the five countries leading this grim pack. Four of them are developing countries, and the fifth is Russia, which while developed, is both an autocracy and suffers from chronic low state capacity.
At the other end of the scale, ignore China, too. It may be lying about its success or, more plausibly, may have achieved it by dint of being an authoritarian state with high state capacity (notably, the latest round of draconian lockdowns in Shanghai commenced after the WHO collated that data).
The US has the worst excess death rate in the developed world (140 per 100,000). Australia has the best: –28 per 100,000. Yes, you read that right. Australia increased its life expectancy and general population health during the pandemic. So did Japan, albeit less dramatically. The rest of the developed world falls in between those two extremes: Italy and Germany are on 133 and 116 per 100,000 respectively, with the UK (109 per 100,000) doing a bit better. France and Sweden knocked it out of the park (63 and 56 per 100,000 excess deaths).
Recall, too, that not only did different countries adopt different approaches to pandemic management; sometimes there were large differences within countries. Like the US, Australia is a federal system, and as in the US, different states did things differently. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, had the longest lockdown of any major city in the developed world. Other Australian states, meanwhile, locked down sparingly or not at all. In a European context, Sweden rejected most over-the-top Covid responses, the UK was somewhere in the middle, and Italy was thoroughly draconian, even barring unvaccinated people from supermarkets and groceries.
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The Cold War Legend That Delivered SAUSAGES To Tanks | Forces TV
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Published 26 Apr 2018To British troops based in north Germany in the last two decades of the Cold War, he was a legend. But this was no commando or member of the special forces.
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QotD: Credentialism
The minute a profession starts thinking of itself as a profession it’s finished, because henceforth “actually doing the job” will come second to “advancing the guild’s interests”. Not for everyone, of course. Most doctors, I imagine, just want to practice medicine. They probably even feel they’d be much better off without the elaborate apparatus of “the profession” — the American Medical Association, their specialty associations, the unique social status of “being a doctor” (there are a lot more downsides than upsides to this, if you really think about it). They no doubt feel this … until someone outside of it starts badmouthing the guild, or someone inside causes the profession to lose standing. Then they close ranks.
The reason for this — if you want to slap an academic-sounding label on it — is “the reification of the bureaucracy”. Even if 99 out of 100 doctors, say, just want to practice medicine, there’s that last guy who makes “being a doctor” his life’s work. He joins all the associations, and because that kind of guy is basically just Trigglypuff with better hygiene and lower BMI, he quickly rises to a position of influence in every organization. He lives for the bureaucracy. Which means he’s a politician, and there it is.
If you want more examples, look no further than the original guilds, the craft associations of the Middle Ages. Any settlement big enough for actual cash money to change hands in it soon had an exquisitely class-conscious group with lots of actual, but no formal, power. Your smart tyrant co-opted the politicians from the merchant guilds, made them de facto nobility and bade them act like it — that gave you the Renaissance. Your dumb (or merely nonexistent) tyrant let the merchants’ resentments fester — that gave you the Reformation, and the whole catalog of ideological murder that followed.
Severian, “Credentialism Ruins Everything”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-03-22.
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