Thinkbinder tonight at 9:30 PM

[Rajesh Kasturirangan]

Just a reminder that we meet on Thinkbinder tonight at 9:30 PM. Last week's thinkbinder discussion organically gravitated toward education. I think we are now at a stage where we need not have another online discussion on this topic until there is something interesting to share/report. For tonight's dicsussion, I am rigging the proceedings by proposing another topic:  the viability of political formations. 

The background: I just finished reading Thomas Trautman's beautiful summary of the main themes of Kautilya's Arthasastra, which the oldest text on politics and statecraft.  One of the points he makes is that Ancient India had republics as well as kingdoms but for most of the last two thousand years, kingdoms were the norm. Trautmann says that kingdoms were both economically and morally more acceptable. Also kingdoms were both more economically efficient and politically more diverse. Strangely, modern democracy arose from Kingdoms rather than republics. Tribal communities like the Afghans haven't evolved into democracies despite historically being more participatory in their decision making. Perhaps even more strangely, not a single Buddhist country is a real pluralist democracy, including our own southern neighbour Sri Lanka. 

The Fundamental Observation. Democracy and dictatorship are neither inevitable nor completely random. Instead, they become more and/or less viable depending on the circumstances,  both material as well as mental. Model thinking should be able to help us think through what is accidental and what is structural in this evolution of political systems.  

The Questions: What makes certain political formations more viable than others at a given time? Is it a function of economics alone? What role does technology play in sustaining a political entity? Why do we such linear paths in the space of politics: theocracy-->kingdoms--> democracy rather than a more liner path? 

A book worth looking at is Acemoglu and Robinson's "Economic Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship," which is the best modern treatment of this issue from an economists point of view. 

The challenge of course is to bring model thinking to bear on these questions. See you tonight. 

Rajesh

[MG Subramanian]

I spent sometime downloading and going thru net logo. Have not completed understanding what its power and limitation are as a modelling environment.But clearly it is very sophisticated

Here is a way I think we can observe "the history of the world in a test tube!" so speak!

Agents and their attributes.

We have some N agents in  the test tube that is a Net Logo environment

Each has 4 attributes.

Power :                       On a discrete scale of  1 to 5 

Resources                   1,2,3

Orientation:                 1,2,3

Connectivity:

Spatial proximity is the conventional form of connectivity. Spatial proximity or the lack of it between agents formed the natural limits on the probability of interaction between two agents.

Communities: 

* Communities can be designed to have the same attributes that are some function of the similar attributes of agents. Their power and influence are moderated by the sum total of resources.

* In addition communities can have rules of engagement with other communities which are derivable from some measures of their resource orientation etc etc

 

The way  different communities interact can be modelled on some function of the probability of interaction and some way to determine an " outcome"

Here are some sample rules.

* If a more powerful agent ineteracts with less powerful agent the former changes the later to his orientation if the former's also has more resources

* if a more resourceful community interact with less resourceful community a "war of conquest" only a metaphor will  ensue if....

 The result on how the resource will be shared  in the meged community is specified by a set of rules

This is only communicate the flavour of modelling. May be we need some more or less rules on how the "world" gets reconfigured from round to round. We may need "simple enough" rules of delay that reflect how difficult or easy it is to " generate consensus" in a community for the next possible/potential decision. These decisions could be internal resource sharing, resource sharing with another community etc. I am using "simple enough" to highlight we don't need complex rules to create complexity. We need simple rules but a lot of diversity.

We can then have " views" to study how the world in a test tube "transforms" itself from round to round.

That's it from me.

Let the games begin (Whenever rules are voted upon and determined.)

-ganu