zenpundit.com

John Robb had an interesting post at his personal blog “Right On: For Nations, Small is Beautiful“, arguing that smaller nation-states have an advantage over larger rivals:

“Gideon Rachman writing for the Financial Times:

The World Economic Forum’s competitiveness index suggests that five of the seven most “competitive” countries have populations of less than 10m. The Human Development Index – which ranks countries by measures such as life expectancy and education – places only one large country in its top 10: Japan.

Look at almost any league table of national welfare and small countries dominate. The International Monetary Fund’s ranking of countries by gross domestic product per capita shows that four of the five richest countries in the world have populations of less than 5m. (The US – placed fourth in wealth-per-head – is the exception.) The Global Peace Index, produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranks nations by criteria such as homicide rates and prison populations and it too makes pleasant reading for pocket-sized countries. The most peaceful place on earth is, apparently, Norway (quite cold, though) and eight of the 10 most peaceful countries have populations of less than 10m.

Roll out economic portability and collective security and why not get small? The political buffet awaits…”

Hmmm. I’m not sure that small size or size at all is the critical variable here.

Looking at the WEF Report list , the only “multicultural” nations in the top twenty are the U.S., Switzerland, France, Singapore, Canada and Belgium.

Of these, Singapore is an efficient autocracy that severely punishes ethnic agitation; France, the U.S. and Switzerland have political systems whose legitimacy goes back centuries that are respected by citizens of all ethnicities; while Canada and Belgium are merely bicultural. All of these states are strongly committed to the rule of law and all of them, save Singapore, are tolerant, liberal democracies.None of these states resembles the ethnosectarian crazy quilts that are Nigeria, Russia, Lebanon, Iraq, India and so on. Or suffers from a paralyzing level of systemic corruption that plague so many potentially viable states that languish on the edge of failure and civil war.

Perhaps relative homogeneity intersecting with legitimate rule-sets is the key?

ADDENDUM:

I agree with Shlok, take a look at “Becoming a Micropower“

PORTALS, PLATFORMS AND RULE-SETS

Blogfriend Critt Jarvis has reinvented his online presence and returned to some of his original intellectual concerns from back in the days when he was a founding member of The New Rule-Sets Project, later purchased by Enterra Solutions. Critt is jumping off a post by Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion and extending the argument with “Steve Rubel is right, do you know why ?“:

“He’s right. Here’s why. Web portals are social networks, and social networks aggregate to a global conversation market.

Like global or world cities — for example, New York, Paris, Tokyo, London — where, from the transparent nexus of culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce, and fashion, we expect to consistently have a really good time,

The global conversation market has the necessary resources to accommodate a global social network.

For a really good time in the global conversation market …

Find your portal to social networks

Web portals provide stability in social networks, requisite to emerging conversation markets.
Web portals provide growth of social networks.
Web portals provide resources for social networks.
Web portals provide infrastructure for social networks.
Web portals provide money for social networks.
Web portals provide rules for social networks.
Web portals provide security for social networks.

And remember this

Absent stability, there’s no conversation market.
Absent growth, there’s no stability.
Absent resources, there’s no growth.
Absent infrastructure, there’s no resources.
Absent money, there’s no infrastructure.
Absent rules, trust me, there’s no institutional investor money.
Absent security, the rules don’t work.

For me, the social networking wars are over. What I need to do now is find my place in the portals. Which makes me wonder, What is going to happen to Twitter?”

One of the interesting things about Critt is his ability to embed a large number of important concepts at the implicit level in his writing. Critt’s primary interest for the past few years has been facilitating “global conversation”; that is people to people connection on a global scale of magnitude. An interest that is congruent with his expertise in technical platforms as tools of communication.

These platforms and by extension, the portals that serve as gateways, represent rule-set systems that offer maximum connectivity and transaction of a certain kind with a minimum of friction and direct cost. These are rule-sets for the enjoyment of “ordered liberty”. For example, Second Life provides the user with system access and tools with which to communicate and create but within these strong minimalist confines, citizens of Second Life primarily must self-regulate. This contrasts with the fairly stringent, proprietary, ethos of other MMORPG like Everquest or World of Warcraft.

These services, while entertaining, stifle user creativity and innovation via techno-paternalism. Arguably, in an economic sense, these companies have a business model that opts for maintaining hierarchical control over outcomes within their system over maximizing the growth of their market share or the growth of the user-market itself by limiting user transactions by orders of magnitude. Ultimately, as Web 2.0 concepts permeate the wider global culture, this position becomes self-defeating – the creation of virtual ghettos.

Mr. Jarvis understands that, in the long run, it’s a road to nowhere.

SOME NEUROCOGNITIVE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATION-BUILDING

Perhaps my favorite entirely apolitical blog is The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by the Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, two physicians who specialize in brain research and its implications for educating children. With great regularity I find information there that either is of use to me professionally or has wider societal importance.

On Monday, the Eides posted “The Thinking Spot” which adds to the existing mountain of evidence regarding the role of the maturing prefrontal cortex in developing the capacity for higher order thinking that does not quite come to fruition until the early to mid-twenties but may begin as early as preadolescence. The Eides write, regarding the PDF studies cited:

“Rule-based learning has a developmental course (no big surprise), but what is a little surprising is the degree to which 12 year olds lag young adults in tests requiring them to make new rules.”

Consider that U.S. or Western intervention in Gap states, or alternatively, internal political reform movements like the ” Color Revolutions”, are essentially political efforts in forcing a ” Rule-set reset” on a dysfunctional society or failed state. If one prefers classic Lockean descriptors, rewriting the social contract to “create a more perfect union“.

Most, though not all, of the nations in which state failure threatens are also demographically undergoing a ” youth bulge”. In Iran for example, 66-70 % of the population is under 30 years of age with the “fattest” part of the population curve being aged between 10 and 20. Indeed, it is the poorest nations that tend to be the youngest. To quote a UN report:

“– Countries where fertility remains high and has declined only moderately will experience the slowest population ageing. By 2050, about 1 in 5 countries is still projected to have a median age under 30 years. The youngest populations
will be found in least developed countries, 11 of which are projected to have median ages at or below 23 years in 2050, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Uganda.”

What I infer from this data and the Neurolearning Blog post is that the most favorable time for any effort, external or indigenous, to engage in a positive restructuring of a nation’s societal rule-sets may be when a given country’s youth bulge hits their early twenties. A narrow window of time when the most physically vigorous and largest section of the population has reached mental maturity in terms of accepting, comprehending and processing abstractions yet are most open to new ideas and desirous of a productive future for themselves.

This is of course a two edged sword. Youthful populations that feel alienated and stymied tend to be restive, even revolutionary. 1968 was not just a year that saw tumultuous baby boomers in American streets but also the chaos of Cultural Revolution in China, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris, the rise of Marxist terrorism in Latin America, Germany and Italy and barely preceded an upsurge in PLO terrorism. Today, while Europe and China are rapidly graying and the U.S. is holding relatively steady, much of the world is very young

I suggest that we are not long for an era of great opportunities and great upheavals.

Cross posted to Chicago Boyz