On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 08:12:15AM -0400, John Kelsey wrote:

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This is the interesting question: Would the anarchocapitalist society have and keep an advantage? I don't think you can answer it except by experiment, but it's at least as feasible to me that the right kind of authoritarian state might be pretty damned good at keeping up with an anarchocapitalist one for technology, and would be better at some technology.

An anarchocapitalist society is capable of much swifter innovation than a centralized one - I think we agree on that (see Cold War for many examples). However, I don't think that a authoritarian society can absorb and use innovations gleaned from a decentralized one of similar size at a pace high enough to keep up. The barrier is that the centralized society requires some gating mechanism to decide *which* innovations to adopt. This gating mechanism (presumably a government ministry of some sort) has to vet innovations not only for 'is it useful?' but also for 'in the long term, will it undermine our central control?'. This mechanism has a limited bandwidth, and acts as a limiting factor in the centralized societies ability to absorb innovation. Examples are numerous; the tight restrictions on Internet access in many authoritarian countries is just one of the most recent. Peter Trei