Scale and competition

In The Dynamic Society, Graeme Snooks stresses the importance of the demand for as opposed to the supply of ideas in driving technological change. In other words, necessity is the mother of invention.

A society's technology is wrapped up with its other characteristics in an eigenmode. An invention like writing should be seen not as a lucky discovery but as an inevitable concomitant of a particular level of social development. Inventing writing is not really that hard. It comes into existence in a high-scale society because such a society cannot function without some means of recording information. It is not fruitful to ask whether writing causes or is caused by a given scale. They go hand in hand, that is all it is meaningful to say.

To extend the point to a recent, familiar example, the internet is associated with an increase in the scale of global society (we can get in touch with more people, more easily). The conventional view would be that some boffins invented the internet, and scale increased as a result. However, it could equally be argued that the development of the internet was driven by the needs of governments and businesses struggling to deal with increases in social scale. We have all heard of inventions like Leonardo's helicopter that languish in limbo because they are 'ahead of their time', showing that merely coming up with an idea is not enough. With the internet, people only invested in it because it filled a real technological gap. Again, the eigenmode concept says we do not need to choose between these opposing viewpoints, i.e. as to whether the internet led to increased scale or increased scale led to the internet. The internet and increased scale both caused each other, while the precise steps by which this came about would not tell us much even if we knew what they were.

I say all this because Snooks's observations have made me think again about geographical influences on technological development, and how I may have been insufficiently rigorous when discussing this in an earlier post.

Thus, I previously put up the following diagram, as part of an explanation of why development first took off in the more centrally located regions of the world's landmasses.

The argument was that more centrally located regions had higher scale, i.e. higher social interactivity, because there were more people within shorter range than was the case for societies around the periphery, and this higher scale meant a higher level of technological development. (I went on to explain that as technology, especially sea-going technology, evolved, it changed which societies counted as central and thus changed which regions had the highest scale and were the most advanced.)

While I continue to stand by this argument, I may have been misleading in implying that it was the flow of ideas from neighbouring societies that was the critical factor stimulating the development of the centre.

What I now want to emphasise is that all we can really say here is that high scale (i.e. proximity of large populations, due to the central location) meant there was societal development and complexification. The details of how this happened are not critical. It may be that centrally located societies were stimulated by the strong flux of ideas reaching them from all the surrounding societies. However, Snooks would argue that the important thing was the pressure exerted on the central societies by their neighbours. In his view, the central societies, with so many close rivals, had to struggle harder to survive compared to the more isolated, peripheral societies, and it was this intense competition that stimulated or compelled them to develop. As before, it is fruitless to get into a debate about which of these viewpoints is correct. Probably both aspects played a part, and there may be other factors or mechanisms as well.

It is not my intention to provide a full review of Snooks's book, which is one of a series in which he sets out laws of history. However, it is worth saying that I do not agree with his assertion that the demand for ideas was the only issue, while for the most part I found his book pretty confused and simplistic.

• Snooks presents his theory as describing biological as well as sociological evolution. This, to me, is a red herring. (It is, however, surprisingly common. Kenneth Boulding does this in Ecodynamics, as does Stuart Kauffman in At Home in the Universe and also arguably Richard Dawkins with his concept of gene-like social memes). Yes, there are superficial analogies between biological and sociological phenomena - e.g. the Roman empire was born, lived and died - but they disappear on close examination - e.g. the Roman empire did not actually 'die', nor was it really 'born'. Biology and sociology exist on quite different levels and need their own conceptual tools. On the sociological side, which is what I am concerned with, we need to use the ideas of politics, economics and cultural anthropology, not the ideas that make sense in biology.


• Snooks argues that the lack of development of the Australian aborigines was because their isolation meant they were not exposed to significant competitive pressure. (Felipe Fernández-Armesto takes a similar view in Pathfinders [p. 11], where he describes the aborigines as "the 'dropouts' of 50,000 years ago, opting out of worlds of change in order to settle a new continent, where they could maintain a traditional way of life".) However, one could ask why the aboriginal tribes did not compete with each other; it might be thought that being cooped up in a small continent could even have increased competitive pressure. Elsewhere, Snooks introduces the notion of 'funnels of transformation', which are narrow regions like Mesoamerica and the Middle East, where many peoples passed through, creating pressure for development. Australia, apparently, had no such funnel. There is something in this, but why do certain geographical conformations have this funnelling effect? Snooks does not really address this. However, it emerges naturally from the 'scale' concept and the idea that sophisticated social mechanisms are needed to deal with intense interaction among close-packed populations connected by short lines of communication.


• Snooks refers repeatedly to 'The Industrial Revolution', which seems to play a large role in his thinking. I find this especially surprising when he himself points out, for example, that sixteenth century growth rates, i.e. two centuries before the 'industrial revolution', exceeded those of any other period bar the 1950s and 1960s. (And he notes high growth rates at other times as well.) The 'industrial revolution', in the sense of a special period in history when technological change suddenly became dramatic, is an illusion. Industrial development during this part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grew seamlessly out of what had gone before, and it was then just the latest twist in the ongoing acceleration of technological evolution. The term 'industrial revolution' originally arose as a pun, jokingly implying that, while France and other countries had political revolutions between about 1750 and 1850, Britain had an industrial revolution. The concept then stuck. It seems that people have a weakness for such explanations of history that assign special significance to particular periods and 'turning points'.

Despite my above criticisms, I would still recommend reading Snooks's books. His work has made me more aware of the issue of demand-side versus supply-side explanations of the evolution of ideas, and indeed of the fact I may have lazily slipped into naive, supply-side explanations myself. He also makes other worthwhile points, such as that co-operation and competition are both necessary in an economy. However, I have reservations concerning his overall model. It is not that it is necessarily 'wrong' in a straightforward sense, but I think it is too vague and impressionistic to be any real use as a theory of history.