One would think that under such attacks on infrastructure any society must necessarily collapse. Or at least that’s what Putin hopes for. But the last time I’ve checked, Ukraine was still very much alive and kicking. The question is: how is that possible?

***

In winter 2022, when the blackout in Kyiv happened for the first time, people had to cope for themselves. Here’s Tymofiy Mylovanov, professor at Kyiv School of Economics, tweeting in real-time:

There is no electricity, no heating, no water. Outside temperature is around freezing. The apartment is still warm from the previous days. We will see how long it lasts. We have blankets, sleeping bags, warm clothes. I am not too worried about heating until temperature goes below -10 C / 14 F. But the water is another issue. The problem is toilets. We have stockpiled about 100 litters of water. There is also snow on our balcony. It is a surprisingly large supply of water. But every time I go there to get it, I have to let the cold air in; not good. For now, the cell network is up, although the quality varies. Thus, I have internet. Internet is critical for food. Yesterday we went to a grocery store to buy up a bit more stuff in case there will be shortages. Food is there, no lines. The challenge is to pay. Most registers work with cash only. Just a few are connected to accept credit cards. Through cell network. The banking system is stable, but I will go get some cash in case Telekom or banks go down Our stove is electric. This means no warm food until the electricity is back. This is not fun. We have to fix it. There are two parts to our plan. First, we will buy an equivalent of a home Tesla battery. So it can be charged when there is electricity. This will also solve, somewhat, the heating problem, as we have already bought some electric heaters. But the electricity might be off for a long time and so we need gas or wood cooking equipment. I guess we have to go shopping. Stores work. They run huge diesel generators.

Later that day he dryly comments: “In the morning I said I was not worried about heating. Instead, I was concerned about water and sanitation. Boy, was I wrong.”

It’s worth reading the tweets from the next few days: Getting a generator, setting it up, placing it on balcony so that fumes stay outside, getting the wires in without letting the cold in as well. Go check it out for yourself.

Anyway, what followed was a series of adaptations, a kind of military vs. civilian arms race. Through the first winter, the strategy was simply to repair what Russia destroyed. Substations and transformers that could be replaced within weeks with donated European spares.

In the meantime, for the millions of affected people, the government created stopgaps. Over 10,000 heated public spaces in schools, government buildings, and railway stations offered electricity, water, internet, and phone charging. Kyiv deployed mobile boiler houses that could run for days without refueling. Hospitals installed Tesla Powerwalls. Cafes ran diesel generators and became de facto community centers.

I’ve donated to some of those efforts, maybe you did too. And taken all together, it worked. Kind of. But by 2024 Russia adapted. Strikes shifted from repairable transmission equipment to the power plants themselves, assets that take years to rebuild. The Trypilska plant was partially restored after its destruction, then it was struck again by drones months later. And again after that. With two-thirds of generation capacity gone and every thermal plant in the country damaged, it became clear that restoring the old centralized system was not a viable strategy.

Ukraine's response shifted. It was not to rebuild what was destroyed but to replace it with something less centralized. Something too dispersed to target. Instead of restoring the Trypilska plant's 1,800 megawatts, hundreds of small cogeneration units were scattered across the region, compact gas turbines producing 5 to 40 megawatts each, generating heat alongside the electricity. By late 2025, Ukraine's heating sector alone ran over 180 such units as well as hundreds of modular boilers. Hospitals, water utilities, and apartment blocks are organized into autonomous energy islands, microgrids that keep functioning even if the national grid goes dark. No single unit is worth a cruise missile. And a destroyed module can be replaced with a phone call and a truck from Poland.

The same logic extends to water. Ukraine's centralized water systems are inherited from the Soviet era. A single pumping station serves hundreds of thousands of people. They are just as vulnerable as the power plants. Strikes on the grid cut electricity to pumps. Without pumps, water stops flowing. In winter, standing water in pipes freezes and bursts them, cascading damage across entire districts.

In Mykolaiv, a damaged pipeline to the Dnipro River left 300,000 residents relying on salty, barely drinkable water from a local estuary for over a year. The response mirrors the energy transformation: water utilities are installing their own solar panels and battery storage to decouple from the grid entirely.

Solar panels are, under these circumstances, close to an ideal solution. They are cheap, manufactured at scale, and can be replaced in a single day. By early 2024, Ukrainian households and businesses had installed nearly 1,500 megawatts of rooftop solar. Not because of climate change, but because of survival. Solar panels are inherently dispersed. There is no single set of coordinates an attacker can hit to disable them all. And destroying them one by one would cost the attacker more in munitions than the panels are worth.

This kind of arithmetic pops up everywhere. In the ongoing Iran war, Ukrainian military observers were flabbergasted by Gulf states and the US burning through hundreds of Patriot missiles, $4 million each, to shoot down cheap Iranian Shaheed drones, $35,000 apiece. If destroying a target costs more than the target itself, the attacker loses even if the strike succeeds.

A different kind of decentralization is happening in the telecommunications domain. The infrastructure was already fairly decentralized to start with, a legacy of makeshift internet adoption that happened in many Ostblock countries, with many small ISPs emerging independently. The war pushed this further. Ukraine has adopted a layered backup approach: if fiber broadband fails, mobile networks fill the gap; if mobile networks are knocked out, Starlink steps in as a last resort.

The logic extends to government services. There’s the Trembita data exchange platform, where government services talk each other directly without centralizing the data. (Trembita is based on Estonian X-Road system — the birth of Estonian e-gov technology is a fascinating story in itself, and there’s a whole book about it!) Built on top of it, there’s the Diia app that allows citizens to file taxes, register vehicles, access medical records, open bank accounts, register births, and start businesses, all from a smartphone. This, of course, means there’s no single office building to target so as to disrupt a particular kind of activity.

Add to that Ukrainian governmental data are now stored in the cloud. A week before the invasion, Ukraine's parliament quietly amended a law that had required government data to be stored physically in Ukraine. On the day the missiles started flying, the Ukrainian ambassador in London met AWS engineers and decided to fly three AWS Snowballs, hardened suitcases that hold 80 terabytes each, from Dublin to Poland and then move them to Ukraine the very next day. Ukrainian technicians copied population registers, land ownership records, and tax databases onto them and shipped them back out.

It was a race. On the day of the invasion, cruise missiles struck government server facilities while Russian cyber operatives simultaneously deployed wiper malware, software designed to permanently destroy data, against hundreds of Ukrainian government systems. Some data was lost, but the most critical registries were already gone, smuggled out of the country in carry-on luggage.

***
On the battlefield, where all these trends are even more severe, concentration has become suicidal. Russian infantry now advances in groups of two or three. Anything larger is an invitation for a drone strike. Warships are floating targets. Russia's Black Sea Fleet retreated from Crimea after losing vessels to cheap unmanned boats. In the Hedgehog 2025 exercise in Estonia, a small team of Ukrainians and Estonians with drones, acting as the opposing force, wiped out two NATO battalions, thousands of soldiers, in half a day, not least because they had moved in columns, parked their vehicles in close formations and failed to scatter under attack.

They made the same mistake as the designers of Soviet-era power grids: they concentrated value and got destroyed for it. Call it the blast radius principle. In a war of attrition, any asset whose destruction is worth more than the cost of the weapon that can reach it will, sooner or later, be destroyed. The only effective strategy is to push the value of each individual target below that threshold, to become, in effect, too small to bomb.

When Rheinmetall’s CEO recently made a condescending comment about Ukrainian housewives 3D-printing drones in their kitchens, much merriment ensued. Because Rheinmetall, of course, builds the very kind of heavy conventional, WWII-style hardware that the developments in Ukraine are rapidly making obsolete.

But mockery aside for a moment: if you’ve spent any time around progress studies, the phrase “housewives building drones in kitchens” makes you prick up your ears. It triggers a specific association: cottage industry, the small-scale, home-based production that preceded and enabled the industrial revolution. It makes you think about how the modes of production change over centuries.

You know that kings and generals don’t make history. One empire falls, another rises, nothing fundamentally changes. What does matter is new technology. Even more so new technology which fundamentally changes how things are done. Technology that reshapes the economics of entire production chains. Agriculture. Road system. Bill of exchange. Putting-out manufacture. Joint-stock company. Assembly line. The humble shipping container…

Does decentralization, as seen in Ukraine, fit the bill? We don’t know. FirePoint, the Ukrainian company producing the much-spoken-about FP drones, is distributed across more than 50 manufacturing sites throughout the country. But that’s nothing new. The allied bombing campaign during WWII failed to halt German aircraft manufacture precisely because Germany had decentralized its industries. Albert Speer, then the minister of armaments, dispersed production into hundreds of small workshops, caves, tunnels, and forest sites across the Reich. German aircraft production actually increased in 1944, the year of the heaviest bombing. But then, after the war, German industry did concentrate again.

What seems different this time, though, is the spillover into the civilian sector. Speer dispersed munitions factories, but German civilians kept heating their homes the same way throughout the war. In Ukraine, the dispersal extends to utilities, water systems, telecommunications, government services. Russians bomb a heating plant, the heating network disperses into dozens of autonomous microgrids.

The obvious objection is that this is a wartime hack, not a permanent transformation. Distributed systems sacrifice economies of scale. A hundred small gas turbines are less efficient than one large power plant. Once the war ends and the skies are safe, the economic logic will reassert itself and everything will concentrate again.

And indeed, in some cases, that's exactly what will happen. Ukraine is currently bombing Russian oil refineries and fertilizer plants, and although cracking crude oil in plastic bottles in a kitchen is exactly the sort of thing you might expect Eastern Europeans to do, it's unlikely to match the efficiency of a proper refinery. Some industries have genuinely irreducible physical economies of scale. The chemistry demands large reaction vessels, the thermodynamics reward concentration. Similarly, some infrastructure simply cannot be distributed. It's hard to imagine a decentralized railway system or a dispersed deep-water port — at least short of giving up on it and transporting everything by drone.

But not all economies of scale require spatial proximity. Sometimes, it’s just sheer scale that matters, not necessarily the co-location. Case in point: solar panels. Other times the crucial element is the organizational structure, not the physical location of the employees. Basically any service offered over internet is like that.

But all that being said, there’s a specific reason to think some of these changes may stick.

Over the past fifty years we’ve accumulated an entire arsenal of distributed technologies. Packet-switched networks. Drones. Solar panels. Distributed databases. 3D printing. Even nerdy cypherpunk inventions like public key cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic ledgers. And it’s not just technical stuff. We’ve developed distributed social technologies too: open-source-style cooperation (who would have predicted that military intelligence, of all things, would be the next domain to go open-source?), market design, remote work, video conferencing. Even prediction markets as a tool for aggregating dispersed knowledge.

Some of these are already ubiquitous. Around 70% of the world’s population already has access to the Internet, a network famously designed to route around damage during a nuclear war. But others feel like we’re barely scratching the surface. 3D printing has existed for decades, yet it still feels like a technology that we are only playing with. We may be like pre-Columbian Americans, whose children played with wheeled toys, but the adults carried loads on their backs.

Based on historical examples, we know that inventing a technology is often not the bottleneck. The aeolipile was invented in the first century AD, but we still had to wait another seventeen centuries to get an actual steam engine. Gutenberg went bankrupt. Adopting a technology is dependent on complex interplay of socio-economic forces that, at a certain moment, make the technology so desirable that people start using it despite all the drawbacks and overcoming all the vested interests. Then the learning curves kick in.

Two questions remain. Are those distributed technologies already adequately exploited, or are they like dead wood lying around in a forest, waiting for a spark? And if the latter is true, are the incentives created by the war in Ukraine — or for that matter, by similar future war elsewhere — sufficient to ignite it? They may be. Because once the enemy starts bombing companies, the incentives change. Working from home ceases to be a nice perk. Suddenly, it’s either work from home or die.

In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local train stopped running in 2019. Seven elementary schools and four junior high schools have been consolidated into just two buildings. Public swimming pools have closed. Parks are not maintained. Even the public toilets at the train station were shut down to save money.

Much has been written about the economic consequences of aging and shrinking populations. Fewer workers supporting more retirees will make pension systems buckle. Living standards will decline. Healthcare will get harder to provide. But that’s dry theory. A numbers game. It doesn’t tell you what life actually looks like at ground zero.

And it’s not all straightforward. Consider water pipes. Abandoned houses are photogenic. It’s the first image that comes to mind when you picture a shrinking city. But as the population declines, ever fewer people live in the same housing stock and water consumption declines. The water sits in oversized pipes. It stagnates and chlorine dissipates. Bacteria move in, creating health risks. You can tear down an abandoned house in a week. But you cannot easily downsize a city’s pipe network. The infrastructure is buried under streets and buildings. The cost of ripping it out and replacing it with smaller pipes would bankrupt a city that is already bleeding residents and tax revenue. As the population shrinks, problems like this become ubiquitous.

The common instinct is to fight decline with growth. Launch a tourism campaign. Build a theme park or a tech incubator. Offer subsidies and tax breaks to young families willing to move in. Subsidize childcare. Sell houses for €1, as some Italian towns do.

Well, Yubari tried this. After the coal mines closed, the city pivoted to tourism, opening a coal-themed amusement park, a fossil museum, and a ski resort. They organized a film festival. Celebrities came and left. None of it worked. By 2007 the city went bankrupt. The festival was canceled and the winners from years past never got their prize money.

Or, to get a different perspective, consider someone who moved to a shrinking Italian town, lured by a €1 house offer: They are about to retire. They want to live in the country. So they buy the house, go through all the paperwork. Then they renovate it. More paperwork. They don't speak Italian. That sucks. But finally everything works out. They move in. The house is nice. There's grapevine climbing the front wall. Out of the window they see the rolling hills of Sicily. In the evenings, they hears dogs barking in the distance. It looks exactly like the paradise they'd imagined. But then they start noticing their elderly neighbors getting sick and being taken away to hospital, never to return. They see them dying alone in their half-abandoned houses. And as the night closes in, they can't escape the thought: "When's my turn?" Maybe they shouldn't have come at all.

***

The instinctive approach, that vain attempt to grow and repopulate, is often counterproductive. It leads to building infrastructure, literal bridges to nowhere, waiting for people that will never come. Subsidies quietly fizzle out, leaving behind nothing but dilapidated billboards advertising the amazing attractions of the town, attractions that closed their gates a decade ago.

The alternative is not to fight the decline, but to manage it. To accept that the population is not coming back and ask a different question: how do you make a smaller city livable for those who remain? In Yubari, the current mayor has stopped talking about attracting new residents. The new goal is consolidation. Relocating the remaining population closer to the city center, where services can be still delivered, where the pipes are still the right size, where neighbors are close enough to check on each other.

Germany took a similar approach with its Stadtumbau Ost, a federal program launched after reunification to address the exodus from East to West, as young people moved west for work, leaving behind more than a million vacant apartments. It paid to demolish nearly 300,000 housing units. The idea was not to lure people back but to stabilize what was left: reduce the housing surplus, concentrate investment in viable neighborhoods, and stop the downward spiral of vacancy breeding more vacancy. It was not a happy solution, but it was a workable one.

Yet this approach is politically toxic. Try campaigning not on an optimistic message of turning the tide and making the future as bright as it once used to be, but rather by telling voters that their neighborhood is going to be abandoned, that the bus won’t run anymore and that all the investment is going to go to a different district. Try telling the few remaining inhabitants of a valley that you can’t justify spending money on their flood defenses.

Consider the España Vaciada movement representing the depopulating interior of Spain, which has achieved some electoral successes lately. It is propelled by real concerns: hospital patients traveling hours to reach a proper facility, highways that were never expanded, banks and post offices that closed and never reopened. But it does not champion managed decline. It champions the opposite: more investment, more infrastructure, more services. Its flagship proposal, the 100/30/30 plan, demands 100-megabit internet everywhere, no more than 30 minutes to basic services, no more than 30 kilometers to a major highway. They want to reopen what was closed. They want to see more investment in healthcare and education. They want young people back in the regions.

And it’s hard to blame them. But what that means on the ground, whether in Spain or elsewhere, is that the unrewarding task of managing the shrinkage falls to local bureaucrats, not to the elected politicians. There’s no glory in it, no mandate, just the dumpster fire and whatever makeshift tools happen to be at hand.

***

You can think of it as, in effect, a form of degrowth. GDP per capita almost always falls in depopulating areas, which seems counterintuitive if you subscribe to zero-sum thinking. Shouldn’t fewer people dividing the same economic pie mean more for each?

Well, no. It’s a negative-sum game. As the town shrinks, the productive workforce, disheartened by the lack of prospects, moves elsewhere, leaving the elderly and the unemployable behind. Agglomeration effects are replaced by de-agglomeration effects. Supply chains fragment. Local markets shrink. Successful firms move to greener pastures.

And then there are the small firms that simply shut down. In Japan, over half of small and medium-sized businesses report having no successor. 38% of owners above 60 don’t even try. They report planning to close the firm during their generation. But even if they do not, the owner turns seventy, then seventy-five. Worried clients want a guarantee of continued service and pressure him to devise a succession plan. He designates a successor — maybe a nephew or a son-in-law — but the young man keeps working an office job in Tokyo or Osaka. No transfer of knowledge happens. Finally, the owner gets seriously ill or dies. The successor is bewildered. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t even know whether it’s worth it. In fact, he doesn’t really want to take over. Often, the firm just falls apart.

***

So what is being done about these problems?

Take the case of infrastructure and services degradation. The solution is obvious: manage the decline by concentrating the population.

In 2014, the Japanese government initiated Location Normalization Plans to designate areas for concentrating hospitals, government offices, and commerce in walkable downtown cores. Tax incentives and housing subsidies were offered to attract residents. By 2020, dozens of Tokyo-area municipalities had adopted these plans.

Cities like Toyama built light rail transit and tried to concentrate development along the line, offering housing subsidies within 500 meters of stations. The results are modest: between 2005 and 2013, the percentage of Toyama residents living in the city center increased from 28% to 32%. Meanwhile, the city’s overall population continued to decline, and suburban sprawl persisted beyond the plan’s reach.

What about the water pipes? In theory, they can be decommissioned and consolidated, when people move out of some neighborhoods. At places, they can possibly be replaced with smaller-diameter pipes. Engineers can even open hydrants periodically to keep water flowing. But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.

***

And then there’s the problem of abandoned houses.

The arithmetic is brutal: you inherit a rural house valued at ¥5 million on the cadastral registry and pay inheritance tax of up to 55%, only to discover that the actual market value is ¥0. Nobody wants property in a village hemorrhaging population. But wait! If the municipality formally designates it a “vacant house,” your property tax increases sixfold. Now you face half a million yen in fines for non-compliance, and administrative demolition costs that average ¥2 million. You are now over ¥5 million in debt for a property you never wanted and cannot sell.

It gets more bizarre: When you renounce the inheritance, it passes to the next tier of relatives. If children renounce, it goes to parents. If parents renounce, it goes to siblings. By renouncing a property, you create an unpleasant surprise for your relatives.

Finally, when every possible relative renounces, the family court appoints an administrator to manage the estate. Their task is to search for other potential heirs, such as "persons with special connection," i.e. those who cared for the deceased, worked closely with them and so on. Lucky them, the friends and colleagues!

Obviously, this gets tricky and that’s exactly the reason why a new system was introduced to allows a property to be passed to the state. But there are many limitations placed on the property — essentially, the state will only accept land that has some value.

In the end, it's a hot potato problem. The legal system was designed in the era when all property had value and implicitly assumed that people wanted it. Now that many properties have negative value, the framework misfires, creates misaligned incentives and recent fixes all too often make the problem worse. Tax penalties meant to force owners to renovate only add to the costs of the properties that are already financial liabilities, creating a downward price spiral.

Maybe the problem needs fundamental rethinking. Should there be a guaranteed right to abandon unwanted property? Maybe. But if so, who bears the liabilities such as demolishing the house before it collapses during an earthquake and blocks the evacuation routes?

***

Well, if everything is doom and gloom, at least nature benefits when people are removed from the equation, right?

Let’s take a look.

Japan has around 10 million hectares of plantation forests, many of them planted after WWII. These forests are now reaching the stage at which thinning is necessary. Yet because profitability has declined — expensive domestic timber was largely displaced by cheap imports long ago — and the forestry workforce was greatly reduced, thinning often does not occur. As a result, the forests grow too dense for light to penetrate. Little or nothing survives in the understory. And where something does manage to grow, overpopulated deer consume new saplings and other vegetation such as dwarf bamboo, which would otherwise help stabilize the soil. The result is soil erosion and the gradual deterioration of the forest.

The deer population, incidentally, is high because there are no wolves, the erstwhile apex predators, in Japan. But few people want them reintroduced. Instead, authorities have extended hunting seasons and increased culling quotas. In an aging and depopulating countryside, however, there are too few hunters to make use of these measures. And so, this being Japan, robot wolves are being deployed in their stead.

***
Finally, care for the elderly is clearly the elephant in the room. Ideas abound: Intergenerational sharehouses where students pay reduced rent in exchange for “being good neighbors.” Projects combining kindergartens with elderly housing. Denmark’s has more than 150 cohousing communities where residents share meals and social life. But the obvious challenge is scale. These work for dozens, maybe hundreds. Aging countries need solutions for millions.

And then again, there are robot nurses.

***

It’s all different kinds of problems, but all of them, in their essence, boil down to negative-sum games.

Speaking of those, one tends to think of it as of the pie shrinking. And there’s an obvious conclusion: if you want your children to be as well off as you are, you have to fight for someone else’s slice. In a shrinking world, one would expect ruthless predators running wild and civic order collapsing.

But what you really see is quite different. The effect is gradual and subtle. It does not feel like a violent collapse. It feels more like the world silently coming apart at the seams. There’s no single big problem that you would point to. It feels like if everything now just works a bit worse than it used to.

The bus route that ran hourly now runs only three times a day. The elementary school merged with the one in the next town, so children now commute 40 minutes each way. Processing paperwork at the municipal office takes longer now, because both clerks are past the retirement age. The post office closes on Wednesdays and Fridays and the library opens only on Tuesdays. The doctor at the neighborhood clinic stopped accepting new patients because he’s 68 and can’t find a replacement. Even the funeral home can’t guarantee same-day service anymore. Bodies now have to wait.

You look out of the window at the neighboring house, the windows empty and the yard overgrown with weeds, and think about the book club you used to attend. It stopped meeting when the woman who used to organize it moved away. You are told that the local volunteer fire brigade can’t find enough members and will likely cease to operate. You are also warned that there may be bacteria in the tap water. You are told to boil your water before drinking it.

Sometimes you notice how the friends and neighbors are getting less friendly each year. When you need a hand, you call them, but somehow today, they just really, really can’t. It’s tough. They’ll definitely help you next time. But often, they are too busy to even answer the phone. Everyone now has more people to care for. Everyone is stretched out and running thin on resources.

When you were fifty and children started to leave the home, you and your friends, you used to joke that now you would form an anarcho-syndicalist commune.

Ten years later you actually discuss a co-living arrangement, and all you can think about is the arithmetic of care: would you be the last one standing, taking care of everybody else?

Finally someone bites the bullet and proposes moving together but signing a non-nursing-care contract first. And you find yourself quietly nodding in approval.

With the weakening of the trans-Atlantic alliance, the debate over European integration has entered a new phase. Mario Draghi warns that Europe risks becoming “merely a large market, subject to the priorities of others,” a collection of middling states in a world where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Facing the U.S. that views European fragmentation as advantageous and a China willing to exploit its supply chain dominance, Draghi calls for adopting a pragmatic federalist stance.

Similarly, in this article, Ricardo Hausmann draws on XIX. century history to argue that Europe faces the same challenge Italian and German nationalists once did: building a political community across diverse populations. As Italian statesman Massimo d’Azeglio said after unification: “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” The EU has created economic integration but lacks the political identity necessary to command devotion and loyalty to the new political entity.

Stefan Schubert counters that this analogy doesn’t hold. Europe today is fundamentally more diverse than the territories that once became Italy or Germany.

The EU has 24 official languages where Italy or Germany had one. World Values Survey data shows cultural variation within Europe exceeds that within the U.S., China, or India. For example, views on fundamental questions like sexual consent vary dramatically across the continent. Economically, Denmark’s per capita GDP is vastly greater than Bulgaria’s.

The skeptics have a point. Modern Europe is quite diverse. Yet, contrasting it with the countries that unified in XIX. century - Germany, Italy or Switzerland - doesn’t really work.

Consider the language question.

Most people in pre-unification Italy couldn’t speak standard Italian. Only about 10% could and maybe a half could even comprehend it. What we call “Italian dialects” would, without the hindsight of unified Italy, be considered separate languages. Many evolved from vulgar Latin independently, much like Spanish or French. They’re often mutually unintelligible, and Sardinian may even constitute an entirely separate branch of Romance languages. In short, Italians could barely understand each other.

Germany was no different. A Plattdeutsch-speaking artisan from Lübeck could hardly understand a Swabian peasant. A burgher from Munich would have had a hard time understanding a burgher of Strasbourg.

Switzerland presents an even starker case. Where proponents of Italian or German unity could at least pretend a common national language existed, Switzerland had no such luxury. Any attempt to promote German at the expense of French or Italian would have only sparked unrest. Yet Switzerland unified anyway.

Today’s Europe, by contrast, has a significant advantage: many Europeans, especially younger ones, can communicate in English, a lingua franca far more widespread than standard German or Italian ever were in the XIX. century.

Or consider different political systems.

Both pre-unification Italy and Germany encompassed a bewildering variety of governmental forms. Germany had everything from authoritarian monarchies, where the king held near-absolute power, to constitutional monarchies with elected parliaments, to the republican traditions of the Hanseatic and free cities.

Italy was, if anything, more diverse. The peninsula contained absolute monarchies like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, constitutional monarchies like Piedmont-Sardinia, the theocratic Papal States, with large swathes of territory occupied by Austria.

Switzerland takes political diversity to another level entirely. Some cantons were ruled by a patriciate or by guilds. Some practiced forms of direct democracy in rural assemblies. Other territories were subject lands with no political autonomy whatsoever. Graubünden operated as a kind of anarcho-communal confederation, with self-rule devolved to the village level. And then there was Neuchâtel, which was simultaneously a Swiss canton and a principality ruled by the King of Prussia. Go figure.

By comparison, today’s EU is remarkably homogeneous. Every single member state is a liberal democracy with free elections, independent judiciaries, protection of fundamental rights, and market economies. If you dig into the details, the similarities deepen: with the exception of France, nearly all use some form of proportional representation in their electoral systems. The political spectrum in each country differs, but the basic constitutional framework is essentially the same. The EU has never had to reconcile absolute monarchy with republicanism, theocracy with secularism, or feudalism with democracy. The political distance between Warsaw and Lisbon is trivial compared to the distance between, say, Kingdom of Saxony and the Hanseatic city of Hamburg.

The GDP argument is more complex. It’s true that Denmark’s per capita GDP is nearly twice Bulgaria’s. It’s also true that economic disparities were much smaller in the mid-XIX. century. The reason, of course, is industrialization and its agglomeration effects. Once it happened — and that was mostly after the period of unifications — it accelerated some regions far ahead of others.

One could therefore reasonably argue that XIX. century unifications were possible precisely because these differences hadn’t yet ballooned, and that the window of opportunity has since closed. We now live in a world that is not conducive to unification.

Yet there are signs pointing in the opposite direction.

First, regional differences within states are substantial. Lombardy is 2.3 times wealthier than Calabria, a difference similar to that between Denmark and Bulgaria. Yet separatist movements remain marginal. The Lega once championed independence for Northern Italy but has largely abandoned such demands. Catalonia’s independence movement, despite its prominence, has failed to achieve its goals. Wealthy regions, it seems, are not actually leaving their poorer partners.

Second, the same pattern appears at the EU level. Simple zero-sum logic would suggest a sorting process: poor countries join to access transfers, rich countries leave to avoid paying them. We should see the EU gradually moving eastward and becoming poorer. Yet with the single exception of Brexit — a departure that has served mostly as a cautionary tale — this isn’t happening. The accession process for the poor countries in Balkans stalls and despite occasional posturing and threats, no wealthy member state is seriously pursuing exit.

This doesn’t indicate much enthusiasm for unification, but it does suggest that despite real centrifugal forces, there are counterbalancing centripetal forces at play, and that they may be stronger.

At a more practical level, were the pre-unification countries more economically integrated than the EU member states? Pre-unification Germany had its Zollverein, which was a great improvement over the previous system, but in no way compared to the scale of economic integration seen across the EU today. Italy and Switzerland, on the other hand, had no economic integration to speak of.

Finally, cultural differences present perhaps the most intuitive objection to European unification. How can people from such different traditions form a genuine political community?

In the XIX. century, culture was exceedingly localized. Most people rarely traveled beyond their native village or town. This remained true even much later. My grandmother in Slovakia, well into her seventies, used to recall an incident from her youth in the early 1940s when she traveled to attend a wedding in a neighboring valley. For her, this journey was a unique adventure, an expedition into foreign territory.

Today’s Europe is different. You can hop on a Ryanair flight and travel to the other side of the continent for mere €25. People move freely across borders as part of everyday life. In Bulgaria, let’s say, approximately 20% of the population lives and works abroad, predominantly in other EU countries. And this isn’t just the case for Bulgaria. Across Europe, virtually everyone either has lived abroad themselves or has close friends and family members who have.

Moreover, this isn’t an elite phenomenon limited to cosmopolitan professionals. Visit a Slovak village and you’ll find that men have often worked construction in France or Germany. Women have worked as nurses in Austria or caregivers in Italy. At a somewhat more elite level, the Erasmus program has facilitated cultural exchange on a large scale. Since its inception, roughly 16 million people, about 3% of Europe’s total population, have lived and studied abroad. The number rises each year by 1.3 million. At the most elite level, the cosmopolitanism is simply a given. One attends regular videocalls with colleagues and business partners in other countries or flies around to meet them in person.

Meanwhile, globalization amplifies these effects. Estonian and Portuguese teenagers watch the same YouTube videos. They follow the same TikTok feed. Berliners still eat their currywurst, but they are equally familiar with McDonald’s as their Romanian counterparts are.

One might object that these are superficial similarities. People may all drink Coca-Cola and watch Marvel movies, but does this really change fundamental attitudes about family, authority, or social organization?

The evidence suggests it can. Consider a study on the impact of Brazilian telenovelas on fertility rates. Researchers found that as television coverage expanded across Brazil, bringing telenovelas into new areas, fertility rates declined substantially in those regions. The programming consistently portrayed smaller, more urban families with fewer children. Viewers, even in remote areas with very different traditional family structures, adjusted their own fertility decisions in response.

In short, common people in pre-unification Italy, Germany and Switzerland lived in cultural isolation. Europeans today, whether they like it or not, do not.

All of this doesn’t mean that Eunification would be easy or even possible. However, it does show that the argument that the future European countries in the XIX. century were more homogeneous than the EU member states are today and were thus easier to unify, does not hold water. The diversity that seems insurmountable today is not qualitatively different from what earlier state-builders successfully overcame.

For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work to maintain their power, like the Duke of Ferrara, period end of chapter. He doesn’t explain, so modern readers can’t get it.”

Palmer’s solution was to make her students live through the run-up to the Italian Wars themselves. Her current method involves a three-week simulation of the 1492 papal election, a massive undertaking with sixty students playing historical figures, each receiving over twenty pages of unique character material, supported by twenty chroniclers and seventy volunteers. After this almost month-long pedagogical marathon of negotiations and backstabbing, then a week of analysis, and reading Machiavelli’s letters, students finally encounter The Prince. By then they know the context intimately. When Machiavelli mentions the Duke of Ferrara maintaining power effortlessly, Palmer’s students react viscerally. They remember Alfonso and Ippolito d’Este as opportunists who exploited their vulnerabilities while remaining secure themselves. They’ve learned the names, families, and alliances not through memorization but through necessity: to protect their characters’ homelands and defeat their enemies.

Then, one year, her papal election class was scheduled at the same time as a course on Machiavelli’s political thought. The teachers brought both classes together, so each could hear how the other’s class (history vs. political science) approached the things differently. Palmer asked both classes: “What would Machiavelli say if you asked him what would happen if Milan suddenly changed from a monarchal duchy to a republic?”

The poli sci students went first: He’d say that it would be very unstable, because the people don’t have a republican tradition, so lots of ambitious families would be tempted to try to take over, so you’d have to get rid of those ambitious families, like the example Livy gives of killing the sons of Brutus in the Roman Republic, and you would have to work hard to get the people passionately invested in the new republican institutions, or they wouldn’t stand by them when the going gets tough or conquerors threaten. It was a great answer. Then my students replied: He’d say it would all depend on whether Cardinal Ascanio Visconti Sforza is or isn’t in the inner circle of the current pope, how badly the Orsini-Colonna feud is raging, whether politics in Florence is stable enough for the Medici to aid Milan’s defenses, and whether Emperor Maximilian is free to defend Milan or too busy dealing with Vladislaus of Hungary. “And I think I’d have something to say about it!” added my fearsome Caterina Sforza; “And me,” added my ominously smiling King Charles. In fact, my class had given a silent answer before anyone spoke, since the instant they heard the phrase, “if Milan became a republic,” all my students had turned as a body to stare at our King Charles with trepidation, with a couple of glances for our Ascanio Visconti Sforza. It was a completely different answer from the other class’s, but the thing that made the moment magical is that both were right.

Both answers were right, but they hinted at different kinds of approaches to history. The political science students articulated general principles, the structural forces that make new republics unstable, the institutional work required to sustain them. Palmer’s students, by contrast, gave an answer saturated with particulars: specific cardinals, specific feuds, specific rulers with specific constraints. They weren’t describing general laws but a turbulent moment where small differences — whether Ascanio Sforza is in the pope’s inner circle, whether Maximilian is busy with Hungary — could deflect the course of events in radically different directions.

From a grand perspective, Palmer’s students’ insights may seem irrelevant. In physics, after all, particulars do not matter. Whether two molecules bump into each other doesn’t affect the overall thermodynamic state of a steam engine. Yet in the historical context, things are different. Because you yourself are one of those molecules and you care greatly about whom you bump into. Whether Ascanio Sforza is in the pope’s inner circle matters, because it can determine whether your city will be sacked and your family killed.

Inventing the Renaissance ranges widely across Renaissance history, historiography, and ethics. The simulated papal election is but one of many topics, but it raises an interesting question Palmer doesn’t directly address: how do you study history when particulars determine outcomes but those outcomes remain fundamentally unpredictable? Her students aren’t learning to predict what happened. They’re learning something else entirely. Understanding what that “something else” is reveals not only why her experiment succeeds, but how it reshapes historical methodology.

***

Palmer’s simulation transforms students into the political actors of Renaissance Italy. Some play powerful cardinals wielding vast economic resources and influence networks, with strong shots at the papacy. Others are minor cardinals burdened with debts and vulnerabilities, nursing long-term hopes of rising on others’ coattails. Locked in a secret basement chamber, students play the crowned heads of Europe, the King of France, the Queen of Castile, the Holy Roman Emperor, smuggling secret orders via text messages to their agents in the conclave. Still others are functionaries: those who count the votes, distribute food, guard the doors, direct the choir. They have no votes but can hear, watch, and whisper.

Each student receives a character packet detailing their goals, personality, allies, enemies, and tradeable resources: treasures, land, titles, holy relics, armies, marriageable nieces and nephews, contracts, and the artists or scholars at their courts. “I’ll give you Leonardo if you send three armies to guard my city from the French.”

The simulation runs over multiple weeks. Students write letters to relatives, allies, rivals and subordinates. If you write to a player, the letter will be delivered to that person and will advance your negotiations. If you write to a non-player-character, you will receive a reply which will also affect the game.

Palmer designed the simulation as alternate history, not a reconstruction. She gave each historical figure resources and goals reflecting their real circumstances, but deliberately moved some characters in time so that students who already knew what happened to Italy in this period would know they couldn’t have the ‘correct’ outcome even if they tried. That frees everyone to pursue their goals rather than ‘correct’ choices. She set up the tensions and actors to simulate the historical situation, then left it run its course.

The simulation captures how papal elections were never isolated events. While cardinals compete for St. Peter’s throne, the crowned heads of Europe maneuver for influence. In the Renaissance, Rome controlled marriage alliances and annulments, could crown or excommunicate rulers, distributed valuable benefices and titles, commanded papal armies. The pope’s allies shifted the political balance to their benefit and rose to wealth and power while enemies scrambled for cover.

War usually breaks out after the election. “Kings are crowned, monarchs unite, someone is invaded,” Palmer writes, “but the patterns of alliances and thus the shape of the war vary every year based on the individual choices made by students.”

Palmer has run the simulation many times. Each time certain outcomes recur, likely locked in by greater political and economic forces. The same powerful cardinals are always leading candidates. There’s usually a wildcard candidate as well, someone who circumstances bring together with an unexpected coalition. Usually a juggernaut wins, one of the cardinals with a strong power-base, but it’s always very close. The voting coalition always powerfully affects the new pope’s policies and first actions, determining which city-states rise and which burn as Italy erupts in war.

And the war erupts every single time. And it is always totally different.

Sometimes France invades Spain. Sometimes France and Spain unite to invade the Holy Roman Empire. Sometimes England and Spain unite to keep the French out of Italy. Sometimes France and the Empire unite to keep Spain out of Italy.

Once students created a giant pan-European peace treaty with marriage alliances that looked likely to permanently unify all four great Crowns, only to be shattered by the sudden assassination of a crown prince.

***

The assassination of that crown prince is telling. In this run of Palmer’s simulation, a single student’s decision — perhaps made impulsively, perhaps strategically — eliminated what looked like an inevitable unification of Europe. A marriage alliance that seemed to guarantee peace for generations evaporated in an instant. One moment of violence redirected the entire course of the simulation’s history. Small things matter.

Or as Palmer herself puts it: “The marriage alliance between Milan and Ferrara makes Venice friends with Milan, which makes Venice’s rival Genoa side with Spain, and pretty soon there are Scotsmen fighting Englishmen in Padua.”

This is the pattern that emerges from repeated runs: certain outcomes seem inevitable (a powerful Cardinal wins the papacy, war breaks out), but the specific path history takes turns on moments like these, moments where a single action cascades into consequences no one could have foreseen.

Palmer’s students aren’t learning to predict outcomes. That would be impossible in a system where a single assassination can shatter a continental peace. They’re learning something else: how to navigate a world where small causes can have large effects, where the direction of those effects remains unknown until they unfold.

***

This is what scientists call sensitive dependence on initial conditions, more popularly known as the butterfly effect. A small perturbation, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, the assassination of a prince, can cascade into enormous consequences through chains of causation impossible to foresee.

Stand beside a river and watch the water flow. In some stretches it moves smoothly. Cast a twig into the flow and it drifts peacefully downstream. The water follows predictable patterns. This is what physicists call laminar flow. It’s orderly and stable and small disturbances quickly dissipate.

But look downstream where the river narrows to meets rocks. The water churns and froths. Whirlpools form and dissolve. Sometimes you feel like you recognize a pattern but no two whirlpools are ever exactly the same. Drop a twig at this place and you cannot predict where it ends. It might circle three times and shoot left, or catch an eddy and spiral right, or get pulled under and pop up twenty feet downstream. Small differences in exactly where and how it enters produce completely different paths. This is turbulence.

And this is what chaos theory studies. It looks at turbulent system and asks: What exactly can we say about it? What predictions are possible when prediction seems impossible? And given that history flows very much like a river — with political science studying its laminar aspect and Palmer’s students learning to navigate the turbulent moments — what can chaos theory teach us about history?

Well, not much, as it turns out. At least not directly.

Chaos theory was everywhere in the 1990s. Fractals adorned dorm room posters. Jurassic Park explained the butterfly effect to moviegoers.

Then chaos theory largely disappeared from public discourse. Not because it was wrong, the mathematics remains valid, the phenomena real, but because it proved remarkably difficult to apply. A recent survey of commonly cited applications by Elizabeth Van Nostrand and Alex Altair found that most “never received wide usage.”

The theory excels at explaining what cannot be done. You cannot make long-range weather predictions. You cannot predict where exactly a turbulent eddy will form. You cannot forecast the specific trajectory of a chaotic system beyond a certain time horizon. These are important insights, but they are negative and thus non-sexy. They tell us about the limits of prediction, not how to make it better.

So if chaos theory mostly tells us what we cannot do with turbulent systems, what use is it for understanding history?

The answer comes from the one domain where chaos theory achieved genuine practical success: weather forecasting. But not in the way anyone expected.

In the 1940s, when computers first made numerical weather prediction possible, the approach was deterministic: measure current conditions, run the physics forward, predict the future. But by the late 1950s, cracks appeared: a single missing observation could cause huge errors two days later. Then came Lorenz’s 1961 discovery: rounding 0.506127 to 0.506 caused his weather simulation to diverge completely, proving that precise long-range forecasts were impossible.

Chaos theory explains why long-range deterministic forecasting fails. But it doesn’t tell you what to do about it.

It took thirty years to achieve a breakthrough. It came from changing the question. Instead of asking “What will the weather be ten days from now?” ask instead what it could possibly be. Run the model not once, with your best-guess initial conditions, but many times, with slightly different starting points that reflect measurement uncertainty. Each run produces a different forecast. Together, they map the range of possible futures.

This is ensemble prediction. Instead of a single forecast, you generate an ensemble of forecasts. If all ensemble members agree, confidence is high. If they diverge into different patterns, uncertainty is high. You cannot predict which specific future will occur, but you can map the probability distribution across possible futures.

Since becoming used in practice in the early 1990s, the results have vindicated the approach. Ensemble forecasts consistently outperform single deterministic forecasts. They provide not just predictions but measures of confidence. They reveal when the atmosphere is in a predictable state (ensemble members cluster together) versus a turbulent one (ensemble members diverge widely).

Ensemble prediction doesn’t defeat chaos, it works along with chaos. It accepts that specific trajectories cannot be predicted beyond a certain horizon, but reveals that the distribution of trajectories can be. It’s a fundamentally different kind of knowledge: not “it will rain Tuesday” but “there’s a 70% chance of rain Tuesday, with high uncertainty.”

***

Palmer’s papal election simulation exhibits exactly the same structure, though she arrived at it independently and for different reasons.

Each run of the simulation starts from the same historical situation. The date is 1492. There are the same cardinals with the same resources, the same European powers with the same constraints. But Palmer populates these roles with different students, each bringing their own judgment, risk tolerance, and strategic thinking.

Run the simulation once and you get a history: one specific pope elected, one specific pattern of alliances, one specific set of cities burned. Run it ten times and a pattern emerges that no single run could reveal: certain outcomes consistently occur (a powerful cardinal wins, war breaks out, Italian city-states suffer) while others vary widely (which specific cardinal, which specific alliances, which specific cities). The simulation generates not a single counterfactual but a probability distribution across possible 1492s.

What emerges is a probabilistic model of the political situation of 1492. Not “Florence will be sacked” but “Florence survives in 70% of runs.” Not “France will invade” but “French intervention occurs with near certainty, though the target varies.” This is the kind of knowledge ensemble prediction provides. Not certainty about specifics, but clarity about the shape of the possible.

Interestingly, Palmer has independently arrived at both major methods weather forecasters use for ensemble prediction, though for entirely different reasons.

For one, she perturbs the initial conditions by moving historical figures in time. Cardinals who never overlapped now competing for the same throne, creating configurations that never actually existed. And she also runs multiple models: each time different students inhabit the same roles, bringing different judgment and risk tolerance. One student playing Cardinal della Rovere might ally with France; another might seek Spanish protection. Same constraints, different decision-making models.

Palmer developed these techniques for pedagogical reasons, to prevent students from seeking ‘correct’ answers and to explore the range of human responses, but the result is structurally identical to what meteorologists spent decades developing to work around chaos.

***

Military planners have long grappled with the same problem. Wargaming exists because commanders cannot predict how battles will unfold. Chaos, friction, and human decision-making make deterministic prediction impossible. But unlike meteorologists, military planners lack the resources to run true ensemble predictions. A major wargame is expensive, it involves hundreds of personnel and equipment over weeks and a single scenario can be executed once, rarely twice.

History, we are told, is more like wargaming than meteorology or physics. We cannot do experiments. What happens, happens once. There is no going back to try different initial conditions. There is no way to rerun 1492 with different actors to see how it plays out.

But Palmer’s approach suggests otherwise. Experimental history is possible. Not in the sense of manipulating the past, but in the sense of systematically exploring its possibility space. Her simulation is an experiment: controlled conditions, repeated trials, emergent patterns. It will never achieve the precision of physics, but it’s a genuine advance beyond purely descriptive history, as we know it.

The limitation is obvious: Palmer can run her simulation perhaps ten times over the years she teaches the course. But what if we could run fifty simulations per day, as weather forecasters do? What if we do that for an entire year? We’d end up with tens of thousands of simulations and a detailed probabilistic landscape of the political situation of 1492.

Enter history LLMs, large language models trained exclusively on texts from specific historical periods!

The idea emerged from a fundamental problem: modern LLMs cannot forget. A generic LLM knows what already happened. No amount of prompting can remove this hindsight bias, which, by the way, it shares with Palmer’s students. A historian studying the Renaissance cannot un-know what came next, and neither can a model trained on Wikipedia.

But what if you could train an LLM only on texts available before a specific date? Researchers at the University of Zurich recently built Ranke-4B, a language model trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts.

“The model literally doesn’t know WWI happened.” It reasons like someone from 1913 would have reasoned, with 1913’s uncertainties and 1913’s assumptions about the future. It doesn’t know that Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be assassinated. It doesn’t know about tanks or poison gas or the collapse of empires.

Due to the scarcity of texts, it probably won’t be possible to train a 1492 history LLM. But a 1913 one is clearly possible. So what does that mean?

Can we run simulations of the July Crisis? Populate the roles with LLM agents trained on pre-1913 texts, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, Serbian Prime Minister Pašić, and watch ten thousand versions of 1914 unfold? Would we see the Great War emerge in 94% of runs, or only 60%? Would we find that small changes, a different response to the Austrian ultimatum, a faster Russian mobilization, a clearer British commitment to France, consistently deflect the trajectory toward peace, or do they merely shift which powers fight and when?

These aren’t idle questions. They go to the heart of historical causation. Was the Great War inevitable, locked in by alliance structures and arms races and imperial rivalries? Or was it contingent, the product of specific decisions made under pressure by specific individuals who might have chosen differently? Historians have debated this for a century. Palmer’s simulation suggests a new approach. Don’t argue, simulate. Map the probability distribution.

But this raises a deeper question. Given the butterfly effect, can actors in chaotic systems achieve their goals at all? If small perturbations cascade unpredictably through chaotic systems, then perhaps historical actors are merely throwing pebbles into turbulent water, creating ripples they cannot control, in directions they cannot predict. They perturb the system, yes, but with unknown and unknowable consequences.

Palmer argues otherwise. Her students don’t just perturb the system at random. They achieve goals. Not perfectly, not completely, but meaningfully. As she observes: “No one controlled what happened, and no one could predict what happened, but those who worked hard [...] most of them succeeded in diverting most of the damage, achieving many of their goals, preventing the worst. Not all, but most.” Florence doesn’t always survive, but when Florentine players work skillfully, it survives more often. The outcomes aren’t predetermined, but neither are they purely random.

This is what Machiavelli asserted. In The Prince, Chapter XXV, he writes:

I compare [Fortune] to one of those violent rivers, which when swelled up floods the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, carrying the soil away from one place to another; everyone flees before it, all yield to its violence without any means to stop it. […] And yet, though floods are like this, it is not the case that men, in fair weather, cannot prepare for this, with dikes and barriers, so that if the waters rise again, they either flow away via canal, or their force is not so unrestrained and destructive.

The flood comes, but prepared actors can channel it. They cannot choose whether it occurs, but they can influence where it flows, which fields it devastates, which cities it spares. Fortune, Machiavelli concludes, “is arbiter of half our actions, but still she leaves the other half, or nearly half, for us to govern.”

Experimental history, as outlined above, could test whether Machiavelli’s metaphor actually describes how history works. If history is pure chaos, if human action makes no predictable difference, then skilled and unskilled players should succeed equally often. But if Machiavelli is right, patterns should emerge. Players who build strong alliances, maintain credible threats, balance powers, and manage debts carefully should protect their homelands statistically more often than those who don’t. Not always, not with certainty, but measurably. The flood still comes, but the dikes matter.

And if patterns emerge, experimental history then becomes a laboratory for learning what works. Which kinds of dikes prove most effective? Does early coalition-building outperform late negotiation? Do transparent commitments work better than strategic ambiguity? The specific tactics of Renaissance cardinals won’t apply to modern crises, but the principles might: How to protect vulnerable positions between great powers, when commitments under pressure hold or collapse? What distinguishes successful from failed crisis management?

Palmer stumbled onto this through pedagogy, meteorologists developed it through necessity, historians and political scientists might adopt it to learn how much we can actually govern within the half that Fortune leaves us, and how to govern it well.

When Sofia Corradi died on October 17th, the press was full of obituaries for the spiritual mother of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme, or, in the words of Umberto Eco, “that thing where a Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, meets a Flemish girl, falls in love with her, marries her, and starts a European family.”

Yet none of the obituaries I’ve seen stressed the most important and interesting aspect of the project: its unprecedented scale.

The second-largest comparable programme, the Fulbright in the United States, sends around nine thousand students abroad each year. Erasmus sends 1.3 million.

So far, approximately sixteen million people have taken part in the exchanges. That amounts to roughly 3% or the European population. And with the ever growing participation rates the ratio is going to get even gradually even higher.

Is short, this thing is HUGE.

***

As with many other international projects conceived in Europe in the latter half of the XX. century, it is ostensibly about a technical matter — scholarships and the recognition of credits from foreign universities — but at its heart, it is a peace project.

Corradi recounts a story from a preparatory meeting of French and Italian rectors in 1969:

Professor Contini of the University of Florence was not at all pleased with the proposal and declared that “the draft needed to be examined carefully, that what was requested of the group of experts was a lengthy and complex task, etc.”

But when Corradi explained that the proposal was not really about curricula or credits, but rather about peace and international understanding, he immediately changed his tune. He turned to his colleagues and said that the scheme should be approved quickly, and that any wrinkles could be ironed out later.

This kind of approach can be seen over and over again in the post–WWII decades, when those involved had firsthand experience of war.

When I, as a modern person, see a tricky political problem, my intuition, honed in the recent decades, tells me that the solution will be slow and painful, that the participants will engage in backstabbing, blackmail, and the trading of favours, that we’ll end up, at best, with a watered-down version of what was originally intended, and that, most likely, there isn’t enough political will to accomplish anything at all.

And then I look back at the Europeans of 1950s or 1960s and observe how, when peace is mentioned, they simply set their concerns and mutual disagreements aside and do the right, if unorthodox, thing.

Sadly, the generations with personal experience of war have passed away, and that implicit, unspoken mutual understanding is now gone.

During Brexit, UK has dropped out of the scheme, with the government claiming it was too expensive. But it was clearly part of the broader effort to detach Britain from the EU institutions. And pointing out that it’s a peace project and that even EU’s frenemies, such as Turkey and Serbia, were taking part haven’t made any difference.

Not that the EU itself is blameless in this regard. When Switzerland voted in a referendum in 2014 to introduce immigration quotas, the Union showed that it was willing to weaponize the peace project for political ends and kicked Switzerland out of the scheme in response.

***

Back to the social engineering though.

Despite what Umberto Eco said, Erasmus seems to work a bit differently, at least according to the anecdotes I’ve had a chance to hear.

In fact, the Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, but he doesn’t make any local friends. They are speaking Flemish among themselves and he has no idea what they are talking about. Also, Europe still carries a certain aristocratic air. Unlike in the United States, it really matters whether you were born somewhere and have spent your whole life there. If that’s not the case, everyone’s going to be friendly and helpful, but you’ll remain an outsider.

Yet, the boy befriends other Erasmus students just as eager for company as he is. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians. He falls in love with a Polish girl, marries her and they settle in Berlin together and speak English at home.

Which, in the end, is probably even better outcome than what was originally intended.

***

And speaking of social engineering: Yes, this is exactly how you do it!

Substantial portion of students actually does want to spend some time abroad. It’s no different from the Western European marriage pattern, where young people left their parental homes to work as servants, farmhands, or apprentices before they married and set up their own households.

The much-maligned idea of social engineering, in this case, doesn’t mean forcing people to do something they don’t want to do. It means removing the obstacles that prevent them from doing what they already want.

Before Erasmus, studying abroad was seen as having fun rather than as serious academic work, something to be punished rather than rewarded. Universities were reluctant to recognize studies completed elsewhere. Erasmus, with its credit transfer system, changed that and thus unleashed a massive wave of student exchanges.

***

The name “Erasmus” is an acronym, but it was clearly chosen to remind us of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the model travelling scholar. Erasmus spent his life moving between the Netherlands, France, England, Italy, the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland and thus makes a perfect mascot for the programme.

But Erasmus was also a citizen of what he called respublica litteraria and what later became the Republic of Letters, a long-distance network of intellectuals connected through the exchange of letters and, yes, actual travel, something that was an indispensable precursor to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

One can think of it as a two-pronged strategy: Letters kept the network among the intellectual elites alive. Travel created new nodes in the network, meetings, collaborations, and shared projects. Professors often recommended promising students to each other, or engaged in master-disciple relationships, such as Tycho de Brahe with Johannes Kepler or Galileo with Evangelista Torricelli.

Which makes me wonder about how the above applies to the modern world.

Today’s blogosphere is sometimes compared to the old Republic of Letters and not without merit: it enables rapid exchange of ideas between people that would otherwise never meet each other. And that’s a great thing.

When it comes to travel though, the state of affairs is somewhat different. The cheap travel of today makes it easy for people to meet in person for a day or two. But at the same time, it makes long stays, needed for deeper collaborations, that were once a necessity, less common.

It’s fun to imagine, say, Matt Yglesias, spending a year in Europe and writing about European affairs. But I don’t see that happening. (Although progress-minded philanthropists could find the idea of sponsoring such intellectual insemination via long-term mutual exchanges interesting to toy with.)

In the meantime, there’s this huge beast of Erasmus programme, waiting to be taken advantage of. We may complain that there are no progress-minded people in Eastern Europe, but at the same time thousands of young people from the region travel abroad each year to study. How hard would it be to steer the promising few towards specific destinations? Presumably those with an established progress community, with the prospect, that after a year spent abroad they will return home and spread the word further?

***

Europeans take Erasmus for granted. They are rarely aware that nothing quite like it exists elsewhere. People from other parts of the world, meanwhile, often don’t know about it at all. And if they do, they see it as a dull, technocratic, typically European matter. Which, I think, is a shame.

But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union. You might start, for instance, by comparing it to the United States, assuming that EU member countries are roughly equivalent to U.S. states. But that analogy quickly breaks down. The deeper you dig, the more confused you become.

You try with other federal states. Germany. Switzerland. But it doesn’t work either.

Finally, you try with the United Nations. After all, the EU is an international organization, just like the UN. But again, the analogy does not work. The facts about the EU just don’t fit into your UN-shaped mental model.

Not getting anywhere, you decide to bite the bullet and learn about the EU the hard way. You open the Wikipedia page. You sigh when you see the amount of text and notice all the unfamiliar names and acronyms. Yet, you start reading…

Apparently, the Council of Europe and the European Council are two entirely different things. And the Council of Europe isn’t even an EU institution, despite sharing the same flag. And notice that we are not even speaking of the Council of the European Union! And the European Parliament, despite its name, is not a legislature…

You browse around, you read articles, make notes, cross-reference stuff. But at a certain point you realize that you can’t bear the prospect of reading yet another dull and confusing wall of text.

At which point you grudgingly turn to this humble blog post.

***

To be clear: We are not going to dive deep into the EU’s institutions. You’ve already done that yourself, and it didn’t help. Instead, we are going to build a kind of conceptual skeleton, an intellectual scaffolding that can be used to put all those odd facts about the Union into perspective. Don’t expect many object-level details, but if I do my job well, you are going to see where your confusion stems from.

***

Consider a stereotypical Balkan house. How does it work? Obviously, the kitchen is for cooking and the bedrooms are for sleeping. That much is clear. But what about the rebar sticking out of the roof? What purpose could it possibly serve?

If you think of the house only as a place to live, you’ll have a hard time explaining it. Rebar seems nonsensical, even dangerous to the residents.

It’s only when you start treating the house as a dynamic structure, from its historical and evolutionary perspective so to say, that things begin to make sense. Of course, the rebar is there to anchor the next floor — if and when it’s ever built!

And suddenly, all the other odd details start to make sense, from the portable concrete mixer in the backyard to the faint imprints of scaffolding in the basement.

***

Consider the European Parliament. As already mentioned, it is not a true legislature. It can’t propose laws on its own. At first glance, that doesn’t make much sense. But take a look at the timeline!

1952 – Created as the Common Assembly. It’s completely toothless. Its task is to debate the decisions of the executive. Its members aren’t even elected. They are delegated by national parliaments.

1958 – Renamed to the European Parliamentary Assembly. It can now at least consult the legislation proposed by the executive.

1968 – Quietly renamed to the European Parliament, though this name isn’t yet formally recognized in the treaties.

1975 – Gains the power to reject the EU budget as a whole.

1979 – First direct elections.

1986 – The term European Parliament appears in the treaties for the first time. The Parliament can now propose amendments to the legislation.

1992 – Gains the power to approve (but not nominate!) the head of the executive.

1997 – Can veto legislation and approves the entire executive.

1999 – Flexes its muscle for the first time. Brings down the Santer Commission.

2009 – EU budget is prepared jointly by the Parliament and the Council.

See? The name “parliament” isn’t descriptive. It is not supposed to mean that the body in question is an actual parliament. It’s a statement of intent. And all the apparent weirdness stems from the fact that we are looking at an institution in the process of transformation. The odd stuff doesn’t necessarily have a practical, functional purpose. It’s historical. It’s evolutionary. It’s rebar sticking out of the roof.

***

That begs a question: if the EU is transforming, what is it transforming from — and into what?

To answer the question, I have drawn a helpful diagram:

When it was created, the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor to the European Union, was an international organization. Established by international treaty, it was supposed to integrate the founding six’s coal and steel industries into a single common market. The idea was that by giving all members equal access to coal and steel — the key resources for waging war at the time — none of them (Germany, wink wink!) would be able to out-arm the others.

But it had already a tiny seed of a state built into it. It was deliberately designed so that the member states had to give up a little piece of their sovereignty to join in. The Community held binding powers over coal and steel production, pricing, and competition policy and the national governments could not veto its decisions individually. That was widely understood at the time. Britain, for example, was invited to join the club but declined, explicitly stating that it could not accept such a loss of sovereignty.

But that sovereignty loss was small, limited to the coal and steel industries. Again, this was deliberate. The founders have understood that creating a fully fledged federal Europe, as some had proposed, wasn’t politically viable. Instead, they adopted Jean Monnet’s method of “little steps”, that is, moving towards common, integrated political entity in gradual, iterated manner. The evolution of the European Parliament, with its tiny, almost trivial steps, fist renaming the Common Assembly to European Parliamentary Assembly, then to European Parliament, is a perfect illustration of that approach.

And that’s what the often heard phrase “ever closer union” actually means.

***

Since the EU’s inception in the 1950s, the Frankenstein, it seems, was always moving towards a unified state. But why is that? It’s a standard political process after all and there’s no reason it couldn’t run in reverse, moving back towards the international organization.

What follows is a speculation, but I’m including it nonetheless as it offers an example of how to even start thinking about the matter.

It seems to me that the process works like a ratchet. The pro-EU forces are mostly bureaucrats and policy-makers, for whom small, incremental changes are their daily bread and butter. The eurosceptics, on the other hand, tend to be people of big ideas, or often, of one big idea: national sovereignty. For them, small steps like trying to rename the European Parliament back to the European Parliamentary Assembly, or blocking it from participating in the drafting of the EU budget, are beneath their dignity.

Case in point: the Brexit negotiations. British government came to the table with the grand idea of reclaiming national sovereignty, but little else. It wasn’t even unified on such a basic question as whether to remain in or leave the common market. The EU side, by contrast, arrived with technical dossiers, raising poignant questions about how sausages would be traded between the UK and Northern Ireland.

So, for now at least, the dynamics appear to be asymmetric. Movement toward closer union is gradual, evolutionary and seemingly unstoppable. Movement in the opposite direction tends to happen suddenly, unpredictably and in leaps, like revolutions do.

***

All of that is fine, but it’s just the big picture. A historical one. It doesn’t offer much guidance on what to pay attention to on a daily basis.

An American columnist might write a commentary on the latest squabble between the Democrats and the Republicans. But what would his European counterpart do? Can you imagine a similar piece about disagreements between the EPP and ALDE? And have you, by the way, even heard those acronyms?

Yes, they are European political parties, but hardly anyone has heard of them. That’s because European parties are merely groupings of national parties, and they only really matter within the European Parliament, which itself is not a particularly powerful institution. The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.

Therefore, the real meat of political action isn’t in party politics. It lies elsewhere. If you want to follow what’s happening in Europe, you should focus on the relationship between the Union and the member states. Where an American pundit might write an article titled “What should the Democrats do about X?”, his European counterpart would instead ask, “What should Italy do about the matter?”

The kind of thing you should pay attention to is when, for example, Slovakia changes its constitution to grant national law precedence over EU law in “cultural and ethical matters.” That’s somewhat more limited than what Poland did back in 2021 but still, it’s a direct challenge to the Union. Will the EU respond by freezing funds, as it did with Poland, when it put more than 35 billion euros in COVID-19 recovery grants and loans on hold because of “rule-of-law violations”?

A different example: Viktor Orbán is clearly a security vulnerability for Europe, with Hungary repeatedly threatening to veto the aid to Ukraine. The underlying problem is that in certain areas — foreign policy in this case — decisions must be made unanimously. (Remember: veto equals unanimity equals national sovereignty.) This gives any national leader the power to block progress on any issue and to blackmail both the EU and other member states. And that’s without even considering the fact that, for Putin, all it takes to paralyze the entire Union is to bribe, threaten, or kompromat a single national leader.

In similar vein, Bulgaria was clearly pursuing a domestic political agenda in 2022 when it blocked North Macedonia’s candidacy to the EU based on accusations that the Macedonian language was simply Bulgarian by another name and Skopje was disrespecting its shared cultural and historic ties to Bulgarians. And again, the problem lies in the requirement for unanimity in the accession process.

To give a final example, the Russian threat, combined with the weakening of NATO, has created a clear demand for a common European army. Yet transferring the monopoly on violence from the member states to the Union would drastically alter the balance of power and therefore is a political nonstarter. That kind of dynamics is why you so often see proposals for “coalitions of the willing” — essentially subsets of countries ready to make unanimous decisions on specific matters. (Think of the Eurozone or the Schengen.)

***

On the more technical level, the decision-making procedures and incentives are heavily skewed in favor of the member states.

First, the strategic and political agenda of the EU is set by the European Council, that is, by the heads of national governments.

Second, the Council nominates the head of the executive, and while doing so, ensures that the President is sufficiently submissive and incapable of decisive action which could challenge the primacy of the member states. The individual commissioners, in turn, are nominated by the member states.

Third, in elections to the European Parliament, voters can only choose among their national parties and national candidates. A Spaniard cannot vote for a Finnish MEP, and a Finn cannot vote for a Spanish party. The Parliament has repeatedly approved proposals for trans-national voting lists, but the Council, not that anyone is surprised, disagrees.

Fourth, not only does the Union lack a common army or police force, it also has almost no alternative mechanisms to enforce its decisions. Given that state of affairs, it sometimes resorts to the crude tactic of blocking the in principle unrelated funds. European Public Prosecutor’s Office may be an early example of building an enforcement institution, but again, it’s a “coalition of the willing,” with Denmark, Ireland, and Hungary still outside of the club.

On the other hand, this systemic bias towards the member states is counterbalanced by how the political dynamics often play out. In times of crisis, the bargains struck among member states can sometimes lead to deeper integration.

When Germany was about to unify, for instance, France agreed to it only on the condition that Germany would support the creation of the monetary union — which later lead into adoption of a common currency.

Another example: when COVID hit, the EU was, for the first time, allowed to issue common debt.

Also, when an unpopular but necessary measure needs to be taken, national leaders are often quite happy to hand the decision over to the Union. This allows to avoid domestic backlash by shifting the blame to the EU and then melodramatically expressing moral outrage.

***

When it comes to nation states, everyone immediately knows what it means and what to expect. The concept was established long ago, in 1848, or even earlier. There’s no need to explain.

The European Union, on the other hand, is an experiment. It’s one of a kind. Nobody has a clear idea of what to expect. You see people using different, and not always mutually compatible, narratives. Some speak of the Union as a peace project. Some treat it as an exercise in economic cooperation. Others still view it as a path toward political unification. And some, of course, as a managerial conspiracy to overthrow the democratic system.

The fact that there’s no common knowledge of what the EU is supposed to be means that it lacks the basic stability of nation states, where everyone is more or less on the same page about what the state is for, even if they disagree on ideology or specific policies.

On the other hand, in an era when democratic institutions no longer generate the political legitimacy they once did, this instability gives the Union more wiggle room and the opportunity to try alternative approaches. It might accidentally stumble upon a model that better fits the modern landscape and come out on top. Or it might continue along its current trajectory and turn into a classic, fully fledged nation state just at the moment when that model ceases to work.

I’d like to tell you a bedtime story. It’s not one of those enchanting and weird fairy tales in the vein of the Brothers Grimm, but rather one of those synthetic ones with a moral at the end. Children hate those, but up to certain age they’re still too young to recognize the trick. Here’s how it goes.

***

There were good people in the empire, living peacefully side by side. Then, one day, a new religion emerged. Those who embraced it believed that the old faith, once good and just, had been corrupted by the devil, and that its followers would inevitably end up in hell. Those who remained true to the old religion thought that the converts had been deceived by the devil into mocking and despising the one true faith. They were led by sinful pride, and they would, it goes without saying, all end up in hell.

Each side believed not only that the other was wrong, but also that they are straying toward eternal damnation and therefore had to be saved, even against their will, and if persuasion failed, then let it be the sword. For what, after all, is a bit of suffering in this mortal world when eternal bliss is at stake?

After a century of wars, the empire was half empty. Wild animals roamed where people had once lived. Those who had not perished in battle, in massacres, or during looting, died of hunger or the diseases that go hand in hand with war. Soldiers plundered anyone they could, just to survive. Fields laid barren. Peasants hid in the forests, fearing their own armies as much as the enemy’s.

The warring princes themselves had been driven into poverty by the endless war. At last, they realized there was no way to go on like this. They resolved to make peace. But they hated each other so much that they could not even meet in the same city. Instead, they gathered in two towns, close to one another, and messengers rode back and forth between them until, at long last, peace was forged.

They agreed that from then on, they would leave those of the other faith in peace. They might be wrong, they might be serving the devil, they might be risking eternal damnation, but so be it. Living beside them without meddling in their affairs would demand much gnashing of teeth, yet so be it. It was still better than hiding in the woods, fearing that one’s own army might take everything one had, if it didn’t kill you outright.

And so they lived happily, gnashing their teeth, ever after.

***

That’s, of course, the story of Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia. It’s great in that it doesn’t paint a naive, rosy picture of tolerance, where everybody is happy to defer to everybody else. It shows how gnashing of teeth is the prerequisite of achieving a tolerant society. And I love a good parable as much as anyone. But, unfortunately, the story is also to a large extent untrue.

1. It’s not true that there was no religious tolerance before the Thirty Years’ War. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio (rulers given free hand to choose the religion for their realm) was introduced in the Peace of Augsburg fifty years prior to the Thirty Years’ War.

2. The conflict has begun, without doubt, as a religious one. Czech protestants tossed catholic governors out of a window. When the governors landed safely on a dung heap, they claimed it was due to the help of Virgin Mary. That’s as religious as it gets. But as the war dragged on, curious things started to happen. Catholic armies recruited protestant soldiers. Protestant armies recruited catholic soldiers. Catholic France joined the show on the side of protestant Sweden. The conflict that once started as a religious war eventually turned into a standard struggle for power.

3. What im theory looks like an orderly war between two factions was in fact pretty different on the ground. It was a bloody chaos. The troops plundered the civilian population, friend and foe alike. Nobody asked whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant before killing you. Think of the recent civil war in Syria and turn it up to eleven.

4. It’s not true that all warring parties were fully exhausted by 1648. France, for example, rather figured out that it has better wars to fight (e.g. Franco-Spanish War) than the pointless and never ending conflict in HRE.

5. The Peace of Westphalia, as already said, hasn’t introduced religious tolerance. It kept cuius regio, eius religio in place, but made some minor adjustments. Most importantly, the rulers could now choose from three options (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist) instead of the previous two. It was in no way universalist. One couldn’t adopt, say, Islam or — the horror! — a different, non-sanctioned strain of Christianity.

6. The tolerance back then was not what we mean by tolerance today. It still worked in pre-modern way. It was granted to realms or groups, not individual people. One’s rights were still linked to the group they belonged to, not to the individual as such. (The story of how we stopped assigning rights to groups, whether social classes, confessions, nationalities, gilds or whatever, is another big narrative that’s never told!)

***

All that being said, the Peace of Westphalia can still teach us valuable lessons, whether about the importance of international law, which arose largely in response to the excesses of the Thirty Years’ War (and yes, even today there are those who brazenly claim that international law is useless because it lacks violent enforcement), or about how progress in military affairs brings not only chemical and nuclear weapons, but also things like better logistics that lessen the suffering of the civilian population.

It also makes me think about the value of narratives. Is the narrative of tolerance valuable enough to justify a lie? And is the lie itself large enough to invalidate the narrative? After all, it is still better than the standard narrative of the Second World War (“the good guys crush the bad guys”) to say nothing of the nationalistic narratives of the nineteenth century, which never shied away from lies, fabrication of legends and outright falsifications.

Moose became extinct in most of Germany around 1000 CE, and in Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, most of southern Poland, and Hungary by the XV. century.

It’s not clear where exactly Emil comes from, but most likely from Poland, which has a large moose population in the northeast. In early summer 2025, he crossed the Czech border and wandered south through Moravia into Austria. He swam across the Danube near Vienna, then turned west. Along the way, he frightened the monks at Melk Abbey, and by the end of September he had passed Linz in Upper Austria. Much of his journey took him through densely populated and even industrial regions, such as Silesia and the Danube Valley.

Europe is rewilding. Sometimes it’s deliberate, as with European bison, other times it just a consequence of reforestation and a less polluted environment.

When I visit my mother in Bratislava, I already have to watch out for wild boars on my way home at night. While they mostly keep to the wooded areas during the day, at night you can meet them roaming in groups among the socialist-era brutalist apartment blocks.

This summer, I went for a swim in the Danube, right in the city. Suddenly, I realized that a large beaver was swimming alongside me. Next time, it might be a moose.

Farmers are perpetually complaining about wolves killing their sheep. And locals in the Romanian mountains are fearful of the growing population of bears.

There’s a special, innate slot for big animals in our brains. Young children are fascinated by stories about them, even if they never encounter them in the real world. It’s no surprise, then, that the return of big mammals looms large in people’s minds and does even become a polarizing electoral topic.

Nonetheless, the trend is here to stay and is unlikely to reverse anytime soon. All the species involved will have to find a way to live peacefully alongside one another, and that even in urban and industrialized areas.

But so far, political attitudes have swung between two extremes: “animals are fluffy” and “kill the vermin.” The technical and political solutions to this problem have been largely unexplored.

Last year, after the first Progress Conference was held in Berkeley, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we need a similar conference in Europe, perhaps even more than it is needed in America. Then, a couple of months ago, I got a message from Bahadir Sirin of GPRG letting me know that such a conference is actually going to happen.

How cool is it when people have the same idea and make it happen, without you having to lift a finger! Huge thanks to Bahadir and everyone involved!

The conference took place in Brussels on September 26th, and what follows are a few brief notes from the event.

***

I didn’t attend the original Berkeley conference, so I can’t compare directly, but here’s what Kevin Kohler, who went to both, has to say:

Despite being a conference aimed at reviving European ambition, the level of ambition was lower than in the US. In SF houseparties people predict what year we’ll have a Dyson Sphere, in Europe we discuss which energy forms should count as renewable in the EU’s energy degrowth plan.

Now, that might be a little unfair. This isn’t really about the US versus the EU, but rather about Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world. I don’t see people in Washington, D.C., discussing Dyson spheres either.

That being said, there’s some truth to it. Europe does feel less ambitious. On this topic, I think that Rasheed Griffith from the Carribean Progress Studies Institute has a point: Fix the capital markets, and most stuff is downstream from there. If discussing Dyson spheres at houseparties would make you look cool and lure investors to finance your startup, the chat about Dyson spheres is what you’ll get.

To give a different example, EU-Inc, a unified legal entity for European business, easy to create and run and spanning all 27 countries would be absolutely helpful. But with easy access to capital, even Europe’s notoriously annoying corporate law(s) would get much less frustrating. If nothing else, you could hire someone to stand in queues for you.

There are enough people capable of executing ambitious projects in Europe. There’s also a lot of money to invest. What’s missing is the way to connect the two. With better ways to finance ambitious projects, the overall level of ambition would naturally rise, without much additional effort.

***

The conference was a lot about policy, much less about the industry. Which, it seems, was partly a deliberate choice. The conference was held in Brussels, to be close to EU institutions. Also the focus was on EU, as a political entity, rather than on Europe as a continent, which made it less interesting for the people from UK, where Progress movement has already put down roots.

But if one truly believes that the main obstacles to progress in Europe are political, that what’s missing isn’t human capital or clever ideas, but rather institutional infrastructure needed to make things happen, then it’s hard to argue with the choice. We could have talked the European industry to death, but as long as every promising startup packs up and leaves for the US, it wouldn’t help one bit.

***

It surprised me was how often the word “democracy” was brought up. Growth can occur in democracy as well as in autocracy, so speaking about democracy, Acemoglu’s paper aside, feels somewhat orthogonal to the topic.

An uncharitable explanation might be that everything-bagel mentality finds its way even into the progress crowd. (Translation for Europeans: It’s Eintopf mentality. If we can talk about democracy on top of progress, why not add it to the pot? The more ingredients, the better the stew.)

A more charitable explanation is that people see the current dysfunction in European institutions as a function of lacking democracy. As an example, take Luis Garicano’s recent article, arguing that the process of selection of the Commission guarantees that we will always end up with weak and incapable leaders. I’ve made a take on a similar topic, from a bit different angle, here.

***

Speaking of EU dysfunction, I went to a café on Sunday and picked up a two-year-old, dust-covered local magazine from the shelf. It was complaining about the ongoing troubles with rebuilding Schuman roundabout, the junction right in front of the Berlaymont building, the seat of the European Commission.

Then, I opened my laptop and read a Politico article from just last week. It was complaining, you’ve guessed it, about ongoing troubles rebuilding the Schuman roundabout.

By the way, I’ve learned from the local magazine that Berlaymont building was built on the site of the bulldozed-down Convent of the Ladies of Berlaymont, a religious institution devoted to the education of young ladies. Not relevant in any way, but funny nonetheless.

***

There wasn’t much discussion of my personal hobbyhorse, the absence of a common European public square, or, for that matter, anything resembling a shared European public opinion. In Europe, issues and policies are debated within individual countries, while almost no public discourse goes on at the European level. And what we can’t discuss, we can’t fix.

Building some kind of common place for discussion and a functional blog-to-policy pipeline would help a lot. But of course, we are speaking of 24 different languages and 27 different media landscapes, so it’s not exactly easy.

***

As already said, the conference was organized in Brussels to get it close to the EU institutions but the choice of venue was also symbolic in its way.

Walking around Brussels, you can’t help but notice the sheer number of Art Nouveau buildings everywhere. (When it comes to Art Nouveau, I rank Brussels as No. 1, just ahead of Budapest and Vienna. Fight me, good citizens of the city of Vienna!)

All that architecture is the legacy of the Belle Époque, a time when progress reigned supreme in Europe. Dyson spheres? Give me a break! In 1910, we had an actual project to build a staircase inside the Matterhorn, all the way to the top.

As for the background, it’s not a widely known fact that Belgium was the second country to industrialize — from 1830’s on, right after Britain, and before Germany, France, and Switzerland jumped on the bandwagon.

Which meant that by 1890, when Art Nouveau came into vogue, the city was booming and the nouveau riche were building their homes in that style.

And by the way, the city of Brussels is doing a good job of keeping the Art Nouveau spirit alive. Just compare the Horta House above to the interior of the local trams!

It’s also worth comparing Brussels with Paris. Paris had much stricter regulations on facade design, giving the city its unified, Haussmannian look. Yes, it has an impressive, imperial feel to it, but if you ask me, I like the libertarian hodgepodge of Brussels better.

And finally, the worn-down state of many of these Art Nouveau buildings, the thick layer of dust, the peeling paint, the graffiti, is a reminder that progress, if left unattended and ignored, will slow down and eventually turn into decay.

One of the examples he gives is how “the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.”

Now, that’s just plain wrong. EU has no military and no police force (except maybe Frontex, but even that is far from clear-cut). The monopoly on violence remains firmly in the hands of the member states. Even coordination at the European level is not handled at the European level, but outsourced to NATO.

That said, Ben’s broader point is correct: groups capable of exerting violence will, in the long run, tend to get political representation. The groups that can’t will be pushed aside and their concerns ignored.

It may not happen at once. We are shielded from the brutal nature of the political system by layers of civilization, but in times of political uncertainty, when the veneer of civilization wears thin, the question of who is capable of violence does genuinely matter.

But it’s subtle. What exactly does ‘ability to exert violence’ mean?

A naive interpretation would be that whoever owns a gun holds political power. In a country where the entire population is armed, ‘the people’ can exert violence and therefore ‘the people’ are in power—ergo, democracy. Just look at Afghanistan!

No, it’s more complex than that. Individual violence matters little. If everyone is armed, the result is more often chaos or civil war than democracy. Power lies not with those who merely own guns, but with those who control the structures of organized violence, that is, armies, police forces, unions or criminal gangs.

Consider Myanmar. The military is largely separated from the rest of society. It has its own schools and hospitals, housing and welfare system. It controls large parts of the economy. Military families often live in closed compounds. Recruitment is heavily skewed toward the children of officers and NCOs, making it resemble a hereditary caste.

The result is what you would expect. The military holds political power a hardly anyone else does. And, by coincidence, the military is at present at war with virtually everyone else.

At the other end of the spectrum, consider XIX. century Prussia. At the beginning of the century, the military has become a popular institution. The Landwehr, based on universal conscription, replaced the earlier model of a professional armed force commanded by aristocrats.

The reason for this change, by the way, had little to do with the ‘people’ asserting political power. It stemmed instead from Napoleon’s restrictions on the size of the Prussian army. To circumvent these quotas, Prussia sought to build a large force by rapidly rotating conscripts through training.

But the outcome was inevitable: the aristocracy lost its monopoly on violence. The officer corps of the Landwehr was largely bourgeois, representing the middle class. This became evident during the revolution of 1848, when the Landwehr often sided with the progressives. Although the revolution ultimately failed, it prevented a full-scale return to the old order. The Landwehr remained a constant thorn in the side of the conservatives, and the progressives ensured it would not be replaced by a professional army.

In the following decades, we observe Bismarck locked in constant conflict with parliament over the question of a professional army. He ultimately achieved his goal, but not by dissolving the Landwehr — that was politically impossible at the time — but by sidelining it and making it basically a veterans’ club rather then an actual fighting force.

In Switzerland, the militia system established after 1848 has, unlike in Germany, survived to the present day. A Swiss saying goes, ‘We don’t have an army. We are an army.’ While often mocked by the left, there is a fundamental truth to it: it is difficult to deploy an army against the people when the army is the people.

But not so fast! In 1918, workers called a general strike, and the government deployed troops against them. In the end, the workers backed down. But how was that even possible? Doesn’t a people’s army mean that such a thing can’t be done?

And as always, the details matter. The workers were, due to universal conscription, part of the army, but the officers are overwhelmingly from the middle class. Ordinary soldiers may have felt sympathy for the workers, but their commanders certainly did not. Moreover, the government made sure to deploy the troops from the rural regions, where there was little industry, where the soldiers were mostly farmers, leaned conservative and had little sympathy for the workers.

We see these dynamics repeated again and again, even in modern times. Who owns guns matters, but so do the details of military structure, the composition of the troops, and their loyalty to their leaders.

During the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, President Shevardnadze attempted to deploy the army against the protesters. But despite his position as commander-in-chief, the army ignored his orders. Shevardnadze fell, and the revolution succeeded.

In Turkey, the military once functioned as a caste of its own, much like in Myanmar, regularly toppling elected leaders. But in 2016, the coup against Erdoğan failed: soldiers refused to use violence against protesters, and Erdoğan remains in power to this day, the power of the military diminished.

The point is that the way violence is institutionalized matters a lot. The nature of a political system is often downstream from seemingly minor details, how the officer corps is selected, how troop loyalty is ensured or how the command structure works overall.

Which brings us back to the EU.

At the moment it has no access to organized violence, but the times are changing. The Russian threat in the east combined with a weakening of NATO makes a lot of people have second thoughts.

At the national level, the change is already underway.

Sweden was early to the party, reintroducing compulsory military service in 2017. Conscription is already in force in the countries along the bloc’s eastern flank, be it Finland or the Baltic countries.

Some countries are experimenting with voluntary service. The Netherlands already has such a system, while, Belgium and Romania are considering it.

The Greece has entirely different concerns. NATO’s famous Article 5 covers external attacks, not conflicts between member states, meaning there is no NATO umbrella shielding Greece from Turkey. Hence, conscription.

But whatever the changes at the national level, in the end of the day, small Estonia could never stand up to Russia on its own. The EU as a whole, however, absolutely could. Despite its vast territory, Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s and if the EU had a unified army, Russia wouldn’t stand a chance.

But with many splintered national armies you get outcomes like this one:

The French army painfully realized how difficult it was to cross Europe in the spring of 2022, when it deployed a battalion to Romania in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We discovered the extent of the administrative red tape. There’s a war in Ukraine, but customs officials explain that you don’t have the right tonnage per axle and that your tanks aren’t allowed to cross Germany.”

The solution seems obvious: create a unified European army.

But who would command it? Would the role of commander-in-chief go to Ursula von der Leyen? Whatever one thinks of her, she was not chosen by popular vote but through haggling among member states. True, she was selected by heads of state who, in most cases, were themselves chosen by national parliaments, which in turn were elected by the people. So yes, there is a measure of political accountability. But at this level of indirection, it is weak, if not imperceptible.

This democratic deficit in the EU (consider also that the Commission drafts legislation rather than the Parliament, concentrating the power in the hands of the executive) doesn’t matter much for now, because the classic system of checks and balances is effectively replaced by the member states’ complete control over the Union. Von der Leyen can do barely anything unless she has member states on board.

However, if the monopoly on violence were to fall into the hands of the Commission, this system would break down, and the democratic deficit would become downright dangerous. The Commission could compel member states, yet it would remain unchecked by voters. The picture has a certain junta-like feel to it and the fact that the supreme leader happens to have a ‘von’ in her name does not exactly help.

Structural changes to the organization of violence in Europe are in the air. And the exact shape of these changes, the details that almost nobody pays any attention to, the nature of conscription, the process of selection of the officer corps, how the army is subjugated to the elected officials, all of that is going to play decisive role in shaping the political system in Europe in the century to come.

Famously, a hundred years ago Keynes predicted that by now people would be working just fifteen hours a week. That hasn’t quite happened, but the Dutch are already down to four-day weeks.

And this isn’t because bad actors are gaming the system or because the government is somehow stopping people from working more. Rather, it’s the result of people increasingly choosing to work part-time.

Interestingly, this is one of the issues where libertarians and progress studies people, who usually get along well, would disagree. Libertarians would say that if you can afford it, by all means, work just one day a week. Progress studies people would point out that GDP growth decreased by, say, 1% over 100 years will leave people in the resulting economy almost three times poorer.

Anyway, the Netherlands lead in part-time jobs, because it has enacted part-time-friendly policies in the past. Was that a mistake? Should governments instead be trying to make the creation of part-time jobs more difficult?

Also keep in mind that not all jobs are created equal. Those working on increasing the productivity (scientists etc.) are, by working more, increasing the exponent of the exponential growth curve. By contrast, assembly-line workers only increase its base. Is that an argument for sector-based policies? Discourage part-time work in science, but make it easier for manual jobs?

At the same time, a very different dynamic exhibits in Poland, yet it is often implicitly waved away as just another case of the same thing. This lazy “think big and abstract, ignore the pesky on-the-ground details” attitude serves no one’s interests, least of all Europe’s.

In August of that year, Belarussian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko began offering “tourist” visas to huge numbers of African and Middle Eastern migrants, allowing them to enter Belarus, before forcing them to cross the Polish border. Lukashenko wanted to push “migrants and drugs” on EU member states that had opposed his domestic political crackdown. Suddenly, tens of thousands of migrants with no connection to Poland were pouring over the border, which at that time had no physical barrier and was lightly patrolled. Lukashenko hoped to exploit Poland’s need to comply with EU and international humanitarian law to destabilize the country’s politics.

In the initial wave of crossings, many vulnerable families crossed over from Belarus. But some of the migrants were single young men who were prone to fighting with border guards. Poland’s PiS government implemented a policy of automatically returning captured migrants to Belarus—a method of return known as “pushbacks.” Human rights advocates denounced the policy as a violation of the principle of non-refoulement, the international legal stipulation that refugees may not be returned to a country in which they are in serious danger. Initially, Poland’s liberals joined the condemnations.

But the government’s toughness proved popular: two-thirds of Poles feared the border situation would spiral into war and large majorities opposed accepting the crossers as refugees. Poland erected a border wall; Belarus provided migrants with ladders and wire cutters. The crossings continued. So did the pushbacks.

— Leo Greenberg: The Immigration Lesson Liberals Don't Want to Face

Emotionally, I lean very much toward the pro-immigration, pro-human-rights side of the debate, but setting emotions aside and looking at the issue from a pure game-theoretic perspective, it is not clear how is that going to solve the problem.

Lukashenko knows at a visceral level that an influx of migrants from foreign cultures tends to destabilize the political landscape of the receiving country. Here, a study by Laurenz Guenther provides numbers:

The grey bars represent voters’ attitude towards immigration. Vast majority of voters feel that immigration should be made harder. Yet, all political parties, including the conservative CDU, believe that immigration should be made easier.

That was in 2013. And as you would expect in a functioning democracy, no policy preference, if it’s this salient, will remain unanswered for long. Just four years later, there’s AfD on the stage and it’s growing strong:

Here, Matt Yglesias provides an anecdote to show the above dynamic is perceived by the voters:

These charts resonate with what I heard from some older people at an AfD rally I attended in Munich during the 2017 federal election campaign. These people said they were longtime supporters of the Christian Social Union, [i.e. the conservatives in the chart above] […] They were annoyed that lots of foreign journalists were characterizing AfD voters as neo-Nazis or something, because in their view they were just voting to uphold the immigration policies of Helmut Kohl and many other mainstream German politicians of the past who nobody thought were Nazis. I raised the point that AfD really does have alarming neo-Nazi ties, and they kind of got annoyed and said their first choice would be for the Christian Democrats to be more restrictionist on immigration, but what are you going to do?

Lukashenko is taking advantage of this dynamic. He weaponizes immigrants to destabilize the political landscape in Poland. But how should Poland react?

Just sticking to the old, lose immigration policies is not going to work. Lukashenko can escalate and do so at a low cost. He can literally funnel half of Africa into Poland, which would in turn mean a full breakdown of the Polish political system.

To make things more complex, the legal framework governing refugees is based on the Geneva Convention, which itself was shaped by the somber experiences of the Second World War. At the time of its adoption, however, nobody imagined that the right to asylum might one day be deliberately exploited by a hostile state.

Fighting back against Lukashenko thus means violating Geneva Convention, which, in turn, means that the whole thing poses a direct challenge to the credibility of the international legal order. (And yes, it’s not hard to guess what kind of leader would benefit from such a breakdown of trust.)

In theory, international law could be adjusted to address these new challenges. In practice, however, such changes are extremely difficult. The international legal system is designed, for reasons that there’s no need to explain, to last, not to be revised.

All that said, while Poland was agonizing over the arrival of thousands of migrants from Belarus, the war in Ukraine broke out, sending millions of Ukrainian refugees across the border and today, roughly 7% of Poland’s population is Ukrainian. Yet, despite there being some sour spots, this immigration wave has been absorbed surprisingly well and has enjoyed broad public support.

It is a hint that the policy of accepting refugees is not yet dead.

But how should a new policy, resistant to adversarial attacks, look like is far from clear. Immigration from South America to Spain is another example of a large immigration wave that works well, which makes one think of avoiding the political backlash by accepting predominantly refugees from culturally and linguistically similar countries. But try telling that to Jordan or Lebanon.

As for now, there is no clear answer and governments are drifting gradually toward more restrictive approaches, which isn’t great news for the migrants, nor for the affected countries themselves.

Legal support for euthanasia is a moral imperative, but it is rare on the global level. Around the world, there are only small pockets where it’s permitted. Western Europe is an outlier in this respect, but there are still some big countries missing out.

That being said, the glaring gap, which is Britain and France, is about to close.

In the UK the assisted dying bill has passed the House of Commons in June and is now heading to the House of Lords.

Also, French National Assembly voted in May in favor of legalizing assisted dying. It’s not done yet, the law still has to pass the senate, but it’s on a good track to follow Spain (2021) and Austria (2022), making Western Europe an euthanasia superpower.

The moral progress has not stalled yet!

Internet of Trains

Internet on trains: Why does it suck? Tunnels. Trees lining the tracks blocking the signal. At high speeds (TGV can do 350km/h) doppler effect kicks in.

Banning C-sections in Turkey

Yup. This is going to make women want to have more kids. On the meta level, it’s weirdly similar to Erdogan’s erstwhile approach to the monetary policy:

Turkey has banned caesarean (C-section) births without medical justification in private clinics, part of a wider campaign by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to promote "natural births" and revive what he calls "traditional family values" in response to the country's rapidly declining birthrate.

Swimming in the Seine

Urban river swimming is one of my hobbyhorses. I used to assume that because of the leaking sewer system, swimming in Seine would be insane. But Paris now apparently can be added to the list of cities where it can be done. If you’ve tried and lived, do leave a note.

Gibraltar

Crossing over to Gibraltar has always been fun, with the rapid switch from the relaxed Andalusian atmosphere to the feel of a small British township. Also, crossing the runway on foot increased the weirdness. And now it’s going to get easier with Gibraltar “effectively joining the EU’s Schengen passport-free area”!

Lost German Conscripts

German and EU privacy rules meant it could not keep in contact with close to a million people who might help boost the country’s reserve forces as it seeks a stronger role in European defence and security. [...] “We have lost their contacts,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “It’s crazy.”

— Financial Times h/t Tyler Cowen

New Romanian President beats Terence Tao

Results of the mathematic olympiad:

Dominic is a politician. The problem, as he sees it, is that the civil service is disconnected from the electoral political system. Bureaucrats are appointed rather that elected, often in complex and opaque ways, and cannot even be fired by the elected politicians. This creates an self-standing, unaccountable ruling class, the bureaucracy, which does not have skin in the game and is thus focused on self-preservation rather than on solving real problems.

Jennifer is a former civil servant. The problem, as she sees it, is that the civil service is micromanaged by politicians to the point that it becomes incapable of solving real problems. Aware that bureaucrats are not politically accountable, politicians attempt to impose accountability by requiring them to fill out ever more reports, undergo ever checks and obey a labyrinthine and ever expanding set of regulations.

Despite their differences, their diagnoses ultimately converge on the same core issue: the government gives commands, but the civil service fails to deliver.

For Cummings, the failure stems from a lack of incentives and skin in the game. Why would bureaucrats inconvenience themselves, after all? For Pahlka, it’s because the regulatory thicket has grown so dense that, in many cases, no sensible course of action remains.

The case study of choice for Cummings is COVID and the underwhelming way in which governments responded to it. In his view, this can be blamed at incompetence, complacency and inflexibility of the civil service.

One of the things that we did to get the rapid testing to work was we got a guy who formerly was commanding officer of the SAS, British Special Forces, and this guy got a bunch of his friends from Special Forces also to work on rapid testing. When we first got this pushing from Number 10, I got the critical people from procurement, commercial HR, etc, into the Cabinet room with the Cabinet Secretary, the single most important official in the whole country, and the two of us said, “The PM wants rapid testing dealt with as if this is a wartime crisis.” We’re going to have a second wave. There’s going to be thousands more people getting CoViD, there’s NHS. People are dying, etc. We can’t have any of the normal civil service HR. We can’t have any of the normal civil service bullshit on procurement. Exactly the same as with the vaccine task force. Everyone sits around the cabinet table, they all nod their heads.

A week later, I call this guy, a former SAS boss and say, “So, how’s it going? Are you getting who you want and is everything working great?”

He says, “No, it’s all the same shit show.”

So I have to get all the people back in the same room with the country’s most senior official and say, who the fuck have we got to fire around here to make clear that these people doing testing don’t have to do all of your bullshit HR?

That’s how extreme things have to be. It was only by doing that a second time and making clear that I would get the PM to actually just start firing senior people in the Cabinet office. It’s only then that the system will kind of part and go, “Okay, this element is allowed to.” But you imagine as soon as that countervailing force is removed, all the normal sea floods back.

— Dominic Cummings, interview with Dwarkesh Patel

Pahlka’s the case study of choice would probably be Obamacare, where the failure to deliver a functioning website for people to sign up for the program nearly sank the entire political enterprise.

But for a more hands-on example, consider rhe U.S. Digital Service developing software to transmit data from satellites to ground stations, ensuring the continued operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS):

This issue of data transmission to the ground stations and back again was one of a few problems that was holding them back. There is an industry standard way of doing this, a simple, reliable protocol [UDP] that is built into almost every operating system in the world.

But this team wasn’t using this simple protocol on its own. Instead, the team had written a piece of software to receive the message from that protocol, read the data, and then recode it into a different format, so they could feed it into a very complex piece of software called an Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB. The ESB eventually delivered the data to yet another piece of software, at which point the whole process ran in reverse order to deliver it back to the original, simple protocol. Because the data was taking such a roundabout route, it wasn’t arriving quickly enough for the ground stations to make the calculations needed. Using the simple protocol alone would have made the entire job a snap—as easy as nailing a couple of boards together. Instead, they had this massive Rube Goldberg contraption that was never going to work.

The people on this project knew quite well that using this ESB was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it.

— Jennifer Pahlka: Culture eats Policy

All that being said, I cannot fail to notice that what the two are saying is not truly incompatible. They both want the civil service to be more flexible, to show greater initiative, to care less about the process and more about the outcomes and to respond to the challenges on the ground more quickly and creatively.

Pahlka complains that, given the tight regulation imposed by the government, they can’t. Cummings complains that, even if given the leeway, they won’t take advantage of it.

Cumming’s preferred solution is to make civil servants fireable by the government so that they get skin in the game and can be forced, under the threat of dismissal, to act creatively. (Good luck with that.)

Pahlka’s preferred solution is to replace the one-way flow of instructions, from the government to the civil service, with a feedback loop, allowing civil servants to point out problems inherent in the directives and government to revise the regulations accordingly. (Hm. Given how hard political renegotiation tends to be, good luck with that, I guess.)

All in all, it looks like a classic accountability sink: if you give your subordinates a clear process and make them accountable for following it, they will follow it up to the letter. They’ll follow it even if it does not help. They’ll follow it even if it actively undermines the actual goal. Because as long as they do, you see, they can’t be fired.

In the rare organizations where this dilemma has been resolved, it has been through superiors specifying WHAT it is to be achieved, but not HOW it is to be achieved. Subordinates are given a free hand in choosing the means, while superiors must place trust in their efforts and accept that failures may occur along the way.

But that, of course, requires mutual trust and politically, it’s a hard sell.

Europe just experienced a heatwave. At places, temperatures soared into the forties. People suffered in their overheated homes. Some of them died. Yet, air conditioning remains a taboo. It’s an unmoral thing. Man-made climate change is going on. You are supposed to suffer. Suffering is good. It cleanses the soul. And no amount on pointing out that one can heat a little less during the winter to get a fully AC-ed summer at no additional carbon footprint seems to help.

Mention that tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are working on life prolongation, that we may live into our hundreds or even longer. Or, to get a bit more sci-fi, that one day we may even achieve immortality. Your companions will be horrified. What? Immortality? Over my dead body! Fuck Elon Musk and his friends.

Try proposing that we all should strive to get rich so that we can lead better, less painful lives. Maybe we should grow the economy, build some more nuclear power plants, get rid of unnecessary regulation or whatnot. But how dare you?!? Are you not aware of the global inequality? Do you know nothing about the climate change? What kind of monster are you?

There’s also a religious inversion of the theme. Humbly, we won’t criticize those who ask for a better life. Instead, we’ll passive-aggressively venerate the suffering. Here’s mother Theresa: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

You can get an esoteric equivalent of the same idea. Tell a spiritual person that embryo selection could help eliminate the most severe genetic disorders, and you’d be told that you are trying to interfere with God’s plan. God manifests Himself through people, all kinds of people, including those who suffer, and eliminating people of one kind would mean diminishing God.

Or you may be told some other bullshit, but the gist will be unmistakable: The pain is good. Do not dare to fight it!

This may seem strange. Pain is an unpleasant feeling. Why would anyone want more of it?

But actually, it’s not that hard to explain.

Until recently, humanity lived in Malthusian, zero-sum world. Everything good we’ve got in life came at someone else’s expense. In such a world, having more meant that someone else had less. Being fed meant someone else was starving. Being warm meant someone else was cold.

Unsurprisingly, a moral intuition evolved that being better off than your peers was bad. After all, your being better off inevitably meant that someone else was worse off.

And it’s just that. An intuition. A heuristic. An instinct. It’s not a conscious, rational argument that we could have adjusted when we entered the world dominated by positive-sum effects some 250 years ago. And as many an instinct, it can misfire when faced with environment that does not resemble the one in which it has evolved.

That instinct can sometimes even look rational. Arguing that rich countries should get poorer for poor countries to get richer is not immediately obvious to be false.

But even when it’s completely irrational, as in arguing that Elon Musk becoming immortal would somehow make everyone else more mortal, the instinct still kicks in. Having more means others must have less. Period. No discussion allowed.

So yes, that’s why Germans were silently suffering in their overheated apartments with no air conditioning last week. The fact that they suffered meant that they were fighting climate change, doing repentance for the carbon footprint of their holiday in Turkey the other year.

That’s why people believe in degrowth. Getting poorer means that others will get richer…

But wait, you cry, isn’t degrowth not about the well-being seesaw, where one gets rich only at the expense of the others, but rather about everyone deliberately getting poorer to limit our strain on the environment?

But no. Look closely enough, and you’ll see the Malthusian instinct is still present, alive and kicking as always. You may point out that poor countries like India and China are burning the most coal as much as you want, but degrowthers will still make statements like: “Again, calls for degrowth are not directed at poor countries, but rich countries.“ Or here, arguing that rich nations should degrow to free up the ecological space for the poor nations: “The transformation needed in industrialized countries–if they are to reduce their emissions and environmental impacts fast enough to leave space for the Global South to administer its wellbeing, and for the world to head towards ecological balance—will also lead to reducing the size of Global North economies.“

And of course, that’s why the Christians love suffering so much. They are do-gooders, for Christ’s sake. Let them self-flagellate a bit and that will surely make everybody else better off.

As a bottom line, if you want to push something like the abundance agenda, you will have to fight not only selfish vested interests, but also the selfless, if misguided, Malthusian zero-sum instincts, emotional as they are and not responding well to rational arguments.

It has it all! Proto-scientific method and experimentation, as seen in the episode with the Koskimo shamans. Doubt and corruption… But what at first appears to be corruption may, in fact, be a more nuanced, albeit incorrect, interpretation of the world.

One is reminded of Paracelsus and his likes, who, before the invention of the modern scientific method, lived in a strange semi-magical world, yet still held ideas we cannot dismiss today, such as the discovery of zinc or the recognition of antisepsis at a time when wounds were often treated with cow dung. Or perhaps he reminds us of modern psychologists, who conduct research in a field where the ontology is not yet settled and everything seems blurry, as if immersed in an epistemic fog.

There is also going mad for epistemic reasons and dying of shame…

I am reproducing the relevant part of the essay as is:

We must consider at greater length another especially valuable document, which until now seems to have been valued solely for its linguistic interest. I refer to a fragment of the autobiography of a Kwakiutl Indian from the Vancouver region of Canada, obtained [at the turn of the century] by Franz Boas.

Quesalid (for this was the name he received when he became a sorcerer) did not believe in the power of the sorcerers — or, more accurately, shamans, since this is a better term for their specific type of activity in certain regions of the world. Driven by curiosity about their tricks and by the desire to expose them, he began to associate with the shamans until one of them offered to make him a member of their group. Quesalid did not wait to be asked twice, and his narrative recounts the details of his first lessons, a curious mixture of pantomime, prestidigitation, and empirical knowledge, including the art of simulating fainting and nervous fits, the learning of sacred songs, the technique for inducing vomiting, rather precise notions of auscultation and obstetrics, and the use of "dreamers" — that is, spies who listen to private conversations and secretly convey to the shaman bits of information concerning the origins and symptoms of the ills suffered by different people. Above all, he learned the ars magna of one of the shamanistic schools of the Northwest Coast: The shaman hides a little tuft of down in a corner of his mouth, and he throws it up, covered with blood, at the proper moment—after having bitten his tongue or made his gums bleed—and solemnly presents it to his patient and the onlookers as the pathological foreign body extracted as a result of his sucking and manipulations.

His worst suspicions confirmed, Quesalid wanted to continue his inquiry. But he was no longer free. His apprenticeship among the shamans began to be noised about, and one day he was summoned by the family of a sick person who had dreamed of Quesalid as his healer. This first treatment (for which he received no payment, any more than he did for those which followed, since he had not completed the required four years of apprenticeship) was an outstanding success. Although Quesalid came to be known from that moment on as a "great shaman," he did not lose his critical faculties. He interpreted his success in psychological terms — it was successful “because he [the sick person] believed strongly in his dream about me.” A more complex adventure made him, in his own words, "hesitant and thinking about many things." Here he encountered several varieties of a "false supernatural," and was led to conclude that some forms were less false than others — those, of course, in which he had a personal stake and whose system he was, at the same time, surreptitiously building up in his mind. A summary of the adventure follows.

While visiting the neighboring Koskimo Indians, Quesalid attends a curing ceremony of his illustrious colleagues of the other tribe. To his great astonishment he observes a difference in their technique. Instead of spitting out the illness in the form of a "bloody worm" (the concealed down), the Koskimo shamans merely spit a little saliva into their hands, and they dare to claim that this is "the sickness." What is the value of this method? What is the theory behind it? In order to find out "the strength of the shamans, whether it was real or whether they only pretended to be shamans" like his fellow tribesmen, Quesalid requests and obtains permission to try his method in an instance where the Koskimo method has failed. The sick woman then declares herself cured.

And here our hero vacillates for the first time. Though he had few illusions about his own technique, he has now found one which is more false, more mystifying, and more dishonest than his own. For he at least gives his clients something. He presents them with their sickness in a visible and tangible form, while his foreign colleagues show nothing at all and only claim to have captured the sickness. Moreover, Quesalid's method gets results, while the other is futile. Thus our hero grapples with a problem which perhaps has its parallel in the development of modern science. Two systems which we know to be inadequate present (with respect to each other) a differential validity, from both a logical and an empirical perspective. From which frame of reference shall we judge them? On the level of fact, where they merge, or on their own level, where they take on different values, both theoretically and empirically?

Meanwhile, the Koskimo shamans, "ashamed" and discredited before their tribesmen, are also plunged into doubt. Their colleague has produced, in the form of a material object, the illness which they had always considered as spiritual in nature and had thus never dreamed of rendering visible. They send Quesalid an emissary to invite him to a secret meeting in a cave. Quesalid goes and his foreign colleagues expound their system to him: "Every sickness is a man: boils and swellings, and itch and scabs, and pimples and coughs and consumption and scrofula; and also this, stricture of the bladder and stomach aches. ...As soon as we get the soul of the sickness which is a man, then dies the sickness which is a man. Its body just disappears in our insides.” If this theory is correct, what is there to show? And why, when Quesalid operates, does “the sickness stick to his hand"? But Quesalid takes refuge behind professional rules which forbid him to teach before completing four years of apprenticeship, and refuses to speak. He maintains his silence even when the Koskimo shamans send him their allegedly virgin daughters to try to seduce him and discover his secret.

Thereupon Quesalid returns to his village at Fort Rupert. He learns that the most reputed shaman of a neighboring clan, worried about Quesalid’s growing renown, has challenged all his colleagues, inviting them to compete with him in curing several patients. Quesalid comes to the contest and observes the cures of his elder. Like the Koskimo, this shaman does not show the illness. He simply incorporates an invisible object, “what he called the sickness” into his head-ring, made of bark, or into his bird-shaped ritual rattle. These objects can hang suspended in mid-air, owing to the power of the illness which “bites” the house-posts or the shaman’s hand. The usual drama unfolds. Quesalid is asked to intervene in cases judged hopeless by his predecessor, and he triumphs with his technique of the bloody worm.

Here we come to the truly pathetic part of the story. The old shaman, ashamed and despairing because of the ill-repute into which he has fallen and by the collapse of his therapeutic technique, sends his daughter to Quesalid to beg him for an interview. The latter finds his colleague sitting under a tree and the old shaman begins thus: “It won't be bad what we say to each other, friend, but only I wish you to try and save my life for me, so that I may not die of shame, for I am a plaything of our people on account of what you did last night. I pray you to have mercy and tell me what stuck on the palm of your hand last night. Was it the true sickness or was it only made up? For I beg you have mercy and tell me about the way you did it so that I can initiate you. Pity me, friend.”

Silent at first, Quesalid begins by calling for explanations about the feats of the head-ring and the rattle. His colleague shows him the nail hidden in the headring which he can press at right angles into the post, and the way in which he tucks the head of his rattle between his finger joints to make it look as if the bird were hanging by its beak from his hand. He himself probably does nothing but lie and fake, simulating shamanism for material gain, for he admits to being “covetous for the property of the sick men.” He knows that shamans cannot catch souls, “for... we all own a soul”; so he resorts to using tallow and pretends that “it is a soul... that white thing... sitting on my hand.” The daughter then adds her entreaties to those of her father: “Do have mercy that he may live.” But Quesalid remains silent. That very night, following this tragic conversation, the shaman disappears with his entire family, heartsick and fearful of the community, who think that he may be tempted to take revenge. Needless fears: He returned a year later, but both he and his daughter had gone mad. Three years later, he died.

And Quesalid, rich in secrets, pursued his career, exposing the impostors and full of contempt for the profession. “Only one shaman was seen by me, who sucked a sick man and I never found out whether he was a real shaman or only made up. Only for this reason I believe that he is a shaman; he does not allow those who are made well to pay him. I truly never once saw him laugh.” Thus his original attitude has changed considerably. The naive skepticism of the free thinker has given way to more moderate feelings. Real shamans do exist. And what about him? At the end of the narrative we cannot tell, but it is evident that he carries on his craft conscientiously, takes pride in his achievements, and warmly defends the technique of the bloody down against all rival schools. He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique which he had so disparaged at the beginning.

The man was overwhelmed by the city, but there were two things that particularly interested him.

One was the bearded woman he saw at a freak show that the anthropologist took him to.

The other was the stair carpet rods in the hotel.

Epistemic collapse does not have to be caused by moving from a simpler society to a more complex one.

It can also result from gradually increasing complexity of your native one. The complexity rises until the point where the subject can no longer make sense of the world. They may have seemed to be a reasonable person for a long time, but suddenly they started believing in chemtrails.

Very much like the tribesman from the first story, they can no longer comprehend the world around them. The cognitive apparatus is freewheeling, clutching at random facts, in this case innocuous condensation trails in the sky, and trying to transform them into a coherent narrative about the world.

Imagine a chimpanzee who somehow ends up in a big city. He finds a park and survives there for a couple of days. His mental model includes, among other things, people. Some of them are kind and feed him, while others have dogs and they are best avoided.

That seems important, but his mental model does not account for what truly matters: the municipal department of animal control.

He will eventually be caught and removed from the park because he’s considered a health threat. But it’s questionable whether he even has a concept of "being a threat," let alone that of a "health threat." Understanding the concept of "health threat" requires awareness of microorganisms, which the chimpanzee lacks.

What’s worse, whether he ends up in a zoo or in an industrial shredder is of utmost importance to him, but the reasons behind why his destiny takes one path or another are far beyond his comprehension.

It may be useful to sometimes think about what your equivalent of a bearded woman is, but it's not clear to me whether that’s a question you can ever truly answer.

Imagine living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in early 2000’s:

All marshrutka [mini taxi bus] drivers had to have a medical exam every day to make sure they were not drunk and did not have high blood pressure. If a driver did not display his health certificate, he risked losing his license. By the time Shevarnadze was in power there were hundreds, probably thousands , of marshrutkas ferrying people all over the capital city of Tbilisi. Shevernadze’s government was detail-oriented not only when it came to taxi drivers. It decided that all the stalls of petty street-side traders had to conform to a particular architectural design. Like marshrutka drivers, such traders had to renew their licenses twice a year. These regulations were only the tip of the iceberg. Gas stations, for example, had to be located at a specific distance from the street.

[…]

These regulations, and thousands like them, were never intended to be implemented. Nobody really expected marshrutka drivers to have a daily medical exam, and they didn’t. But by creating such a rule, the Georgian state immediately created a pretext for prosecuting the entire fleet of marshrutka drivers. To avoid this, the drivers had to pay bribes. So did the petty traders. So did the gas stations.

— Acemoglu & Robinson: The Narrow Corridor

One lesson, I guess, is that the tough approach, the ideology of "law and order," the belief that more numerous and stricter laws lead to a stronger rule of law, does not necessarily work. In fact, the opposite can be true. Laws that are too strict can make it impossible for citizens to comply, and so, willy-nilly, they end up bribing police officers and bureaucrats.

The professions of police officer or judge become attractive, even if the salaries are low. In Georgia, the position of a police officer was being sold, and new law enforcement officers were expected to provide their own uniforms and weapons at their own expense. Police officers couldn’t stop taking bribes because they simply couldn’t survive on their official salaries. Conversely, the flow of money from bribes through the state administration created a strong incentive to introduce even more strict laws, which in turn generated even greater bribes.

But that’s not the main point I wanted to make. What I’m really trying to emphasize is that the Georgian state in the 1990s and early 2000s was extremely ineffective at delivering services to its citizens, whether justice, defense, electricity, or basic everyday security. The situation was dire, even by the already low standards of Russia at the time. Here’s what Andrey Illarionov, a former advisor to Putin, had to say:

There’s no comparing it to Russia. [...] It was truly a country in a state of collapse. An economic, political, social, legal collapse. A country where power was wielded by bandits in the literal sense of the word. A common occurrence was that when, for example, some more or less successful businessmen arrived in Tbilisi, they’ve sent armed men to accompany him so that he could travel those 15 minutes between the airport and the city without being kidnapped and held for ransom. And when some kind of godfather or mafia boss arrived, they were welcomed by the Minister of the Interior.

Unsurprisingly, between 1991 and 1994, the Georgian economy contracted by 77%. The country's largest export was scrap metal.

Then, in 2003, the Rose Revolution took place, the first of the so-called "color revolutions", and Mikhail Saakashvili became president with an overwhelming 96.2% mandate to reform the country.

Saakashvili is a colorful character: former Georgian prime minister, leader of the Rose Revolution, and president during the brief war with Russia. After his presidency, he obtained Ukrainian citizenship and became the governor of the Odesa Oblast. He later accused Ukrainian President Poroshenko of corruption, was stripped of his citizenship, and became stateless. At one point, he was arrested on a rooftop in Kyiv while his supporters began building barricades. Eventually, under President Zelensky, he regained his Ukrainian citizenship. He later returned to Georgia, got arrested and now he’s reportedly dying in a prison hospital, possibly at Putin’s behest.

That being said, his minister of economy, the spiritual father of the Georgian reforms, a former Soviet biologist and Russian businessman Kakha Bendukidze is no less interesting.

Generally speaking, libertarians do not occur in the wild in Europe. However, there exists a rare and peculiar breed: the Eastern European libertarian. His distrust of government does not arise from deep philosophical conviction or even a particular love of liberty. It comes from firsthand experience with the (post-)communist state.

"Someone complimented me on quoting Hayek,” Bendukidze recalls, “and I replied that I hadn't quoted anyone. I had never read Hayek. I was quoting myself."

Bendukidze began his business career in the Soviet Union, earning his first million during the Gorbachev era. He later became the CEO of Uralmash, a heavy machinery manufacturing company based in Yekaterinburg.

“When you own a vodka business,” Bendukidze says, “protection racketeers will come and take the vodka. With heavy machinery, it gets more difficult.”

But what protection racketeers can’t do, the state can. When Putin came to power, the purge of the disloyal oligarchs began. Oligarch Boris Berezovsky, then already in exile, remarked: "Bendukidze was not among Putin's friends and understood sooner than others that everything would eventually be taken away from him... Bendukidze had far from exhausted his potential, but at that moment the Russian authorities did not need such talented people."

Bendukidze sold his shares in Uralmash and moved to his native Georgia. And soon enough he joined Saakashvili in his attempt to reform the Georgian state.

They did a host of reforms, rising the economic growth to 7% yearly and Georgia, that was still in 100th place in the Ease of Doing Business index in 2006, soared up sharply and by the end of Saakashvili's reign it was already in eighth place, among the most developed countries.

But that’s a story for another day. For the purposes of this article, the most interesting reform is the reform of the police:

The most visible, tangible, and celebrated reform was the abolishment of the Soviet-style road police, the GAI (State Automobile Inspection). Georgia’s road police had nothing to do with law enforcement and created no public good; its sole purpose was to extract bribes. To deal with the problem, in 2005 we fired all of the traffic police in Georgia, cutting 30,000 police from the payroll overnight. Following this extraordinary step, Georgia had no traffic police for some time. The fact that traffic did not become less orderly or unsafe was evidence that the system had been designed not for safety but rather to extort bribes from motorists.

(By the way, the quote comes from The Great Rebirth: Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism. If you want to know more about post-communist reforms in the Eastern Europe, straight from the horse’s mouth, that is, from the very people who implemented the reforms, then that’s the book for you.)

Very few of the dismissed traffic police were taken back into the service. Salaries of the new officers were raised by a factor of 15–40. It was essential for the new police to gain the trust and confidence of citizens. To ensure that they do so, every year they go through training and selection, after which the least efficient are dismissed and new officers hired.

To boost the public image of the police, new, transparent, headquarters were built. People in discos danced to the new police anthem.

Soon after the mass firing of the Gaishniks, Georgia had a new and modernized police institution. The share of the Georgian people that had confidence in the police rose from 5 percent in 2004 to an astonishing 87 percent in 2012, and Tbilisi became one of the safest cities in Europe.

Tyler Cowen interviews Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and co-founder of the United States Digital Service (check her substack), a person who has tried to reform the US civil service from inside, and asks:

[Do] we need something like DOGE? I’ve lived near DC for about 40 years of my life. I haven’t seen anyone succeed with regulatory reforms. You can abolish an agency, but to really reform the process hasn’t worked. Maybe the best iteration we can get is to break a bunch of things now. That will be painful, people will hate it, but you have a chance in the next administration to put some of them back together again.

Pahlka sympathizes, but regrets that the disruption did not happen in a more orderly way. Cowen suggests it could have been done gradually:

Just take government agencies and sidestep them. Create a new NIH, call it something else. […] In the meantime, we cut the budget of the current NIH, say, in half. […] Why not just keep on doing that? Create new things and destroy parts of old ones.

Pahlka is skeptical:

That does happen. That’s what we call the bureaucratic rigidity cycle. We haven’t, I think, been disciplined enough about dismantling the old when we create the new. I experienced that myself helping start USDS, the United States Digital Service.

It’s creating something new, but it still […]  just had far less power than the existing infrastructures, CIOs of agencies, the procurement frameworks. That stuff has a life of its own and a power of its own. If you are creating these skunk works to disrupt the old stuff, it has to actually disrupt the old stuff. You can’t just add.

Compare that with what Mart Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia from the time of the post-soviet reforms, has to say:

Our insight was simple: It is not possible to teach an old dog new tricks. Old communist apparatchiki had based their entire careers on lies and deceit. It was unrealistic to expect them to change. The state apparatus inherited from the Soviet Union was unsuitable for implementing appropriate policies. Its preferred mode of command was phone calls from superiors; written law meant little and ethics nothing. Therefore, it was important to do away with the old attitudes and relations, as radically as possible. The ties with the Soviet past had to be cut for good. The more radical the change and the more people and politicians of the previous generation are replaced in the governing bodies, the more credible the reform and the greater the chances of success. My party won the election campaign in 1992 with the slogan “Clear the place!”

And of course, this is the same as Bendukidze’s “destructive destruction,“ a wordplay on Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction”.

The crux of the discussion is whether reforms should be done gradually, or in one sweeping go.

Here’s Estonia’s Mart Laar again:

With regard to the question of whether transition economies should opt for a “gradual” approach or “shock therapy,” countries that have attempted to carry out reforms slowly in stages have faced serious difficulties. The social price of the reforms has been as high as or even higher than in countries in which decisive action was taken, and at some point it has nevertheless been necessary to adopt policies containing elements of shock therapy.

Gradual reforms faced two major challenges:

First, when the consequences of the reforms began to affect people and the standard of living declined, an electoral backlash was almost inevitable. If the reforms were slow, they would remained unfinished by the time the new government was elected, which would likely stall or even revers them.

Second, the communist apparatchiks had their own agency. If reforms dragged on, they would have time to regroup, ally with organized crime, and recapture the institutions.

This is exactly what happened in Bulgaria, where the communists won the first election after the revolution:

In addition to the Communist Party retaining its power, the meandering path to reforms created a second feature of transition in Bulgaria: The former secret police, the best-organized institution under socialism, took control of parts of the economy, in particular the banking sector and the exporting business.

[…]

The takeover of the major exporting companies by members of the former secret police created a third feature of Bulgaria’s transition: the emergence of organized crime and its preeminence throughout the transition period. Members of organized crime started bloody gang wars over the contraband channels for selling drugs and weapons abroad, as well as for dominance over the energy sector. That dominance required the cooperation of the police and customs officials, which they secured through bribes or threats.

The struggle for dominance went all the way up to the former communist leadership and the leadership of the secret service. In one fight over lucrative Russian energy contracts, in October 1996, the last communist prime minister, Andrei Lukanov, was assassinated. […] Between 1996 and 2008, some 300 members of the Bulgarian mafia, including some political figures, were assassinated by rival factions.

At the time, it wasn’t clear whether gradual or abrupt reform was the better approach. Even reasonable experts like Joseph Stiglitz advocated for a slow transition, fearing an anti-democratic backlash.

Only in hindsight do we now know that countries opting for shock therapy, such as Poland and Estonia, ended up much better off than those that chose a gradual approach, like Bulgaria and Ukraine:

Anyway, back to the original topic, there are strong reasons to doubt that the lessons from the rapid and harsh reforms in Eastern Europe are applicable to the US, or indeed to any other developed country or organization such as the EU.

First, the institutions in post-communist countries were already dysfunctional, and in some cases, provided little to no value. Therefore, dismantling them was not particularly painful.

Here’s Saakashvili’s argument for closing down government agencies:

Let's say we abolished the sanitary inspection. Nobody goes and checks if there are cockroaches in the restaurant kitchen... But will there be fewer cockroaches in the kitchen just because the sanitary inspection exists? We all know that the sanitary inspection goes there only to take bribes. And the owner, instead of spending money on improving the restaurant, on cleaning the kitchen — including from cockroaches — spends it on other cockroaches from the sanitary inspection. [The same applies to the fire inspection.] It would be good, of course, if we were such a disciplined supernation that the fire inspection would actually check fire safety. [But we are not.]

However, if an institution like sanitary inspection is functioning properly, shutting it down will cause real harm, leading to more infections and food poisonings. Abolishing fire inspection would result in more fires. This argument is even stronger for vital services such as healthcare, social security, or tax collection.

Second, the reformers in Eastern Europe were not acting blindly. They had a clear goal, an endpoint they wanted to reach: Namely, a state that would function much like the existing Western democracies.

Not so today. The civil service in western countries clearly struggles to keep up with the ever more complex and dynamic world. (If you want to understand the nitty-gritty details of that struggle read the excellent Pahlka’s book on the topic.) It clearly needs a reform, but nobody knows what kind of reform would work. Unlike in post-Soviet states in 1990’s, there’s no one to copy, no one to get guidance from. We are in experimentation mode.

So, short of disbanding institutions wholesale without a clear plan, merely hoping they’ll improve when rebuilt, what else can be done?

The joint op-ed by Macron & Merz in Le Figaro (in French) is therefore worth checking. The stuff about Ukraine and trade policy will no doubt be commented upon ad nauseam elsewhere, so let’s look at more low-profile matters:

To reduce energy costs and ensure security of supply, France and Germany will implement a realignment of their energy policies, based on climate neutrality, competitiveness, and sovereignty. This includes applying the principle of technological neutrality, ensuring non-discriminatory treatment of all low-carbon energies within the European Union.

Realignment in this context hopefully means that Germany will stop opposing nuclear power on the EU level.

Here’s an analysis from the Anthropocene Institute:

Merz aligned his position with France’s, ending years of fierce and constant opposition that had refused funding to nuclear investments across the EU and treated nuclear power, in some ways, as worse than coal.

The move came in the context of a broader effort to revitalize the Paris-Berlin strategic partnership, where German sniping against nuclear projects had been a constant irritant. The shift has barely gotten noticed in the German press, because it isn’t likely to change policy within the country. Nuclear restarts remain a hot-button issue there, with not only the Greens but the Social Democrats adamantly opposed to restarting the country’s nuclear fleet. […]

But in the EU more broadly, dropping the German government’s constant obstructionism to approving nuclear projects […] could nudge dozens of plants toward viability. Projects in France, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania will be much easier to bring to fruition if they don’t have to fight German nay-saying at every turn.

[…]

Just this year, three of the four countries that had been blocking nuclear investments at a Europe-wide level have changed their tune: first Belgium, then Denmark and now Germany have joined the French-led pro-nuclear block. In March, Italy reversed a Chernobyl-era nuclear moratorium and is now actively looking to expand its nuclear fleet. Bizarrely, it’s the places that ought to have gotten the message loudest that have been slowest to get the hint: holding out for the already retro-futuristic vision of a non-nuclear renewable grid, Spain and Portugal look increasingly isolated in Europe. Austria is their one remaining ally.

Macron and Merz write:

We need public and private investment, particularly in infrastructure. Establishing a genuine Capital Markets Union to channel our savings to European companies supporting the green and digital transitions and defense.

Luis Garicano describes the problem in greater detail:

While European households save around 15% of their income (nearly double the 8% rate in the US), about €11 trillion—over one third of EU household savings—sits in bank deposits. At the same time, European tech startups regularly fly to Silicon Valley seeking the private equity that should, in theory, be available at home. If, instead, a Spanish start-up wants money from German pension funds and Dutch family offices, it must comply with three national rule-books. Between 2008 and 2021 almost 30 % of European “unicorns” moved their headquarters abroad (Draghi, 2024).

But then he’s not very sanguine about the current EU efforts in the area:

The Commission's newly released Savings and Investments Union proposal (March 2025) continues this pattern of slow, incremental change. It makes proposals such as EU “Savings and Investment Accounts” with possible tax relief, financial-literacy drives, automatic pension enrolment, simpler listings, more securitisation, less “gold-plating” (extra national rules added to EU directives) and easier withholding-tax refunds. It also proposes to increase the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) powers, yet still leaves twenty-seven supervisors in place–contrary to the suggestion in Mario Draghi’s report that a single EU regulator was needed.

Anyway, back to Macron & Merz:

We also urgently need to reduce the administrative burdens in the EU, which are stifling growth, by reviewing all EU rules, removing constraints while maintaining our ambitions. […] We call for further simplification of EU rules.

A laudable goal, but I would like to understand the details. The general institutional dynamic is that once rules are in place and people are invested in them (having, say, formed a regulatory agency, or, in EU’s case 27 regulatory agencies) they will fight tooth and nail to keep them in place.

So an European DOGE? But this time a good one, fixing stuff instead of breaking it? Creative destruction by fiat? And how would that work?

We are also keen to use this opportunity to coordinate our national economic and social reform programmes, in particular on labour and taxation. We will create a platform for dialogue between the French and German social partners, as well as between economic experts.

Frankly, I have no idea what that means, it may be just hot air, but it’s intriguing to think about how a converged labour policy — given that in France unions are mostly in opposition to the government, but in Germany they kind of incorporated into it — would look like.

The Birth of Estonian E-government

Estonia thanks the old communist bureacrats in the ‘90s for its now world famous e-government. It’s worth noting that all post-communist countries were facing the same problem, but only Estonia (ok, maybe also Georgia under Mikhail Saakashvili) used the problem to their advantage:

But while the economic situation was improving, many Estonian state institutions and infrastructure were still in disrepair and there was a constant danger of backsliding. One of the greatest risks came from inside the bureaucracy which was still replete with Soviet-era holdovers. […] Political leaders desperately needed a way to both defeat corruption and increase state capacity, each of which would be a difficult task independently. Thankfully, the youth of Laar’s cabinet and the Estonian political elite worked in the country’s favor as political leaders embraced the potential of new technologies to solve the country’s most pressing problems. After all, as former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is fond of saying, “you can’t bribe a computer.”

--- Joel Burke: Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution

EU and CPTPP

We all know the trick when the politicians implement some unpopular, but necessary measure and then blame IMF for making them do it. The same, to some extent, also happens with national governments and the EU.

Now, the EU itself needs some reforms badly, namely, as Draghi report suggests, relaxing the regulation, but there seems no political will to do that. At least, last time I’ve checked I have still seen those annoying “accept cookies” banners alive and kicking.

So why not use the political momentum created by American tariffs and an equivalent of the IMF trick to address the issue?

Politico comments on the idea of EU joining CPTPP that has been voiced lately:

It’s a plan leaders in Brussels and the 12-nation Indo-Pacific club have been turning over in their minds since Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs. As Trump’s trade war smashes the economic order globalization built into little bits: Why not band together?

But as LTLDR News report:

There are still quite a few obstacles in the way. Firstly, the EU generally struggles to sign free trade deals at the moment. The EU’s strict data protection laws, for instance, which are historically not compromised on in trade agreements, contrast with the CPTPP’s emphasis on freer data flow.

Can we use the IMF derangement syndrome for our good? You know: “Nobody wanted to cut those regulations, but CPTPP made us do it.” Bad, bad CPTPP!

Habemus papam

I know that Pope is not an exclusively European matter. However, he’s also a leader of the smallest European country. So, yes, it’s good to know we have at least one head of state who knows what the Bayes theorem is.

Also, when addressing cardinals after the election, the new Pope said:

“Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.”

Feels a bit anodyne to me.

I am no catholic, but I would expect the emergence of technology capable of thinking would give Catholics a pause: When exactly does a machine qualify to have a soul? Having been trained on the Internet, with all its porn and everything, is the AI somehow, by contagion, burdened by the original sin? Did Jesus sacrifice himself also for the AIs? Should we expect them to know right from wrong? Will Sidney go to hell?

So many questions! But I guess even Pope can’t stray too far away from the Overton window.

Also check the evergreen post by Bruce Schneier on the security of the papal election:

The cardinals are in “choir dress” during the voting, which has translucent lace sleeves under a short red cape, making sleight-of-hand tricks [when casting votes] much harder.

Many more goodies in the article.

Problems with state capacity in Britain

It’s no secret that Britain has problems with state capacity, but wow, it looks worse than I though.

Archie Hall writes:

An old lady, Daphne, had fallen on the street, knocked her head, and was bleeding. I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, but I photographed an especially shocking passage in the print copy I was reading at the time.