By Ajay Shah, on March 23rd, 2011
Why do some places achieve great feats of architecture, while others routinely opt for merely functional structures? The economist
in me is instinctively unsatisfied at a claim that America lacks great architecture because they have poor taste. Taste-based explanations are a cop-out. Instead, how about the following five angles:
- Surplus
- To go beyond merely functional structures requires resources to spare. At low levels of income, people are likely to merely try to get some land and brick and stone together. In these things, we have nonlinear Engel curves. Pratapgarh looks picayune because Shivaji lacked surplus.
- The desire to make a statement and to impress
- Ozymandius wanted to make a point: He wanted ye Mighty to look at his works and despair. I have often felt this was one of the motivations for the structures on Raisina Hill or the Taj Mahal.
- Arms races
- There may also be an element of an arms race in these things. Perhaps the chaps who built the Qutub Minar (1193-1368) in Delhi set off an arms race, where each new potentate who came along was keen to outdo the achievement of the predecessor. I used to think that the Taj Mahal (1632-1648) was so perfect, that it could not be matched, and thus it put an end to
this arms race. But then I saw the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore (1671-1673), and I had to revise my opinion. We are used to
thinking of Aurangzeb as a bit of an ayatollah, but in the Badshahi Mosque, there is genuine beauty, and more than a hint of rivalry with the Taj Mahal. And that same arms race may have mattered all the way into the 20th century: perhaps if Delhi/Agra/Lahore had not been strewn with majestic structures, the British would have approached Raisina Hill (1912-1931) differently.
In similar fashion, perhaps the great cathedral building of the European continent had an element of an arms race, where each team was keen to outdo all that had come before.
As in biology, it is hard to predict where an arms race will erupt, but one can argue that if and when some quantum fluctuations
set off an arms race, then it can lead to great flourishes of architecture.
- Transparency
- You only need to impress someone when there is asymmetric information, where that someone does not know how great you are. Shah Jahan needed to build big because the targets of his attention did not know the GDP of his dominion and his tax/GDP ratio. In this age of Forbes league tables, Mukesh Ambani does not need to build a fabulous structure for you to know
he’s the richest guy in India. A merely functional house suffices; a great feat of architecture is not undertaken.
- Accountability
- The incremental expense of going from a merely functional structure to a great feat of architecture is generally hard to justify. Hence, one might expect to see more interesting architecture from autocratic places+periods, where decision makers wield discretionary power with weak checks and balances.
From this point of view, let’s think about architecture in India and China and the outlook for this in the coming decade. China is
undertaking great feats of architecture today. What explains this, and how might things shape up?
- Surplus.
- China’s GDP has grown fabulously and has generated this surplus. Perhaps India’s new buildings will match up to China’s within 10-15 years, when India’s GDP matches the present Chinese GDP. But the other four elements of the reasoning go against
such a prognosis.
- The desire to make a statement and to impress.
- The lack of legitimacy of the Chinese State implies that there is a greater desire to impress.
- Arms races.
- Has there been a competitive element in China’s construction, where each person running a project is out to prove he’s better than those that came before? And in India, perhaps one or more powerful people could set off an arms race. Gujarat’s GIFT project could represent a first salvo of that.
- Transparency.
- The greater transparency in India reduces the urge for architecture.
- Accountability.
- The greater accountability in India reduces the outlook for great feats.
By Russ Nelson, on January 22nd, 2010
Well, I listened to Larry talking about how Obama failed to change anything. And I heard about Larry’s plan to change this: Citizen Funded Elections. It’s astounding how someone so smart can miss the mark by so much. The problem is not that special interests are buying congressmen. The problem is that congressmen have power to sell to them. As long as they have the power, they will be able to demand a price.
So, first things first: If we want to be able to trust Congress again, first we have to take away their power. How do we do that? Well, for one, people could vote Libertarian, but I don’t think that’s likely. More likely would be to demand that state legislators take back the power that rightfully belongs to them, according to the design of our country.
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By Thersites, on January 8th, 2010
As mentioned in my previous post, most businessmen will do anything they can to preserve their position. This extends to people in all realms. Whether manufacturers, farmers, financiers, academics or politicians, those who wish to preserve their power will promote as many measures as necessary to do so. In the case of those in the latter two fields, they impose the same anti-competitive barriers as those in the former ones. For the statists of the academy and the capitol, they put up barriers to entry by stifling debate in marginalizing anti-statists such as the Tea Partiers, imposing punitive tariffs in engaging in ad hominem attacks against opponents and peddling their products in the marketplace of ideas by sophistry, obfuscation and at times fraud.
More generally, given that in most cases one need be accepted by the elite in order to enter academia, the political realm and even many industries, this creates another superficial barrier to entry. This is well-depicted when one considers that while the Austrians seem to be the most accurate economists, most all professors of the subject are evidently blacklisted from the most prestigious institutions, and in the fact that there are so few Ron Paul’s in Congress.
Those wedded to the state – be it the politicians or their propaganda arms in academia and the MSM further cement their power by creating a permanent underclass via their policies. This would explain why the most liberal urban areas are afflicted with the most widespread poverty, crime and education problems. It is the policies of the statists that make these areas fertile for these conditions, but the people, imbued with the notion that the state is there to help them with their plight given its coddling from day one remain even more wedded to the paternal politicians the more desperate their situation. The politicians throw their impoverished constituents crumbs, but at some point the pols will run out of crumbs when they plunder those who produce them to a large enough degree.
The slums of America reflect the ultimate end of statist policies, and the reason is as follows. Statists remove the incentives to produce by encouraging failure, extending largess and attacking mutually beneficial exchange in free commerce. The economic and political environment of urban America destroys the values that led to the creation of wealth squandered on the welfare state in the first place.
Ultimately, my sense is that those in power today, radical Cloward-Piven and Alinsky-ites that they are are not so much concerned with developing a socialist Utopia. Contrary to this, I think they are using the socialists in academia, and the elites, former students brainwashed by academia, CNN and the New York Times as useful idiots. They have institutionalized their progressive ideas over the last hundred years so that those with the most influence in society know of nothing else and more disastrously lend credence to their policies.
They are at peace with their yielding a hellish country like the ones incubated historically by leftists replete with widespread poverty, chaos and violence to reach their goal. The goal of this administration and most all in government is power. They will usurp our freedoms stealthily or outright in order to preserve and enlarge it. Most evil in my view is the man bankrolling the whole operation, George Soros, who will push the country to the brink with his puppet politicians running the show, for his own profit.
In sum, I urge you to understand that ideology is a mere means to an end – secondary to all those who use the state as an instrument, be it the One-Worlders, Greens or Marxists. Do not be fooled, their concern rests with one thing and one thing alone: power. With every state encroachment, their power increases whilst individual liberty is extinguished.
By Winton Bates, on August 7th, 2009
One of my reasons for reading Tony Abbott’s recent book, “Battlelines”, was to remind myself why I am not a conservative. The more serious reason was to find our how a politician who proudly wears the conservative label would attempt to justify proposing an amendment to the Australian constitution that would remove current restrictions on the policy areas in which the federal government has power to make laws.
In writing this book Tony Abbott, a former minister in the Howard Government who is now on the opposition front bench in the federal parliament, seems to have taken on the role of defining where the battlelines should be drawn in the approach to the next election.
One of the things Abbott is clearly trying to do in this book is to identify enduring values that will continue to bind the Liberal Party together. In the process he does a reasonably good job of minimizing the differences between Hayekian liberals and Burkean conservatives. At one point he writes: “Following Adam Smith, Liberals tend to think that government is necessary to keep the peace but otherwise should let people make mutually beneficial arrangements with each other” (p 82). If I believed that was a statement of conservative philosophy, I would not mind being called a conservative. In other places in the book, however, Abbott displays the contempt for personal freedom that is associated with traditional conservative values. For example: “The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good” (p 97).
Having now reminded myself why I am not a conservative, let me turn to Abbott’s views on federalism. The essence of his argument is as follows:
- When nothing else seems to solve problems, voters always expect the central government to ‘do something’.
- After more than 50 years of increasing federal government involvement in matters that were formerly the exclusive responsibility of the states, the federation has become dysfunctional. “There are few problems in contemporary Australia that a dysfunctional federation doesn’t make worse”.
- Current attempts to end the “blame game” between different levels of government are not going to work. Someone has to have the legal power to take responsibility.
- The only credible way to fix the problem is to give the central government the legal power to call the shots i.e. to over-ride the states.
- The argument that the states form a bulwark against the potential tyranny of the national government is “far-fetched”. Australia has states because this was the price of becoming a nation, not because the fathers of federation thought that an intermediate level of government was necessary to avoid tyranny.
I agree, more or less, with the first three points, but disagree with the last two. What reason do we have for thinking that a government attempting to run schools and hospitals out of Canberra would do a better job than one trying to run them from some office in a state capital? Absolutely none! And I think that Tony Abbott agrees with me. What he has in mind is that if the federal government was able to over-ride the states on health and education the most likely result would be for public hospital and school services to be “provided on a contestable basis by a range of independent and autonomous organisations as well as by state-government instrumentalities” (p 129). That sounds to me like a move in the right direction, but we can’t be sure that some control freak in charge of the central government would not attempt to intervene more directly in the management of hospitals and schools if he/she had the power to do so.
As I see it, the main problem of the federation arise from the stupidity of the central government in its choice of forms of intervention. The basic problem in both hospitals and schools prior to federal intervention was that people were unhappy with the services that state governments were providing from tax revenues. Instead of giving state governments more money to waste, the central government should have given people back some of the money they had paid in taxes so that they could purchase alternative services.
The central government does not need additional power in order to achieve contestable service provision. It just needs to stop propping up inefficient state bureaucracies and give power back to the people.
In concluding I would like to commend Tony Abbott for presenting his views in a forthright manner. It is nice to be able to disagree with quite a lot of the things he has written and yet still feel that, as politicians go, Tony Abbott is not a bad bloke.
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