James Dale Davidson Quotes

“The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.”

“A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation. If they had insurance, or sufficient savings to self-insure their experiments, such strong social taboos would not be needed to help ensure survival.”

“As the bandwidth revolution unfolds, it will draw people more and more into the borderless virtual world of online communities and cybercommerce, a world with enough graphic density to become the “metaverse,” the kind of alternative, cyberspace reality imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson.

Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a virtual community with its own laws, princes, and villains. As ever more economic activity is drawn into cyberspace, the value of the state’s monopoly power within borders will shrink, giving states a growing incentive to franchise and fragment their sovereignty. Just”

“Because a hunter's labor did not augment the food supply but could only reduce it, one who heroically labored overtime to kill more animals or pick more fruit than could be eaten before it spoiled contributed nothing to prosperity.

To the contrary, overkill reduced the prospects of finding food in the future, and thus had a detrimental impact on the well-being of the group.”

“Beginning about ten thousand years ago, cities began to emerge. Although tiny by today's standards, they were the centers of the first “civilizations,” a word derived from civitas, which means “citizenship” or “inhabitants of a city” in Latin.

Because farming created assets to plunder and to protect, it also created a requirement for inventory accounting.”

“Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.”

“Decision-making becomes more difficult as numbers rise, because incentive traps proliferate. You need only think how hard it is to get a dozen people organized to go out to dinner.

Imagine how hopeless would have been the task of organizing hundreds or thousands of persons to traipse around on a moveable feast. Lacking any sustained and separate political organization or bureaucracy required by specialization for war, hunting-and-gathering bands had to depend on persuasion and consensus—principles that work best among small groups with relatively easygoing attitudes.”

“Efficiency will become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. This means that provinces and even cities that can effectively uphold property rights and provide for the administration of justice, while consuming few resources, will be viable sovereignties in the Information Age, as they generally have not been during the last five centuries.”

“Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.9 This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency.”

“Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded.”

“Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.”

“Few are inclined to imagine that apparently minor changes in climate or technology or some other variable can somehow be responsible for severing connections to the world of their fathers. The Romans were reluctant to acknowledge the changes unfolding around them. So are we.”

“Five hundred generations ago, the first phase change in the organization of human society began. Our ancestors in several regions reluctantly picked up crude implements, sharpened stakes and makeshift hoes, and went to work.

As they sowed the first crops, they also laid a new foundation for power in the world. The Agricultural Revolution was the first great economic and social revolution. It started with the expulsion from Eden and moved so slowly that farming had not completely displaced hunting and gathering in all suitable areas of the globe when the twentieth century opened.

Experts believe that even in the Near East, where farming first emerged, it was introduced in “a long incremental process” that “may have taken five thousand years or more.”

“For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity.”

“From the vantage point of the Information Society, the spectacle of soldiers in the modern period traveling halfway around the world to entertain death out of loyalty to the nation-state will come to be seen as grotesque and silly.

It will seem not far different from some of the extraordinary and exaggerated rites of chivalry, like walking about in leg irons, which otherwise sensible people took pride in doing during the feudal period.”

“Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the easy that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.”

“If you see a flash of lightning far away, you can forecast with a high degree of confidence that a thunderclap is due. Forecasting the consequences of megapolitical transitions involves much longer time frames, and less certain connections, but it is a similar kind of exercise.”

“In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.”

“In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.”

“In the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence.”

“In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair.

In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.”

“Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.”

“Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.”

“Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology.

Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000.

The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.”

“Lent survives as a much moderated version of this self-imposed discomfort.”

“Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.”

“On the dimension of technology, the conflict has two poles: AI and crypto. Artificial Intelligence holds out the prospect of finally solving what economists call the “calculation problem”: AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy.

It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.”

“Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.”

“Part of the reason is that the normal balance of nature tends to make it beneficial for microbes to infect but not destroy host populations. Virulent infections that kill their hosts too readily tend to eradicate themselves in the process.

The survival of microparasites depends upon their not being too rapidly or uniformly fatal to the hosts they invade.”

“Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained. The cost of garrisoning the empire’s far-flung borders exceeded the economic advantages that an ancient agricultural economy could support.

The burden of taxation and regulation required to finance the military effort rose to exceed the carrying capacity of the economy. Corruption became endemic.”