Michael Nielsen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I worry that he too quickly assumes collective-action problems are solved, which is close to your answer. He thinks the League of Nations can be effective for a long period of time, which I suspect was not really contingently possible. And he has this Hegelian sense. What Hegel would call a national spirit, for him is a civilizational or certain stage of man’s spirit that so shapes how people think. I hang out with a lot of economists. I think that’s much stronger than the economists believe — your overall view of the world and what’s important — but I don’t think it’s nearly as strong as Stapledon believed. The way in which collective spirit rules millions, billions, or trillions of beings — I feel he’s overestimating the efficacy of that. The comment about the League of Nations is really interesting. There’s this spirit at the time — lots of people wanted this idea to work. Lots of his friends would have wanted it. I think it’s a shallow kind of a mistake that he made there. But your comment about collective-action problems seems much more to the heart of it. I think he didn’t really believe in them, or actually understand just how difficult they are to solve, how difficult it is to supply public goods and these kinds of things. He always does away with it, narratively, and it’s assumed away without really a mechanism being given. He assumes a lot away in those books, but when the problems are interesting, he usually doesn’t. That problem is interesting, and he still assumes it away. I am not very sympathetic to that at all. I’m not sure how big a mistake League of Nations was. Clearly, it didn’t work, and I just criticized him for it. But if you think about 1815 up through the First World War — almost a century — you have an unprecedented degree of peace in much, not all of Europe, and everyone has just lived through that. They maybe thought that was not possible. Maybe that is itself still a bit of a mystery. Then there’s World War I, and you feel you can get back to some version of what you had. The League of Nations appears to be the closest path to doing that. It might have been more plausible at the time.…

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