Large countries and bad government

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F.H. Buckley writes,

We’re overly big, one of the biggest countries in the world. Smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

It sounds like I should read his new book, American Secession.

I originally wrote this post before his article appeared. I started with a list of the countries with at least 100 million in population.

1 China 1,384,689,024
2 India 1,296,834,048
3 United States 329,256,480
4 Indonesia 262,787,408
5 Brazil 208,846,896
6 Pakistan 207,862,512
7 Nigeria 203,452,512
8 Bangladesh 159,453,008
9 Russia 142,122,784
10 Japan 126,168,160
11 Mexico 125,959,208
12 Ethiopia 108,386,392
13 Philippines 105,893,384

Note that the governments of all of them, with the exception of the U.S. and Japan, are either very authoritarian, incompetent, or both.

I’ve made this point before in different ways. But the U.S. is not comparable to Denmark or Singapore. The peer group for the U.S. is the countries on the list above. And from that perspective, we should really be grateful for what we have.

Scale is seriously under-rated as a challenge in human society.

23 thoughts on “Large countries and bad government”

  1. Completely agree. I always thought comparing countries with a population less than NYC and the US was unfair. They are different types of entities. When claiming for example, “best country to live”, comparisons should be along peer groups.

  2. Those countries have large populations because they failed to develop as fast as Europe and didn’t have the demographic transition until recently if at all. If Europe didn’t have a collapse in fertility large European countries would be at the bottom of this list. Why would having an extra 25 million Germans seriously worsen German governance?

      • Agreed. The EU is very similar to Switzerland with its three nationalities/languages and two religions. You could call it the United Nations of Europe (UNE) and it would still be less ethno-linguistically diverse than India and English is the de facto lingua franca in both regions.

        With its brief flirtation with Empire building after its capture of Spanish colonies, the U.S. is technically a global multi-national country but most would not consider Puerto Rico and the Philippines economically significant and borderline “American” but few would consider Hawaii foreign. Come to think of it, Utah is about as culturally distinct in the U.S. as Quebec is in Canada.

        I think size is beneficial to orderly meritocracies. Germany’s size is an advantage over the Netherlands (or Australia vs New Zealand).

        • Utah is not as as culturally distinct in the US a Quebec is to Canada. Do they speak a different language in Utah? Give me a break. If the EU was considered a country on list, which is a bit of a reach but not crazy, it would be a bit worse than the US in governance but better than the others. Not sure it would change the general theory.

          • No they do not speak a different language in Utah. Do Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims speak a different language? What about Iraqi Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds? What is the difference between Urdu and Hindi? There are many dimensions to nationality.

    • I just finished browsing through _the shortest history of Germany_ by Hawes, a popular work. The author asserted that it was Prussia and East Elbia that provided much of the electoral support for Hitler. Hitler, the Austrian, got the votes of East Elbia, not the Catholic voters of Bavaria.

      When you think of Germany do you think of a Rhinelander like Konrad Adenauer or do you think of a Prussian like Heinz Guderian?

      The issue is not just adding more people–it’s that when a country adds a marginal increment, the marginal increment is often on the geographical margins and non-typical. When the country adds territory at the margins it becomes more internally dissimilar and harder to hold it together without patronage.

      For example it was hard to keep Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy after 1848–my crude understanding is that the Hungarian landed farming interests were a good example of a rent-seeking group, constantly extracting a little something extra from the center.

      Why on earth would it matter whether or not Bosnia is added to the old Habsburg Monarchy after 1878? It’s not like adding a few Bosnians to the empire could ever make any sort of actual difference.

      Would the US be different if you added Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Cuba as the 51st, 52d, and 53d states? It’s only an extra 25 million people, or less than 10% of the current 328 million.

      I hope I don’t come across as merely whimsical or argumentative.

      Most of the big countries in the Western Hemisphere are melting pots in the way that the Old World countries are not. Big countries not in North or South America look more like empires in some sense–“A sovereignty without a polity.”

      The EU might be conceived as a sort of Carolingian Empire reborn.

      http://www.isegoria.net/2016/07/imperial-overstretch/

  3. About ten years ago (maybe 15?) a book came out called _Big African States_, an edited volume. It noted that the 6 biggest African states did not distinguish themselves in their governance, and some were total basketcases, including Sudan (which had not yet formally split in two).

    If I recall correctly, the six listed were

    Nigeria
    Ethiopia (now more populous than Egypt)
    Egypt
    DR Congo, previously Zaire
    Sudan
    Angola (which I don’t think of as especially big, except geographically)
    maybe South Africa was included. Anyway, check the book.

    Based on everything I know, the African countries often spoken of as much better than average are Botswana, Senegal, and Mauritius. All of those are small. Even Ghana, which has bounced back from mismanagement, is not all that large.

    Rwanda (also small) has always been very closely administered by its rulers. I just saw this morning in a NYTimes educational travel for middle-high school students that Rwanda is now a destination. This should not be a huge surprise in the sense that it recovered from the 1994 genocide which was a punctuated event.

    having written the above, here is the citation.

    http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/big-african-states/

    • I do wish we had an edit button. Let me attempt greater clarity.

      Here’s a restatement of my previous point:

      The largest African countries have a governance record that is at best indistingushed or mediocre. but is usally very bad. Most of the largest African countries have horrible records of governance.

      Omit Egypt as in the Arab Middle East zone, and consider six big countries.

      Nigeria
      Ethiopia
      DR Congo
      South Africa
      Sudan
      Angola

      Only South Africa would get a “C” letter grade if it were a student taking the course for a grade. The C may or may be overly lenient in grading. But South Africa is at the head of the classroom in the “Big African Countries” class.

      = – = – = – = –

      Additional point: Among the smallest countries are those with good records and those with very poor records.

      Good:

      Botswana
      Senegal
      Mauritius

      Bad–off the top of my head…

      Equatorial Guinea
      Central African Republic
      Sierra Leone, probably
      could probably throw in a bunch more countries.

      There is a book that links this to political geography:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_and_Power_in_Africa

  4. I vehemently disagree with Buckley and respectfully disagree with Kling.

    Buckley has no sense of the distinction between a nation and a political party nor does he have a good grasp of how infrastructure and institutions unite a nation-state. The Quebec separatist movement is an example of why Buckley’s secession fantasies are nothing more than self-indulgent cosplay. “That’s the story of the Quebec secession movement: Nobody picked up a gun” is false unless you think enactment of the war measures act in response to a political kidnapping is a form of pacifism. Deploying troops in a major urban center and responding “just watch me” to the question “how far will you go?” is coercive by any definition I can think of.

    Quebec is a separate nation in the traditional sense of the word of “nationality” independent of the nation-state notion that dominates the meaning (since 1776 in my estimate). I would argue that the most stable nation-states naturally align the demographics of nationality with the geography of the nation-state. Geographically, there is no obvious benefit to Quebec if it was independent of Ontario and the negative-sum consequences of trying to disentangle the shared infrastructure and institutions. This holds true for uniting other geographic regions in North America that are currently separated by national/nationality borders. Geographically, the large catchment basins of a continent form a naturally contiguous region the positive-sum benefits of politically uniting such a region are small compared to existing mature institutions/infrastructure.

    In response to Kling I’d propose a thought experiment using his list of nation-states. Suppose we proposed a grand swap. The current nation-state boundaries remain unchanged but the entire population of one nation-state can decide to migrate to another nation-states geography. Say you could take your institutions and liquid assets with you but a fair market value exchange would be required to account for the difference in the infrastructure that stays put.

    I would argue that there is a naturally geographic ranking of the existing nation-states independent of the people/institutions. The United States is on the top of this list followed closely by China. Russia, Japan, and Brazil form the next distant tier. I would argue that there are other geographic nation-states that might rank as high or higher (e.g. Turkey, Syria, Egypt, maybe a combination of nation-states spanning the African Great Lakes). The other geographies are terrible. Rational citizens in these regions acting in the best interest of their great grand-children should migrate away.

    Geography matters and it has mattered in every significant socio-economic era since writing evolved (~ 3000 B.C.) which is when Jared Diamond’s “Lucky Latitudes” gets stuck. Domesticated plants and animals have not played a deterministic role in any major civilization since the Roman Empire, IMHO.

    • Oh, Iran and Iraq should geographically rank alongside Turkey, Egypt, and Syria (i.e. easily support a modern 100M+ population).

  5. The administrative state in the U.S. is both authoritarian and incompetent. Those traits are simply ignored because the administrative state is assumed, wrongly, to be controlled by the visible veneer of the the constitutionally authorized apparatus.

  6. I always thought there was a serious selection bias problem in the small country lists. Small counties are easier to take over and also can be more quickly run into the ground than large ones. That means that the fact that they have managed to stay independent means they are more likely above-average draws from the small country distribution. This effect seems plausibly large enough to demand quasi-experimental evidence on the role of country size before assuming that smaller is better in countries.

  7. I looking at this chart and think compared to what. We love Denmark and Singapore but aren’t terrible governments in small nations? There are seven Central American nations having governments too. So if we believe that only 20 – 25% of nation states have good governments, then 2 out 10 largest nations have 20% of good government. So feels like selective choosing of issues. (And although authoritarian is China government really bad? Is India government that bad?)

    That said I still think both China and United States are heading to the same point of a Corporatacrasy in 2120 but they are heading in opposite points. The US more free market are heading to more dominant firms while China command the largest firms to lead the growth.

  8. I’ve read the book and although, in my case, it was mostly preaching to the choir, I nevertheless think it is a worthy book that merits a large audience. There is a lot of fancy math in the appendices to support Dr. Kling’s observations. But most importantly, people should stop taking the title of the book to be an endorsement of secession. Judging a book by its title is foolish. Buckley does not endorse secession. Rather he argues for “home rule on steroids.” And he does an exemplary job of examining the costs and benefits. We used to call his remedy “federalism” back when that existed in the USA. But there are endless ways to describe the notion of pluralistic tolerance in allowing people with skin in the game the liberty of exercising local political control without the interference of remote elites.

    My personal favorite is “the principle of subsidiarity” which meant (until the EU thoroughly corrupted the usage of the term) preserving and tolerating local governance. In the words of Pope Pius IX: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.” But you see similar notions of the value of localized knowledge in Hayek and more formally in Elinor Ostrom’s solutions to the tragedy of the commons. Where local people have a greater voice and increased meaningful participation in their governance, governance tends to be less corrupt and more efficacious.

    In a previous book, The Once and Future King, FH Buckley persuasively demonstrated the superiority of parliamentary governments over presidential systems. He has yet, as far as I know, to recognize the importance of proportional representation and multiple political parties to this finding. But Steve Sailer yesterday had a nice chart illustrating the wide variety of political parties available to citizens of pluralistic, democratic countries. The most recent Gallup poll on the topic found that a plurality of USA citizens, 45%, identify as independents as opposed to Republican or Democrat, the numbers for which parties were both in the 20s. Clearly the “crisis” of populism (Obama voters voting for Trump, cats and dogs sleeping together, oh my!) is that the USA two-party system denies representation to a plurality of citizens. And this is why the secession movement, as Buckley discusses, is so popular in California in the moment.

    I’m now into Yuval Levin’s building book and am quite disappointed with his vapid dismissal of parliamentary governance. I will withhold judgment until I finish, but I will not be surprised if his notion of building does not extend to an Article V convention to adopt a parliamentary system of government with proportional representation. Conservativism is apparently now all about popular passive submission to corrupt elites until they figure things out for themselves.

    I will ignore Dr. Kling’s trolling: “Note that the governments of all of them, with the exception of the U.S. and Japan, are either very authoritarian, incompetent, or both” which is both patently false and mean-spirited with respect to India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Bangladesh.

  9. I’m not sure that population size is really that important. Culture and institutions seem to me to be far more important than any particular population size.

    From the link, I’ve grabbed a list of all the countries between 10 and 20 million in population. Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands are in there, but so are Niger, Syria, Chad, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Haiti, South Sudan, etc. Say what you want about Russia or Brazil or China, but they certainly don’t seem worse to me than Zimbabwe or Syria or South Sudan or Haiti.

    I suppose small countries often aren’t ‘throwing their weight around militarily’, but the flip side of that coin is that sometimes they are the victim of bigger countries doing exactly that (e.g. Syria, or Belgium and the Netherlands if we go back prior to 1945).

    59 Niger 19,866,232
    60 Malawi 19,842,560
    61 Burkina Faso 19,742,716
    62 Syria 19,454,264
    63 Kazakhstan 18,744,548
    64 Mali 18,429,892
    65 Chile 17,925,262
    66 Netherlands 17,151,228
    67 Guatemala 16,581,273
    68 Ecuador 16,498,502
    69 Cambodia 16,449,519
    70 Zambia 16,445,079
    71 Chad 15,833,116
    72 Senegal 15,020,945
    73 Zimbabwe 14,030,368
    74 Rwanda 12,187,400
    75 Guinea 11,855,411
    76 Burundi 11,844,520
    77 Belgium 11,570,762
    78 Tunisia 11,516,189
    79 Benin 11,340,504
    80 Bolivia 11,306,341
    81 Somalia 11,259,029
    82 Cuba 11,116,396
    83 Haiti 10,788,440
    84 Greece 10,761,523
    85 Czech Republic 10,686,269
    86 Jordan 10,458,413
    87 Portugal 10,355,493
    88 Dominican Republic 10,298,756
    89 South Sudan 10,204,581
    90 Azerbaijan 10,046,516
    91 Sweden 10,040,995

  10. Isn’t this pretty much only because Europe is a collection of small to medium-sized countries?

    If we grouped the EU together as one “country”, the list would look pretty bad for all size categories.

    • To elaborate, pretty much any method of grouping countries which manages to put most of Europe into one bucket is going to make that bucket look far better than the other buckets. For example, if we grouped countries by latitude, or latitude + hemisphere, whichever bucket Europe landed in would look much better than the others.

  11. If we, the United States, chopped ourselves up into a dozen or two well governed little countries, who would protect us and the rest of the world from the horrible countries in Dr. Kling’s list?

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