It is better to be the predator than the prey. This intuition is no doubt on the minds of many in Donald Trump’s Washington, as well as other world capitals right now.
But there is one very important caveat to this logic, one that is especially salient for those few nations powerful enough to call the shots for (most) everyone else. This caveat derives from ecology—or the logic of groups rather than individuals—and the fact that, as a community, predators are strictly limited by the amount of prey that is available.
A group of creatures cannot grow in calorie terms beyond their food supply. Similarly, a tribe of raiding nomads is bound by the number of villages they can plunder. In contrast, nations can grow beyond their prey. Ancient empires like Rome and dynasties like in China expanded to the limits of the known world. To do so, they had to morph from predators into creators and facilitators.
What ancient empires came to understand was that more wealth and power could be had by cooperating with their neighbors—proscribing their predation—than by seeking to plunder them. The “pax Romana” was not woke; it was wise. Shrewd leaders of great powers do best by making good use of an important asset: trust.
The political scientist Mancur Olson spelled out this logic in a compelling anecdote about peasants (prey) and bandits (predators). In their dysfunctional world, everyone has a problem. Peasants are reluctant to till the soil because anything they produce is stolen by the bandits. The bandits in turn suffer from a dearth of prey; in town after town, there is little available to steal.
The solution is cooperation, and the incentives to trust that are required to achieve it. “Trust” in this instance is very limited, the kind that stems from being confident in the behavior of others. You can “trust” a bank robber to rob banks.
Cooperation forms as the roving bandits realize they can become “sedentary”: they can settle down and protect a group of peasants from other bandits. In doing so—Olson showed, mathematically—sedentary bandits help themselves and benefit the peasants.
How can this be so? How can plundering less make one richer? The trick stems from something called incentive compatibility. This is the same logic that discourages going in the wrong direction on the highway. The likelihood of an accident by taking a shortcut is too great a downside. Better to arrive where you are headed eventually, safely, than not at all.
The incentive compatibilities between peasants and sedentary bandits are even more consequential. If the bandits can control some portion of territory, they in turn develop an “encompassing interest” in the local peasants. By protecting “their” peasants from other predators, the sedentary bandits in effect possess everything that these peasants make.
But the real magic stems from the incentives both peasants and bandits possess in this new social setting. Sedentary bandits can now prey on the same peasants year after year. Because both groups share a predictable future, and because the bandits remain greedy, they can benefit by encouraging the peasants to be more productive. But peasants who know that everything they produce will be stolen (as before) will not produce much.
Sedentary bandits solve this problem by committing to take only some of what the peasants produce (a tax). For their part, the peasants can trust this promise because they too recognize that incentivizing production, and honoring the commitment to tax rather than plunder, is in the long-term interest of the bandits.
The peasants are better off because they keep more of their food. This gives them an incentive to be more productive. The bandits, in turn, also obtain more food.
This logic of (selfish) cooperation imposes hard limits on those who wish to grow at the expense of others. It is particularly important in the modern world, where knowledge (information) is central to a growing range of productive processes. Knowledge depends on trust; I have to believe those I interact with will not behave in a short-term predatory manner, but will recognize that it is in their long-term interest to cooperate with me as a colleague, partner, or fellow driver.
The free world is, or has been, one great big village overseen by a sedentary bandit, the United States. There is a need for reform, but this setup has benefitted the great majority of those involved.
The current leader of the free world made his fortune as a bandit. He, and many of his supporters, are steeped in the logic of predator-prey. They understand the art of the deal. What they recognize less, perhaps, is that they now own the savannah, rather than having to roam it, looking for scraps. The deal has already been made, though of course there is room to redefine its terms. In treating the liberal international order as a dog-eat-dog world, the risk is that everyone will end up hungry, less safe, and poorer.
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