The Megapolitics of Information Economics

I recently posted a short article on one of the main ideas from the Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. The article explores how megapolitical factors drive institutional changes and how the digital economy and money are likely to shape the future.

The full article is here. I posted the beginning of the article below to help you decide if you are interested.

Violence - The Key Social Variable “The key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand the factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence.” The Sovereign Individual

“The Sovereign Individual” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg originally written in 1997, provides equal parts history and prophecy. The authors predicted a number of social, political and technological developments currently unfolding based upon a thorough historical analysis of what they call the logic of violence (LV). The book argues that controlling violence (ie. Protecting life and property) is the key social variable and that each society forms a logic of violence based upon two factors:

1. The returns or profitability of violence,
2. The optimal scale of violence (large vs. small)

“The Sovereign Individual” explores how historical shifts in megapolitical factors (topography, climate, technology, and microbes) drive changes in the LV. Finally, when the LV shifts, almost everything (institutions, morality, economics) in society adapts to the new logic.

The book argues that history has seen at least three transition periods in the logic of violence; and that the world currently is transitioning from an industrial economy to an information economy. This article highlights two previous transitions examined in the book, namely, dark ages to feudalism and feudalism to the industrial period. Our aim is to use the historical transitions to understand the Sovereign Individual model and then apply the model to the current transition in the LV.