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36 reviews for:
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
James Dale Davidson
3.79 AVERAGE
36 reviews for:
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
James Dale Davidson
3.79 AVERAGE
Excellent historical perspective. One of the few books from the 90's that seems more appropriate now than when it was written. Worth the price just for the history from the Roman Empire until now. The authors have a bizarre ideology, but the research more than makes up for it. It's like The Prince meets The Wealth of Nations.
A jumbled mess of a book. It's written by two financial advisors posing as armchair historians. The book is loosely strung together by short paragraphs, each with their own title. The only parts worth reading are the sections on cybermoney.
They actually advocate moving your money to offshore tax havens in Bermuda and give you the name of the service to contact. Lots of cringey Bible references and quotes.
They actually advocate moving your money to offshore tax havens in Bermuda and give you the name of the service to contact. Lots of cringey Bible references and quotes.
informative
medium-paced
Whether you agree or disagree with the conclusions - and their desirability - there is no doubt that this is an incredibly insightful piece, especially considering the year it was written. Recommended.
The book's most important prediction hasn't materialized. In the end the state found a way to tax online businesses, so the big transition to a stateless society hasn't happened. The authors make a big deal of encryption. And yet we still pay taxes in 2021, even though our online purchases and online banking are all based on encrypted communication. Bummer.
Reading this 1997 book in 2021, it's tempting to think that blockchain will change things - that *now* the internet will finally be decentralized, economic activity will be untaxable, and the state will collapse. Maybe this book wasn't wrong, just early? But that's like being a marxist who sees every financial crisis as *the* ultimate crisis of capitalism. The state has adapted to disruptive technologies before - even to encryption -, it might very well adapt to blockchain and to quantum computing and to whatever comes next.
Other predictions have materialized though. The part about "cybercash" is essentially about Bitcoin - except that it predates Bitcoin by eleven years. The authors talk about how "cybercash" will make it harder for states to tax through inflation, and it is precisely in countries that have seen inflation rise in the 2010s, like Argentina and Venezuela, that Bitcoin has been most popular.
It's also hard not to think of Estonia's e-residency program, created in 2014, when the authors predict small nations competing for citizens, and that such competition wouldn't necessarily involve immigration. And it's impossible not to think about Amazon Turk and Upwork when the authors talk about technology will accelerate the transition from jobs to project-specific work - a post-Coasean economy.
Also, the authors anticipate the hordes of humanities majors and journalists with no no marketable skills who have turned against technology and capitalism:
“The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, underachievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.”
Relatedly, the authors correctly predict the multiplication of self-declared (and more or less officially recognized) "oppressed" categories. And they offer a neat theory about it: "We see the growth of victimization as mainly an attempt to buy social peace by not only widening membership in the meritocracy as [Christopher] Lash argues, but also by reconstituting the rationalizations for income redistribution."
Fake news and echo chambers are also there: "you'll even be able to order a nightly news report that simulates the news you would like to hear. [...] You'll see any story you wish, true or false, unfold on your television/computer".
It's also great to be reminded of how absurd it is to consider "fair" that "different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government". Why should someone with an income of US$ 2X pay twice as much tax than someone with an income of US$ X? If anything policing wealthier neighborhoods is *cheaper* than policing poorer neighborhoods. In fact the lower your income the more likely you will use up *more* state resources, so you should pay more taxes, not less.
Finally, every now and then it's good to be reminded that our faith in democracy is no less ludicrous than a medieval peasant's faith in the Church. The authors do a good job drawing parallels between the religious myths of 1000 years ago and the civic myths of today. The state is nothing more than the stationary bandit of Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" - but the mythology around the state is strong and it's easy to forget that we're all serfs.
Reading this 1997 book in 2021, it's tempting to think that blockchain will change things - that *now* the internet will finally be decentralized, economic activity will be untaxable, and the state will collapse. Maybe this book wasn't wrong, just early? But that's like being a marxist who sees every financial crisis as *the* ultimate crisis of capitalism. The state has adapted to disruptive technologies before - even to encryption -, it might very well adapt to blockchain and to quantum computing and to whatever comes next.
Other predictions have materialized though. The part about "cybercash" is essentially about Bitcoin - except that it predates Bitcoin by eleven years. The authors talk about how "cybercash" will make it harder for states to tax through inflation, and it is precisely in countries that have seen inflation rise in the 2010s, like Argentina and Venezuela, that Bitcoin has been most popular.
It's also hard not to think of Estonia's e-residency program, created in 2014, when the authors predict small nations competing for citizens, and that such competition wouldn't necessarily involve immigration. And it's impossible not to think about Amazon Turk and Upwork when the authors talk about technology will accelerate the transition from jobs to project-specific work - a post-Coasean economy.
Also, the authors anticipate the hordes of humanities majors and journalists with no no marketable skills who have turned against technology and capitalism:
“The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, underachievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.”
Relatedly, the authors correctly predict the multiplication of self-declared (and more or less officially recognized) "oppressed" categories. And they offer a neat theory about it: "We see the growth of victimization as mainly an attempt to buy social peace by not only widening membership in the meritocracy as [Christopher] Lash argues, but also by reconstituting the rationalizations for income redistribution."
Fake news and echo chambers are also there: "you'll even be able to order a nightly news report that simulates the news you would like to hear. [...] You'll see any story you wish, true or false, unfold on your television/computer".
It's also great to be reminded of how absurd it is to consider "fair" that "different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government". Why should someone with an income of US$ 2X pay twice as much tax than someone with an income of US$ X? If anything policing wealthier neighborhoods is *cheaper* than policing poorer neighborhoods. In fact the lower your income the more likely you will use up *more* state resources, so you should pay more taxes, not less.
Finally, every now and then it's good to be reminded that our faith in democracy is no less ludicrous than a medieval peasant's faith in the Church. The authors do a good job drawing parallels between the religious myths of 1000 years ago and the civic myths of today. The state is nothing more than the stationary bandit of Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" - but the mythology around the state is strong and it's easy to forget that we're all serfs.
Talk about a heavy book, I honestly don't know how to begin reviewing this, I feel like it covered a lot more than I could possibly remember. Written in 1997, it's not only accurate 21 years later but extremely eye-opening especially in terms of history. It discusses the transition that we are undergoing in the Information Age and how microprocessing will reshape everything we currently know.
The book goes through the history of the nation-state, in the beginning filling the void that the church left, and then the industrial era and the beginning of mass programs - all the things that led to the current state of governments today.
The history is very thorough and goes back to knighthood, the gunpowder revolution, and how that changed warfare forever. It predicts and explains the rise of cybercurrency (cryptocurrency), Bitcoin and all its implications.
The one thing that I really appreciated was at the end of the book, in the last chapter, morality is discussed from an interesting perspective. "In science, three thousand years completely changed what human knowledge is; in morality, we may actually have fallen back."
This book might leave you in despair (and paranoia?) but I'd still recommend this book if you want to better understand the current changes from a metapolitical view. I will say it's a long and not so easy read but very gripping.
Also, the Clintons are pure evil!
The book goes through the history of the nation-state, in the beginning filling the void that the church left, and then the industrial era and the beginning of mass programs - all the things that led to the current state of governments today.
The history is very thorough and goes back to knighthood, the gunpowder revolution, and how that changed warfare forever. It predicts and explains the rise of cybercurrency (cryptocurrency), Bitcoin and all its implications.
The one thing that I really appreciated was at the end of the book, in the last chapter, morality is discussed from an interesting perspective. "In science, three thousand years completely changed what human knowledge is; in morality, we may actually have fallen back."
This book might leave you in despair (and paranoia?) but I'd still recommend this book if you want to better understand the current changes from a metapolitical view. I will say it's a long and not so easy read but very gripping.
Also, the Clintons are pure evil!