Henry Farrell posts on the role of transaction costs in sustaining despotic regimes. The idea, in a nutshell, is that there’s a sort of first-mover problem that makes submission to tyrranical governments a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. It’s basically not possible to rule by force a population determined to get rid of you. If the vast majority of the population in (e.g.) Iraq had risen up at once, Hussein could not have retained control by force of arms. The problem is, you really have to get everyone going at once. If only a small group rises up, they can always be put down easily. This is why regimes like that need to squelch press freedom and sow spies throughout the population: if mass action could be coordinated, the government could be toppled fairly quickly.

As Henry notes, this means that the fall of oppressive governments is often a “tipping point” phenomenon, because when the floodgates holding back coordination crack, there’s a sudden and dramatic readjustment shock. This is basically analogous to what happens in an economy when an information distorting policy can no longer be maintained. So, for example, when a country has been defending a fixed exchange rate that props up their currency well above market value. The longer and more out-of-touch with reality the peg, the harder and more destructive the economic hit when (say) speculative pressure finally forces a float.

One implication of this model is that technologies which enable communication (and therefore lower the transaction costs of coordination) can foment rapid political change. In his book Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold discusses the fall of the Philippines’ Joseph Estrada to… text messaging. On January 20, 2001, the message “Go 2EDSA, Wear blck.” circulated like a chain letter passing from mobile phone to mobile phone. Within an hour, tens of thousands of Filipinos had converged at “Edsa,” or the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where mass demonstrations had felled the government of Ferdinand Marcos almost 15 years earlier.

Note that this ability to coordinate makes such power changes more likely to be bloodless. Folks who do law and economics have observed a similar link in the law between conflict and uncertainty. When two parties are in a civil dispute, if the law is clear about who is in the right, they’re likely to settle rather than go to court. Both parties can predict about how much the loser will have to fork over, and so he’s got no incentive to expend resources on a court battle and end up paying the same restitution. When either the facts or the law are uncertain, though, legal conflict may follow. Similarly, if a popular movement against a government proceeds by way of a halting discovery process—if a “vanguard” moves first, and only gradually does it become clear whether the mass of the people are also willing to rise up—the regime may attempt to quell the uprising by military force… and it may succeed. When, as in the case of Estrada, some million citizens (about 1.2 percent of the population) came to protest over the course of four days, the writing on the wall was clear enough.

Now, there’s still a commitment problem to go with the information problem. You may know that a lot of your fellow citizens are displeased with the regime, you may even know everyone’s plannign to show up at a certain place on a preset time and date. But there’s still a sort of prisoner’s dilemma when it comes time to decide whether or not to actually show up. If too many people decide to hedge their bets and stay home, after all, the best laid plans any dissident movement may yet leave a tiny vanguard up against the wall. And, as with voting and a thousand other collective action problems, the likelihood that any one person will be the difference between success and failure that it seems rational to be one of the hedgers.

So, how to overcome the problem? One way is to internalize the benefits of regime change, say by promising those who participate a place in the new government. That, however, works better for small juntas than mass movements, where the size of the group necessary to effect change is too large to promise any one member a benefit proportionate to the risk undertaken. Another way is to enable individuals to make some kind of credible commitment in advance to participating if and when the there exist reciprocal commitments from the threshhold number of people whose participation makes probable the success of a mass movement.

Now, here there arise a different set of problems. Obviously, the process by which people commit has to be open and public enough that almost anyone can opt in and voice their commitment. Just as obviously, though, it has to be closed enough that the regime in power can’t get a rolling list of the number of people who’ve signed on, gradually picking them off.

So here’s something that might work. If you had a trustworthy (probably offshore) host, you submit your own commitment, maybe signed with a PGP key to verify your identity, to be kept in escrow for some predetermined period of time. If the agreed upon “critical mass” is not reached within, say, one year, the list is destroyed. If it is reached, then the party holding the list in escrow announces that in two days, or one week, or whatever, the people who’ve signed on should converge at such-and-such a location at such-and-such a time and date. One week after the time in question, the list is published.

Now, if you submit your name and few others do then, assuming you can trust the escrow agent, you lose nothing. Once the announcement is made, however, you can predict that your erstwhile allies, should they triumph, will hold you to account if you fail to show up as promised. And you’d better hope that they do succeed, because the regime will now have its eye on you if they don’t.

By the by, Henry also has some comments on my comments on public choice and Marxist base/superstructure theory. I also don’t find all that compelling the notion that “court intellectuals” refuse to accept public choice theory out of cynical self-interest… though I do think PC is probably a more useful model than he seems to. If I were going to offer my own sort of amateur psychologist answer to Nozick’s question—why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?—I’d guess that it’s for the same reason that literary scholars found postmodernism so appealing. If there is, at least roughly speaking, a “right” interpretation, or at least a most plausible and defensible set of interpretations, of a text, then sooner or later you get at least approximate convergence on that one or that set, and even if there’s not total agreement, then most of what there is to be said about, say, King Lear, has already been said. If “all interpretation is misinterpretation” (a mystifying slogan, since without the idea of a correct interpretation to contrast with it, the concept of “misinterpretation” is meaningless—you cannot “misinterpret” a Rorschach blot) then your publication horizon is radically expanded. In politics, something similar is probably true. I don’t mean here that advocacy of larger government is just disingenuous careerism, but rather that what intellectuals and pundits enjoy is the challenge of coming up with novel solutions to social problems. And the whole point of letting the market rip, so to speak, is that you don’t think any centralized solution is going to do as well as the emergent solution produced by the decisions of lots of individuals. Once you look at social phenomena as problems to be solved, what Hayek called the “engineering mindset” is likely to take hold.