Overview
Book Title: The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
Authors: James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg
Year: 1999
Cameron’s Rating: 9/10
My Thoughts
In the Sovereign Individual the authors examine history to see how human civilization’s earlier forms of government collapsed with the advent of new technologies.
The book also explores how societies have transitioned from earlier forms of government to more modern iterations.
Perhaps most impressively, the authors predicted the rise of cryptocurrencies nearly 20 years before Bitcoin and other virtual currencies began receiving significant coverage from the mainstream media.
This book has brilliantly predicted trends such as increased gaps between skilled and unskilled workers, more decentralized econmies caused by virtual currencies, as well as the degradation of a set of consistent moral values widely held amongst members of nation states such as the USA.
If you’re interested in learning more about where the world is going, this book will take you on a rollercoaster. Yet, while the Sovereign Individual offers a lot of insight into how the world will change, it doesn’t spend as much time explaining how you can best take advantage of these changes in the coming years.
If you’re willing to invest a bit of the heavy lifting in planning your own strategy, however, this book may be one of the best “big picture” books you’ll ever read.
Best Quotes
- “Cyberspace is the ultimate off-shore jurisdiction.”
- “The more apparent it is that a system is nearing its end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws. Any social organization will therefore tend to discourage or play down analyses that anticipate its demise. This alone helps ensure that history’s great transitions are seldom spotted as they happen.”
- “You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why.”
- “… Experimentation increases the variability of results.”
- “Whenever elites find themselves threatened their first action is denial.”
- “…It is to be expected that one or more nation states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged via biological warfare such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions across the globe an excuse to close their borders and limit immigration.”
- “With income earning capacity more highly skewed than in the industrial era, jurisdictions will tend to cater the needs of those customers whose business is most valuable and who have the greatest choice of where to bestow it. Under such conditions it may matter much less than we are accustomed to assume whether or not policies are commercially optimal for a jurisdiction would appeal to the median voter in a focus group.”
- “Societies as we have argued can only be strong if moral values are widely shared. The advanced nations are already moving into the situation where many people will hold weak or limited moral values. Others will compensate with fierce adherence to irrational values and few values will be held in common across the whole of society.”
My Notes
- As the cyber economy continues to develop governments will have to treat their residents more like customers and less like cows to be milked.
- The role of violence across human civilizations plays a great role in how those societies will organize and use scarce resources.
- When variables have remained constant for decades or even centuries, it’s easy to take them for granted.
- The rise of technology in the 21st century will result in smaller portions of the population taking home larger incomes. It isn’t realistic to think the 21st century will be as financially equitable as the 20th century was.
- Two huge factors that contributed to the creation of “good jobs” during the industrial era were high transaction costs and difficulty dismissing employees due to various legalities. Both of these factors, however, have and will continue seeing their pulls weaken in the coming years.
- Entrepreneurs have long paid taxes to the nation state in excess of the benefits they’ve received in return. This is unlikely to continue in the latter half of the 21st century.
- As globalism permeates around the world, standards of living worldwide also increase. This along with the fact that modern technologies causing cultures to gradually blend together is decreasing the steep exit cost of leaving one’s country.
- The desires of human beings are formed via a combination of our biological pressures as well as the current conditions on Earth. As the conditions on Earth change, our desires will also adapt.
- Future generations will likely look back at the industrial era and feel it was unfair that those who used government services the least were forced to pay the most (in taxes) and those that use government services the most were forced to pay the least.
- In economies that are more decentralized it is more difficult for governments to levy income taxes.