The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
by James Dale Davidson
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age:
The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.
Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.
To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.
Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the easy that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.
The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence of farming.
Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.
Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.
When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.
The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence.
You cannot tax unless you can compile records and issue receipts. The symbols employed in the accountant's ledger became the rudiments of written language, an innovation that had never existed among hunters and gatherers.
Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.
In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.
Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.9 This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency.
In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.
The fact that people tend to respond to costs and rewards is an essential element of forecasting. You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.
The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.
in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence.
Decision-making becomes more difficult as numbers rise, because incentive traps proliferate. You need only think how hard it is to get a dozen people organized to go out to dinner. Imagine how hopeless would have been the task of organizing hundreds or thousands of persons to traipse around on a moveable feast. Lacking any sustained and separate political organization or bureaucracy required by specialization for war, hunting-and-gathering bands had to depend on persuasion and consensus—principles that work best among small groups with relatively easygoing attitudes.
An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.
When weapons or tools of production can be effectively hoarded or monopolized, they tend to centralize power.
Those without the resources to wrest a share of the available and inadequate supply of horses and fodder suddenly found that they and their property were no longer safe. To put their dilemma in contemporary terms, it was as if you were forced to arm yourself today with a new type of weapon, but the cost of doing so was $100,000. If you could not pay that price, you would be at the mercy of those who could.
The Church undertook many functions that are today absorbed by government, including the provision of public infrastructure. This is part of the way that the Church helped overcome what economists call “public goods dilemmas” in an era of fragmented authority. Specific religious orders of the early-medieval Church devoted themselves to applied engineering tasks, like opening roads, rebuilding fallen bridges, and repairing dilapidated Roman aqueducts. They also cleared land, built dams, and drained swamps. A new monastic order, the Carthusians, dug the first “artesian” well in Artois, France. Using percussion drilling, they dug a small hole deep enough to create a well that needed no pump.36
Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded.
Whatever your current residence or nationality, to optimize your wealth you should primarily reside in a country other than that from which you hold your first passport, while keeping the bulk of your money in yet a third jurisdiction, preferably a tax haven.
In almost every competitive area, including most of the world’s multitrillion-dollar investment activity, the migration of transactions into cyberspace will be driven by an almost hydraulic pressure—the impetus to avoid predatory taxation, including the tax that inflation places upon everyone who holds his wealth in a national currency.
Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings.
The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws.
We live in the time of the computer, but our dreams are still spun on the loom.
Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life.
