

When kings and princes grow old - bootload
http://www.economist.com/node/16588422?story_id=16588422&fsrc=scn/tw/te/rss/pe

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jacquesm
I'm surprised that in this day and age there are still 'better' people, it's
not like we don't know that this is a fiction.

In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other
countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched. There is a whole
media circus around them and there are still special laws on the books giving
the royal people rights that ordinary people do not have.

The most heard argument against abolishing these institutions is that 'you
need a head of state' and 'a president costs money too'. I'm not really sure
what either has to do with creating and maintaining a special class of people,
and I can't imagine a presidency to be as costly and as messy as what we have
today.

Besides that, 'our' royal family isn't even Dutch, but hardly anybody seems to
care, as long as the fairy tale is allowed to continue it's all good.

~~~
masklinn
> In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other
> countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched.

But in most of those places royalty is _at best_ the nominal chief executive,
with few if any factual power.

~~~
mseebach
They're not chief executives, not nominally, not actually. They're chairman of
the board. The only power they have is firing the executives and approving the
next one.

~~~
thirdusername
Those powers were stripped along with virtually all others from the Swedish
monarchy in the 1974's reform of government, and now sits with the speaker.
Our royal family isn't a lot more than a well payed magnets for tabloid
journalists, so that our real civil-servants can get work done.

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lionhearted
That's the biggest problem for classical monarchy - you want succession that's
crystal clear to avoid fighting, but you also want at least a competent
monarch. Those two goals are often at odds with each other - very clear
succession rules with primogeniture (first born son takes over) often means
you get a weaker monarch - someone like Puyi, the last Qing Dynasty Emperor,
or Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last Tokugawa Shogun. Sometimes you wind up with a
monarch who is mentally ill, that happened notably a few times in Roman
history.

That's the biggest flaw with monarchy - succession is hard to get right.
Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics
in almost all metrics except maybe military, but republics are insulated from
having a long terrible reign of government by having a bad monarch. In a
republic, usually you can get rid of a poor ruler within 10 years.

The most effective monarchy succession plan is probably having the current
ruler groom his successor and retire or alternate - that happened during the
height of Rome with emperors choosing and grooming their successor before
retiring, and it happened in Heian Japan with two branches of the Emperor's
family alternating duties as emperor and jointly choosing the order of
alternating a number of years in advance. Unfortunately, this system seems to
be unstable - eventually someone can't resist the temptation to put their own
child in power, even if they're not fit to govern. Then you get the despotic
monarch again, and all the problems that entails.

It's a hard problem to solve.

~~~
hooande
Not to challenge you, but what do you mean when you say " Historically
speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics in almost all
metrics except maybe military"? The United States seems to have done pretty
well as a republic in terms of average quality of life and gross domestic
product. While it hasn't controlled as much land as the largest Roman Empire,
I'd think that it has done more per capita than any form of nation in history.

~~~
lionhearted
> "Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform
> republics in almost all metrics except maybe military"

Gosh, this is an incredibly long discussion and I don't know where to start. I
tried writing a reply and I'm just not accurately capturing it - my ability to
articulate all the history I've read in a short summary isn't so good. Let me
try, though.

First, yes, the United States is amazing, it was the most well-designed
republic in history during the early years. There's been times when republican
government was suspended and dictator/imperial leaders came to power. Since I
don't want to make this overly political, without naming names I'll say
there's been two American presidents that acted very much like dictator-type
emperors. They took emergency powers, suspended civil rights including habeas
corpus, drafted men into military service, seized industry, and conquered
large tracks of land. Both of those guys were popular but quite brutal and
oppressive to people who opposed them, including arresting people for peaceful
protest. The first of these guys even arrested elected officials that didn't
agree with his war! Both of them seemed poised to control the United States
for a long time, but then they both died in office, and the next
administrations quickly put more safeguards to make sure America didn't get a
tradition of presidents doing whatever the heck they wanted.

It's a really strange case - these guys are generally seen as good guys, and
were good guys in some ways, so history treats them favorably, but they were
both very dictator/monarchy-like once coming into power, ignoring the Senate
and Supreme Court. Prior to them, I think the early American federal
government was one of the finest government designs in history, so yes that is
pretty incredible. Though, the USA has been gradually sliding towards what
tends to happen in republics with corruption, politics, factions, and all
that.

Generally speaking, you get lots of politics, bureaucracy, waste in a
republic, and lots of corruption once people come into power. There's corrupt
monarchies, but a good monarch can almost completely end corruption and waste
in a short time. I'm thinking of someone like Tokugawa Yoshimune -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Yoshimune>

Or more controversially, the Napoleonic codes of law:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_code>

It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero, it
almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean house
and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.

Beyond that, my, where do I start? I'd recommend looking at comparable nations
at comparable eras of history and see if republics or monarchies produced more
art, science, architecture, trade, general happiness and health and
prosperity, and things like that (admittedly difficult to measure). I'd read
some thoughts by smart people on what happens in democracy through history,
and monarchy. I'd look at the Federalist Papers to see how America was
designed, I'd also strongly recommend Machiavelli's The Prince which has some
analysis on the difference between monarchy and republics, and then I'd look
at some of the Greek and Roman thoughts on the matter. The height of Rome came
after Rome transitioned from a republic to an imperial monarchy, but this same
transition sowed the seeds of its downfall with succession crises and the
power of the Praetorian Guard. Likewise, the Ottomans and the Janissaries...

The most insightful eras for me is when there were a number of small states
with similar resources and technology in a local era. The monarchic states in
Renaissance Italy, the Greek city states, different eras of civil war in China
and Japan... republicanism traditionally underperformed monarchy on average,
but was less prone to catastrophically bad leadership, with the exception of
rulers who came to power democratically but then seized power (that's what
happened with the Chancellorship of Germany, there's been between 2 and 5
hardcore dictator American presidents depending on how you define it, etc).
It's a large topic - if you have specific questions, I'll try my best to give
a starting block of where to read and learn.

~~~
DLWormwood
> It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero,
> it almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean
> house and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if there is any hope in the practice of
studying history or trying to recreate it. Your statements make sense (in
retrospect and with your evidence) but, at least here in the States, it is
almost 180 degrees opposite to the political consensus.

Your above quote reminded me of the Civilization PC games, especially the
early ones that just have a simple "government type" instead of an attribute
matrix. The older game consistently portrayed Monarchy as having corruption
problems, while Republics didn't have as much and Democracy was immune. As
if...

~~~
netcan
The best solutions to corruption is, often, making it irrelevant.

In the Saudi system, the rulers don't pilfer public money (like oil money) the
way that most if it will be pilfered in Iraq, the just own it. They aren't
corrupted into placing friends, family & allies in government positions, that
how systems work and it's exactly what is expected of them. Filing to appoint
a powerful ally might result in the weakening of the alliance and instability
in the kingdom.

Similarly, capitalism doesn't have to worry about the corruption of greedy
individuals out to make money for themselves without regard for the greater
scheme, this is how the system works. If people didn't follow their own desire
for personal prosperity, nothing would be produced.

Saudi Arabia is not a good example for anything though. The country itself
(IE, the land) produces the wealth pretty much autonomously. The people do not
have to be productive for the monarchy to have wealth. All government needs to
do is provide government services and ensure stability. They don't have to be
all that efficient because they can afford to do things the costly way. In
other monarchies (EG, neighbouring Jordan) the people have to make the wealth.
This creates a completely different dynamic.

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gwern
> Yet the king is now thought to be 86.

Er... Interesting.

