RE: A functioning nation: system requirements

I intend to write longer about it, but as for now I just like Malcolm Pollacks IT-inspired wording, so maybe a quick and somewhat frivolous reply for now. If we are approaching nations from an IT angle, why not try to simulate them on a computer? And this is actually being done, there are “niche” videogames that focus on accuracy more than popularity. I am talking about Paradox, of course. One could start there.

Say, you are trying to survive playing Britain in Hearts of Iron IV. For an insane challenge, try it with France. Or try Germany and start the game after Kursk. Anyhow you will notice pretty quickly that you need four things:

• Manpower. This is mainly another word for demographics/natalism, although, of course, you can always increase it with insanely long conscription periods.

• Economic output. Wait, no, the service sector does not matter much there, especially if financial thingamajiks are counted in. Neither foot massages nor credit default swaps are going to help much with the old guns-or-butter problem. Mainly manufacturing and agriculture i.e. productive output it is.

• Morale. Not in the sense of “being moral and ethical”, more like in the sense of ardent nationalism, loyalty, an aggressive fighting spirit and suchlike. I.e. morale is precisely that thing that if you are a liberal type, it looks scary, ugly and halfway evil even if in the case of impeccably Allied countries during WW2. Morale is one good reason why you cannot just import immigrants if your manpower stat is falling due to the lack of births. I mean, it is not in the game, but I would easily model it with an increase in manpower and a permanent or very long term decrease in morale – it is not going away, not before a century or even longer period, because the cohesion of your nation just got essentially lowered and you won’t get it back until they have intermarried so much that there are no internal tribal differences anymore and  everybody is thinking like “we are a we, against them” again. Take some productive output points away, too.

• Intelligent leadership, management and experts. This is probably where the free market matters most – not in sheer quantitative productivity, as the Soviets were able to pump out enough tanks. But designing advanced electronics, i.e. qualitative productivity, now that is something the free market does best. Hearts of Iron IV models this with “research teams”, which are simply a “given”, you as the player, as the leader of a country cannot produce more teams. This inability in the game probably simulates that it is a free market thing, not so close under Dear Leaders control.

But wait a bit. Why am I basing my requirements of a functioning nation on a simulation of a period of total war? (Not that the simulations of the non-total periods, like Europa Universalis IV are much different in this regard.)

Let me ask a question. You need to test the fitness of a person. How do you do it? I would simply send him in the cage for a bit of MMA fighting. Fighting is a perfect test of all kinds of fitness because if you have a weakness in any of them your opponent will use it against you. Low on cardio? You will get tired out, and then easily finished. Weak upper body strength? The opponent will not have to care so much about defending himself. Poor balance (my bane) ? You will find yourself on your ass a lot.  Poor flexibility? Your opponent will make moves that can  only be countered by a head kick, but you can’t pull that off well. Actually your body is all right, but you get mentally easily scared? Will be used against you, too.

Fighting is such a perfect test of fitness, if you think about it, it is almost in the definition. Fitness is an ability to overcome obstacles, and a human opponent is per definition the kind of an intelligent, flexible obstacle who is the hardest to overcome because he will screw with your weaknesses.

The same way, the health and fitness of nations is tested by wars. Just about anything that is truly robust and healthy about a nation, can be used to  gain an advantage, or just about any weakness can be exploited. This justifies the use of computer war simulations for this purpose.

This is something non-obvious and seriously crucial to understand – I used to think I have to work on and test various kinds of my fitness separately. Strength Monday, endurance Tuesday etc. But at some point I realized I can just hand the whole thing over to e.g. a boxing trainer and he will make me overally well-rounded fit.  And the reason is simply that if the purpose of fitness is to be able solve problems, the best test is to find problems who intelligently resist being solved, who will find out your weaknesses and use them against you. In theory it could be any intelligence, from AI to extraterrestrials, but in practice just using other humans works best. It is pretty much the definition of intelligence and this is why intelligent challenges are per def the hardest because they are adaptive challenges.  Get real good at boxing, and it is practically impossible you will fail at an 5K run or neighborhood push-up competition or walking a tightrope or catching flies in the air, largely because you never become real good at boxing without these, so you will have to do all these and more in order to pass the ring test. Even more importantly, you will have to be psychologically fit, too.

And this is just the same for nations. Give me a nation who is very good at not letting other nations of the same calibre and weight class (important!) give them a pounding and I am fairly sure it will be a nation that will be good at solving any other kind of problem either. Because if they have just one true weakness, one category of problems they are really bad at solving: that is how they will get pounded.

And if we accept this hypothesis, we have not only these fairly decent simulations but also immense amounts of analytical literature of the “Why had France lost the Franco-Prussian war?” or “Had Carthage really no chance?” type.