Bobby Van
Psychological basis of the ingredient that makes possible social organization is trust. When this trust is not necessary physical threat as guarantor of the arrangement, and it's obvious the fact that exchanges are mutually beneficial. The role of aggression is to "convince" someone to do something that I do not believe that it would really be in his interest. Thus, in the absence of the phenomenon of trust, we cannot distinguish between a voluntary exchange and a relationship of power.
In the case of small groups of people (hundreds) can form networks of trust in informal way, through direct interactions. This is the way human societies functioned for over 90% of human history up to now, approx 10,000 years when, due to the onset of agriculture, could occur in growing human created. Our instinctive social feelings, such as a sense of equity, have evolved in the context of those primitive societies with the role the detection free-riders or inselatoriilor within those groups. To a certain extent, these feelings we create wrong social insights into the world of the present; beyond the intuitive appeal of xenophobia, which we discussed at another workshop, the most significant phenomenon is the conflict between individuals ' freedom to act without them bully others and our sense of fairness. Individual actions do not assaulting anyone it can seem instinctively in "unfair" because they result in inequality.

In the case of large groups, the trust between the various participants can no longer occur after direct interactiilor; It is necessary to be present either intermediaries, ultimately, formal rules and institutions (States & Governments). Formal institutions imposed in a society are good when the result is the appearance of trust between strangers. The transition from informal to formal institutions institutions reflect the transition from "exchanges between friends and families in small communities to exchange between strangers and strangers in the community" (Shermer). Issues you need to resolve a society with many people (Diamond):

the Resolution and prevention of conflicts) between individuals
b) making decisions regarding public issues (which affects all)
c) coping with the system of barter-of money > > appearance-problems with the monetary system
d) high density of the population-are insufficient resources-> > need Commerce
Our tribal social intuitions do not provide suitable solutions for these problems, on the contrary they we suggest:

the forced imposition of) a single moral system

b find the private sphere) in (everything is public)

(c) Rejection of the concept of interest), suspicion of intermediaries, the call to inflation

d) and protectionism against Commercialism (the rejection of free trade)
From historical point of view, no States showed neither necessarily nor by voluntary associations, but as a result of the aggression: whether the tribes were United thanks to an external danger, either one of the tribes conquered neighbours and became gradually growing. Case studies and well documented: external Danger: Confederation of Cherokee (18th century), the formation of the United States (18th century), the unification of Germany (19th century). By conquest: Zulu (18th century), the States of Australia (18th and 19th centuries), the Aztec and Inca Empires (15th century), Romanian and Macedonian imperiele.

At least until very recently, our tribal social intuitions have led to the development of formal institutions, not very effective, based on an excess of authority-what Jared Diamond calls cleptocratii:

Considerations of conflict resolution, decision making, economics, and space thus converge in requiring large societies to be centralized. Bajwa centralization of power inevitably opens the door — for those who hold the power, has the privy to information, make the decisions, and redistribute the goods — to exploit the resulting opportunities to reward themselves and their relatives. To anyone familiar with the modern grouping of people Abraham, that's obvious. As early societies developed, those acquiring centralized power gradually established themselves as an elite, perhaps originating as one of several formerly equal-ranked village clans that became "more equal" than the others. (Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Michael Shermer's quote and criticize at least part of what it says about the need for Diamond processing:

"Large societies can function induindustrial only if they have a redistributive economy in addition to a reciprocal economy. Goods in excess of an individual's needs must be transferred from the individual to the centralized authority, which then redistributes to the individuals with deficits. "

This conclusion makes sense from an economic perspective of folk, where we simply scale up the social structure of hunter-gatherers into that of consumer-traders. In fact, societies have done just this throughout history. While it is true that most societies included top-down solutions in the form of chiefdoms, kingdoms, theocracies, monarchies, dictatorships, and the like, in the last half millennium the development of various economic and political institutions has flipped back to bottom-up solutions. And we have not simply increased the size and number of hunter-gatherer institutions and rules; We have added entirely new categories of similarly modeled social institutions, which in turn have created the need for entirely new categories of rules.

In particular, democratic capitalism offers of bottom-up solution based on the guaranteed right of private property and a democratic vote as well as the free and fair trade between citizens in the nation and with citizens in other nations. […] The addition of the relatively new concept of property rights-which assigns the right and use of a commodity to someone with stipulated rules of conduct that are socially recognized and mutually binding among all members of the group regardless of the owner's ability to physically (and convincingly) threaten aggression-is counterintuitive to our evolutionary instincts and therefore require constant's. (The Mind of the Market)
The institution of private property seems so to form the basis for successful solving the four problems raised by Diamond. It is not a sufficient condition, but necessary.

At this workshop, Friday, June 13, 4:00 pm, I want to talk about

-What are the other formal institutions needed

-the extent to which it appeals in unnecessarily formal institutions to implement when informal rules actually works very well (the problem touched and Shermer in the attached text)
-What kind of formal institutions must take into account pre-existing informal rules (as Anglo-Saxon vs. French law)
-on what basis the formal institutions evolves

Texts:
Michael Shermer-excerpt from The Mind of the Market

Jared Diamond-excerpt from Guns, Germs, and Steel (optional)