How Did Rugby Become Football?

|Peter Boettke|

The history of American football begins with rugby football.  The game evolved as equipment changed, player skill evolved, and most importantly rules changed which produced subsequent changes in equipment, skill, and strategy.

My colleague Dick Wagner often asks the question above, and demonstrates how small changes can accumulate to such an extent that one day you are playing a totally different game.  He then, to my mind, brilliantly flips the quesiton to how constitutional democracy became social democracy in the 20th century. Small changes accumulate and we end up playing a different game in the political arena just as we did on the field.

Constitutional democracy had puzzles and paradoxes, but social democracy has it own sets of serious puzzles and paradoxes that must be addressed.  Simplistically, I think you can think of the puzzles and paraxdoxes of constitutional democracy as relating to incentive alignment issues, whereas the puzzles and paradoxes of social democracy are epistemic in nature.  In both instanaces, critical analysis requires that we take an institutional perspective --- institutional problems demand institutional solutions.

I tried to stress this epistemic point in a recent review of Jack Knight and JIm Johnson's The Priority of Democracy.  From some of the comments, it appears I wasn't as effective as I might have hoped at communicating my point about the epistemic constraints (as well as incentive issues) that must be addressed if we are going to have robust political institutions.

BTW, Alex Tabarrok has an excellent discussion of the issues of the cognitive capacity of democratic institutions at Marginal Revolution.

 

 

Comments

[FriedrichHayek]

Wittgenstein talks about language games and how with small changes you suddenly have a new language game.

David Hull and Charles Darwin talk about populations of replicators undergoing small changes over time until suddenly the replicator population has suddenly become a new species.

David Hull's point is the populations and concepts labeled with words are evolving individuals and over time can become something different than what they were when they began, terms can gain jobs and lose jobs, concepts can gain new aspects of significance and lose old aspects of significance.

Words, concepts, species, games, are not natural Platonic kinds defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.

[FriedrichHayek]

The classic book on this 'flip' is Theodore Low, The End of Liberalism, one of the biggest sellers ever in academic political science.

[Mathieu Bédard]

I am going to challenge that with; the history of American football and rugby start with the French "soule". Perhaps that even emphasizes the point about evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_soule

[Roger McKinney]

“the questions of political structure and the processes that are necessary to reconcile our differences and to learn to live better together.”

I think it’s dangerous to assume that most people want to get along. I don’t find that to be the case at work, in politics or even in families. Power seems to be the major motivation. No set of institutions can force people to get along who don’t want to get along with each other.

The writers of the Constitution understood this, so they limited the political power that any group can amass. They saw a tyranny of the majority as worse than the tyranny of a monarch. But the majority decided they didn’t need limits on their power and destroyed the institutions that limited it. The majority has unlimited power today. The natural lust for power guarantees that people will fight will all their energy to grab that power. Pity any institution that tries to stand in their way.

To get along, someone needs to convince the majority to surrender some of its power.