Chris Coyne — 2023 Markets and Society Conference Keynote
TL;DR
Economist Chris Coyne contrasts state-imposed 'Pax Imperii' with emergent 'Pax Hominum,' arguing that top-down peacemaking relies on four flawed assumptions about elite capabilities while generating illiberal violence abroad and eroding domestic liberty through expanded state power.
⚖️ Two Models of Peace 3 insights
Pax Imperii: The State-Centric View
This dominant perspective treats peace as a government-provided public good requiring vertical, coercive power (Leviathan) to impose order, exemplified by historical hegemonies like Pax Romana and Pax Americana.
Pax Hominum: The Emergent Alternative
Bottom-up peace arises from horizontal, voluntary cooperation among ordinary people exercising diverse, context-specific skills within heterogeneous cultures rather than through centralized design.
Mainline Political Economy Framework
Drawing on Boettke, Haeffele, and Storr, this tradition emphasizes that social cooperation is possible without central direction despite human cognitive limits, highlighting spontaneous order over expert control.
🎯 Four Fallacies of Top-Down Peacemaking 4 insights
The Design Delusion
Proponents assume a 'peacemaking power elite' can deliberately engineer complex peace institutions, ignoring Hayekian insights and James Scott's critique in 'Seeing Like a State' that order emerges from human action but not human design.
The Knowledge Problem
Elites lack access to tacit, context-specific local knowledge necessary for functional institutions, causing imposed systems to fail against the friction of 'institutional stickiness' with underlying cultural practices.
Incentive Misalignment
Public choice theory reveals that democratic frictions and bureaucratic pathologies lead elites to pursue narrow opportunism rather than the public interest, particularly when intervening in foreign polities where accountability is absent.
The Imperial Myth
The assumption that imperialism promotes liberal values contradicts Caroline Elkins' documentation in 'Legacy of Violence' that violence was endemic to the British Empire, serving as both means and end of colonial rule.
⚠️ The Illiberal Consequences 3 insights
Crypto-Imperialism Crowds Out Self-Governance
Interventions marketed as fostering freedom often impose arrangements that prevent the development of genuine liberal skills, creating what Vincent Ostrom calls 'crypto imperialism' or 'jack boot peace' through militarized authoritarianism.
Domestic Liberty Erosion
Preparing for global interventions requires expansive discretionary state power that destroys constitutional constraints and informal norms, permanently expanding government scale and scope while reducing freedoms at home (Higgs, Hall).
Violence as Means and End
Rather than exporting liberty, top-down peacemaking generates violence and dependency that undermine liberal values abroad while corrupting institutional integrity within the intervening nation.
Bottom Line
Genuine liberal peace requires abandoning imperial interventions in favor of bottom-up processes that respect local knowledge, emergent voluntary cooperation, and the severe limits of centralized social engineering.
More from Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen)
View all
Henry Farrell on AI as a Social Technology
Political economist Henry Farrell argues that AI systems like large language models function as 'social technologies'—complex institutional mechanisms for processing collective cultural information akin to markets and bureaucracies—rather than as individual agentic intelligences, warning that misunderstanding this distinction creates risks of ideational bubbles when AI narratives collide with reality.
Shruti Rajagopalan and Milan Vaishnav on India's Delimitation Dilemma
India faces a constitutional crisis over parliamentary representation frozen to 1971 census data, creating severe malapportionment where high-population northern states are under-represented compared to southern states, while delayed censuses and political gridlock prevent resolution.
Chandran Kukathas — 2023 Markets and Society Conference Keynote
Chandran Kukathas argues that an open society is fundamentally a regime of toleration that cannot be morally limited, as any attempt to restrict toleration by appealing to truth, justice, or reason begs the question; instead, departing from toleration is always an exercise of power, not moral justification.
Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur on India’s Precocious Development Odyssey
Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur argue that India's unprecedented early adoption of universal adult franchise created a 'precocious' development model where democracy served as both the glue for nation-building and a constraint on state capacity, leading to unique patterns of stability alongside inefficient redistribution captured by powerful interest groups.