halalmoney on Nostr: Perplexity: the state is not primarily a normative ideal but an emergent coordination ...

Perplexity: the state is not primarily a normative ideal but an emergent coordination device imposed by material and incentive constraints:
States crystallize around culturally or geographically coherent blocs because:
shared language, norms, and expectations reduce the cost of enforcing rules and extracting revenue,
physical geography (rivers, mountains, coastlines) helps define clear, defensible boundaries for coercion and taxation.

These relatively stable “constraint bubbles” allow:
semi‑predictable law enforcement,
semi‑stable property regimes,
inter‑elite bargaining via institutions (armies, courts, bureaucracies) that partially internalize the incentive problem by tying rulers’ fates to some degree of order and long‑run revenue.

...the “state” is the least‑bad overlay of endogenous constraint on an otherwise unstable anarchic incentive landscape—functionally analogous to the way socialist planners, lacking market prices, try (and mostly fail) to impose exogenous constraints on the calculation problem