Advantage of Backwardness

Full Title or Meme

When an advanced civilization is overcome by a more nimble one that is not burdened by the existing political and economic structures.

Context

The American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen developed the concept of the Advantage of Backwardness in his essay Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, published in 1915. Veblen did not use the term Advantage of Backwardness himself as is noted below.

In Ancient Times

• Cyprian Broodbank makes the case that the great empires of antiquity ossified and shrank because that could not overcome the limits of one-man rule. The Greek islands on the other hand, benefited from the Advantage of Backwardness and lack of a unifying leader to create a new civilization based on each islands contribution. Later empires learned to create bureaucracies that were able to survive longer, but they too eventually succumbed to other civilizations that used the Advantage of Backwardness in their turn.
• Part of the source of backwardness was the "Sea Peoples" that brought down the Egyptian empire that include Greeks with a new type of slashing sword and agile sailing vessels. In the aftermath of their destruction of older empires the Greeks became the source of modern Western thought. The Greeks worshiped gods of fixity and liquidity, the safe harbor and the roving seafarer. They thrived by keeping these two in precarious balance.

In Recent Times

• Also known as; The backward advantage, which implies that a still-developing country can take advantage of their low wages to gain an advantage in manufacturing. This was the position of the Southern States in the United States after the Civil War.
• Thorstein Veblen described Germany's advantage in moving from a feudal society to an industrial society has have a competitive advantage due to skipping the intermediate steps taken by England since Elizabeth I relaxed some strictures that enabled the growth of guilds and other structures that impeded England but were absent in Germany.
• The advantage seem to appear when the central authority gets all that it wants and become conservative and ceases to innovate. The less developed and more adventuresome surrounding people begin to feed on the lethargic center. One advantage to a federal government is that various states contained in the federation are left with some flexibility and can contend, one against the others and thus keeping the whole federation able to grow and thrive where more centralized states would ossify and diminish.

As Technology Quickens

• The speed at which technology advances has become so fast that even during a single lifetime generations of technology come and go. In this space it seems that the Advantage of Backwardness has become a curse. Wisdom that comes with age is no longer of value and generations on the web are but a decade long. All technologists seem to feel that the lessons from the past have no meaning and they all want to start over with a clear slate. In reality that means that all of them want to be free to repeat all of the failures from past technologies and avoid learning from other's mistakes. These technologists are rewarded by the market when they find a formula which will sell well, so there is little to hold them back. The new motto of those that ignore the past wisdom is to win big or die trying.