[The Hierophant]

Positive feedback processes also have an intrinsic tendency to reach a limit and they often are characterized by path dependency, instability and amplification of shocks. Thus, such processes and models based on them are characterized by catastrophic discontinuities, and by chaotic, far-from-equilibrium dynamics (Hallinan, 1997; Wallerstein, 1997). Such processes often generate tendencies toward increased inequality and polarization, especially when applied to control of scarce resources such as wealth or land, power or influence.

The self-reinforcing character of Collins's geopolitical arguments (1992) can be simply represented by a positive feedback loop of domination, directly analogous to the positive feedback of advantage and accumulation. Control of population, coercive resources or strategic areas may help a power to acquire further resources. The game of Risk in which territories yield armies, and armies yield territories, is a simplified archetype of this dynamic. Myrdal stresses that the loop of cumulative causation is unstable -- the way up is the way down. The amplification of advantages generates a beneficent cycle, but if anything brings that process to an end the amplification of deficits will generate a vicious cycle (unless one happens to end on the knife edge of an unstable equilibrium). The process of domination is unstable and path dependent in the same way. The accumulation loop generates inequality, which is reinforced by the transfers of resources from the poor to the affluent, and the process of domination should generate power inequality and concentration of power in the same way.

Though not global, they were world-systems in exhausting or nearly exhausting the reach of commercial, political and cultural networks. Thus they constitute a reasonably large universe of inter-societal systems that came into existence, expanded and then been merged or incorporated into larger systems. Chase-Dunn and Hall's analysis of the dynamics governing the "rise and demise" of such systems marries a theory of semiperipheral institutional innovation to the model of circumscription developed by Carneiro, Harris, and Cohen (Chase-Dunn & Hall 1997; Sanderson, 1995). The theory of semiperipheral innovation has roots in Trotsky's concept of uneven and combined development, Gershenkron's analysis of the "advantages of backwardness," Service's distinction between adaptation and adaptivity, and Quigley's concept of the institutionalization of an instrument of expansion (Chase-Dunn & Hall 1997: 78-82). The dominant core states are institutionally inflexible because of the sunk costs of commitment to institutional forms which are the basis of their core position. Peripheral areas are also locked into the existing institutional structures both by their poverty and by ties to the core, but some semiperipheral societies are in a position where it is possible to make structural innovations and to implement them.

Well, indeed. [img]smile.gif[/img] Ownership and productivity eh? The core of modern economics, and the basis for human imperialism throughout the ages.