is there a parallel here to gunpowder? i.e. european feudal era cavalry, expensive and needing trained warrior elites to maintain - giving way to relatively untrained masses, and then the eventual political grants to reward those masses? The only difference is that you seem to be saying that bronze (centralized kingdoms) -> iron (democratized, more polities) but definitely the shift from cavalry to gunpowder saw the reverse.
I believe there is a parallel. But with gunpowder you’d have two different effects. Firearms would lead to decentralization (in theory), while cannons would lead to centralization due to costs. If you are interested, Michael-David Mangini and Casey Petrof have a working paper on the gunpowder revolution in medieval Europe.
I think it was Mokyr (the latest Nobel in Economics) who argued that the invention of gunpowder led to the fall of feudalism. The argument is that gunpowder shifted the balance of power from the the feudal lords to the monarchs as it reduced the costs of controlling the territory from a central capital. Also, these new technologies led to more capital intensive and larger armies. That helped to centralize power in the monarch and incentivized better taxation systems which empowered the monarch more.
The question is whether technology of the future will lead to further centralization or fragmentation. This seems to be dependent on the scale of supply chains required. I think AI tends to favor centralization, while biotech tends to favor fragmentation.
is there a parallel here to gunpowder? i.e. european feudal era cavalry, expensive and needing trained warrior elites to maintain - giving way to relatively untrained masses, and then the eventual political grants to reward those masses? The only difference is that you seem to be saying that bronze (centralized kingdoms) -> iron (democratized, more polities) but definitely the shift from cavalry to gunpowder saw the reverse.
I believe there is a parallel. But with gunpowder you’d have two different effects. Firearms would lead to decentralization (in theory), while cannons would lead to centralization due to costs. If you are interested, Michael-David Mangini and Casey Petrof have a working paper on the gunpowder revolution in medieval Europe.
I think it was Mokyr (the latest Nobel in Economics) who argued that the invention of gunpowder led to the fall of feudalism. The argument is that gunpowder shifted the balance of power from the the feudal lords to the monarchs as it reduced the costs of controlling the territory from a central capital. Also, these new technologies led to more capital intensive and larger armies. That helped to centralize power in the monarch and incentivized better taxation systems which empowered the monarch more.
The question is whether technology of the future will lead to further centralization or fragmentation. This seems to be dependent on the scale of supply chains required. I think AI tends to favor centralization, while biotech tends to favor fragmentation.
this makes me we want to play/make a Bronze-Iron Age 4x game