What makes some societies/countries more successful than others. We will assume all individuals are equally good. All are striving to better their lives. Then how the societies differ. In one society, people are having to work hard to achieve a certain quality of life whereas in another the same is made available for every member without any effort.
We will use the human development index as a measure of this success for now. This will make it easier to verify any hypothesis as we have a good amount of data available.
I believe the fundamental cause for development is with devising cooperative strategies. The most important one being the legislature. With the legislature, a society can ‘consciously’ alter the ‘environment’ to align the individual’s immediate optimal strategy with that of society in the long run. In other words, often an inviduals optimal strategy might be moving the system to a local optimal point, whereas with a legislature and a designed reward and punishment, the system moves towards global optimum and benefits all individuals. Thus, a society can move faster towards the ideal state. The legislature itself could be designed to use feedback to achieve this goal. Democracy as we call this is being in practice in many societies today. Yet we see variation among societies. How do we explain this? Is voting the only criterion for democracy. How do we define democracy? Can we compare two democracies and say one is better than the other? Is it possible to measure democracy of a given practice?
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