Astral Codex Ten

Czechia

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Czechia

Article

Czechia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 19, 2023 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “cases, like Czechia and Slovakia”; “European fertility rates over time. What happened in Czechia in the past ten years?”; “Czechia”. It most often appears alongside Europe, France, Germany.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: May 19, 2023
  • Last seen: August 29, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
15: European fertility rates over time. What happened in Czechia in the past ten years? (no, it doesn’t seem to be immigration). H/T @RichardHanania and @benbawan
Inline links: @RichardHanania, @benbawan
15: European fertility rates over time. What happened in Czechia in the past ten years? (no, it doesn’t seem to be immigration). H/T @RichardHanania and @benbawan 16: Freddie deBoer’s Derek Chauvin Defund Challenge asked defund-the-police advocates what their plan was for dealing with Derek Chauvin (the cop who killed George Floyd - presumably someone they think should face consequences, and presumably someone who wouldn’t voluntarily accept those consequences if there were no police to arrest him). The winning entry proposed a slightly modernized version of the medieval Icelandic system - a judge could assign a penalty like community service, and if he didn’t do it, the judge could declare him an “outlaw” and make it legal for any citizen to kill him. I agree this solves the problem, but it seemed more like the answer of a clever mechanism design appreciator and not a typical genuine defund-the-police advocate - I’m still curious what their answer is supposed to be.
Inline links: @RichardHanania, @benbawan, The winning entry, medieval Icelandic
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
PRAGUE, CZECHIA Contact: Daniel Hnyk Contact Info: betualphu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: Fixed Point. Koperníkova 6, 120 00 Praha, Česká Republika Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CCR+3C Group Link: https://fb.me/e/28OXui8Zy Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CCR+3C, https://fb.me/e/28OXui8Zy
GUERNSEY Contact: John Contact Info: Jangliss[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Dorset Arms Public Bar (right hand side) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CXVFF26+32J Czechia BRNO, CZECHIA Contact: Michal Keda Contact Info: adekcz[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 25, 07:00 PM Location: probably Skautský institut Brno, see FB event before the meetup, for up to date info Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXR5JX4+W7 Additional Notes: For further details see: https://www.facebook.com/events/420155810598847
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CXVFF26+32J, https://plus.codes/8FXR5JX4+W7, https://www.facebook.com/events/420155810598847
BRNO, CZECHIA Contact: Michal Keda Contact Info: adekcz[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 25, 07:00 PM Location: probably Skautský institut Brno, see FB event before the meetup, for up to date info Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXR5JX4+W7 Additional Notes: For further details see: https://www.facebook.com/events/420155810598847
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FXR5JX4+W7, https://www.facebook.com/events/420155810598847
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
Czechia is notorious for having a large amount of cops nominally, but relatively few beat cops. Most of the difference are bureaucrats formally employed by police.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Dominik Contact Info: dominik[dot]tujmer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 3, 5:30 PM Location: Grif Bar, Savska cesta 160, Zagreb Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQQQXR4+53 Group Link: email me for invite link CZECHIA PRAGUE Contact: Jiri N Contact Info: nadvornik[dot]jiri[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 31, 06:30 PM Location: Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FP Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1479695076556456/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQQQXR4+53