I remember spending a lot of time in my teenage years wondering how societies are possible. Noticing how difficult it is for people to get along, I wondered what the key mechanisms are underlying the impressive stability one finds in societies whose members can number in hundreds of millions, and even over a billion.It took me a while to realise that this apparent achievement had been puzzling humanity practically since the first complex societies began appearing.There is the Hobbesian idea...
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is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His latest book is Signals in the Noise: Notes on Penang, Malaysia and the World (Singapore: Faction Press) Homepage: wikibeng.com.