Caleb Watney: Well, welcome. Thank you for coming today to our Politics of Game of Thrones panel. So, this is a panel that is cohosted by the R Street Institute and the Cato Institute. My name is Caleb Watney. I am a tech policy analyst at the R Street Institute and I’ll be your moderator for the evening. We are so excited to have all of you here, and thanks for all of you joining online. I know we are going to have a really interesting conversation today. To start off, I’d like to ask all of you to silence your phones, but please do not turn them off. We’d love all of you to join in on the conversation on Twitter, using the hashtag #GOTpolitics, which you can find, also, on the bottom of the screen behind me. We will also be taking some questions towards the end for the panel from Twitter and from the live audience, so I’d love to see your thumbs twiddling. We also have a Snapchat filter, which many of you may already know, but if you don’t, it’s there. So be sure to use that. Before we officially begin, I’d just like to give a brief note on why are we doing this. I think kind of a common refrain that I hear whenever I bring up this topic is you know, obviously Game of Thrones is set in the setting it is because George R. R. Martin just really likes writing about swordfights and, you know, we don’t need to analyze any further into why, you know, they are stuck in a particular place and technological progress, or what the institutions and the incentives of the world are, because they are all just created because George R. R. Martin wants it to be that way. But one, that misses out on a lot of fun. You know, we are all nerds. We all love politics and economics and so might as well apply our tools and our interests to this world that we love and enjoy. Secondly, I think George R. R. Martin would have wanted it. I wanted to read here, there is a really good quote. He is talking about one of his main mentors, Tolkien. And he says, “Ruling is hard. And this was my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man the land would prosper. We look at history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien didn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all those orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone and all of the orcs aren’t gone — they’re in the mountains. Did Aragon pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them all? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?” So, I think, you know, George R. R. Martin is certainly one with an eye for world-building, and I think it’s a testament, really, to his writing that we can draw implications of the system and of the world he’s built that go far beyond his original, I think, view of the world. And then, finally, I think this gives us a valuable opportunity to examine the way that institutions, philosophy, and incentives can affect economic development, even in a fictional world. In some ways, we can use fiction to run simulations of our own history over and over again, changing subtle variables and seeing what might have happened. What would human society have looked like if our winters were unpredictable and lasted years at a time? What is magic and dragons existed? Presumably these changes would have had big effects on our economic and political development, but in what ways? And those are the kinds of questions that we are here to answer tonight. So, without further ado, I will introduce our panelists. I am going to keep it short because you should really know all of these people already, but we have, immediately to my right, Peter Suderman, who is a senior editor at Reason. He writes regularly on healthcare, the federal budget, tech policy, and pop culture. He is also a pop culture columnist for Vox. Next, we have Matt Yglesias, who is a cofounder and executive editor at Vox.com, where he writes on basically every policy topic imaginable, including Game of Thrones. He is also the author of the book most recently, The Rent is Too Damn High. Next, we have Ilya Somin, who is an adjunct scholar here at the Cato Institute. He is also a professor of law at the George Mason University. He is the author of numerous books, his most recent of which is the second edition of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. And, finally, we have Alyssa Rosenberg, who is a culture columnist at the Washington Post’s opinion section and, in my opinion, she gives some of the smartest critiques of the series in her weekly reviews at the Post.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, thank you. That’s very nice of you to say.
Caleb Watney: So, these are our panelists and we have many questions to talk about. Broadly we will be talking in four major categories: economics, international relations, law, and culture, and then we’ll be taking some audience questions towards the end. But first, because I know you guys are all wondering, what did you think of the episode last night?
Peter Suderman: I mean, it’s a mixed bag, right? It’s pretty exciting, but this season has really felt different than a lot of the previous seasons. It has been much faster, much more plot-driven, and much more cinematic. I think we saw all of that last night. It’s really big in a way that is very crowd-pleasing, that’s kind of driven by fan service, by a desire to show off what they can do in terms of effects on a TV budget. At the same time, I think it lacks some of the sort of nuanced, methodical, character-driven pacing of the previous seasons, in particular of the kind of the best seasons, two, three, and four. And so, we’re just not, you know, the show has changed in some ways and, like I said, it’s very exciting, very thrilling. It’s also in some ways a little bit disappointing, a little bit frustrating at this point.
Matt Yglesias: Well, I was saying to Peter before the panel started that the last time I was here at Cato it was for a discussion of William Fischel’s latest book about zoning, and the turnout wasn’t quite as high. And, so, I was very glad to see that in the most recent episode we had that little discussion of the size of King’s Landing and the sort of possible economic benefits of urban agglomeration and…
Peter Suderman: So you really liked it.
Matt Yglesias: …I finally got the zoning angle for Game of Thrones that I have been needing professionally.
Ilya Somin: It so happens that I am a property professor, among other things, so I, too, write about zoning. It is one of the relatively few issues that Matt and I tend to agree about, that there is too much zoning. That may also be the case in King’s Landing, where it seems like although there may be a million people there, there are not enough poor people who are able to move there and find financial opportunities. That is why, as Tyrion says, the wages in King’s Landing are higher than they are in the north, and yet not very many workers have moved from the north to King’s Landing. That said, I tend to agree with Peter’s assessment of the episode in the season. I think this does have some of the virtues we associate with Game of Thrones. There is some great dialogue, some great acting, and some great set-piece scenes. On the other hand, the plot has been moving on in an onrush that increasingly doesn’t make a lot of sense in some cases. The rules of the world have been broken repeatedly, or, perhaps, there has been an unanticipated burst of technological development, such as ravens that fly at the speed of light…
Alyssa Rosenberg: Zombie ice dragons.
Ilya Somin: …yes…
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, zombie ice dragons are the big…
Ilya Somin: Well, that, actually, is not inconsistent with the rules of the world.
Alyssa Rosenberg: It’s a technological development, though, Ilya.
Ilya Somin: The rules of a fictional world. It isn’t consistent with our world, I think. But, on the other hand, in Game of Thrones we have a sense of how fast armies and ships and the like can move or be built, but now we have Euron mass-producing a thousand ships in a few months, and we have armies moving at the speed of World War II panzer divisions, and other such developments. And I understand why the needs of the plot require this, but it’s somewhat unfortunate. There is also, I think, some plot-driven stupidity by some of the characters, which occurred during this season, such as in the ill-fated white expedition, which we might talk about later. That said, whatever they are doing, they must be doing something right because we are all still watching the movie and this event has a much — watching the show — this event has a much bigger turnout than any other think-tank panel that I have ever been on, so you can’t criticize them too much.
Alyssa Rosenberg: All I’m saying is that if the Cato Institute has me on as a fellow to essentially be the resident expert on ice zombies and, you know, horns that bring down giant walls and, you know, the Lord of Light, I can guarantee this kind of turnout ever week. So, clearly, you know, I am doing something right. So, as the resident person who gets paid to sit around and read 900-page fantasy novels rather than know anything about zoning, and, as someone who cares a lot about these novels, I found the end of this season really frustrating. Are we operating, this is a spoiler-filled zone, okay? Everyone here cool with that? I’m not going to break anybody’s heart if I start talking in great and nerdy detail? I think the thing that I found really frustrating about this, the end of this season of Game of Thrones, is that it made me feel foolish for having taken the text seriously. And, most importantly, for having taken seriously the idea that there was an underlying magical set of rules and structures that was supposed to be emerging over the course of the novels that would, perhaps, be surprising, but would make the world of the show make sense. And, you know, a lot of what happened in this season was casting these sorts of things aside. You know, we’ve had seven seasons worth of discussions about what it would take to bring down the wall, a structure that is built by, you know, one of the founding sort of people of Westeros that theoretically has special magical protection and oh, it just takes ice zombies. It’s not the horn of winter, it’s not that there is, you know, anything special about what has to happen here, it’s just a special effect. I also just felt like the series treated us a little bit like we were stupid for the first time. I mean this is a show that lays down breadcrumbs for you. Who here was not aware that R plus L equaled J before, say, the fourth episode of this season? Anyone willing to raise a hand and brave that confession? I mean, this is a series where, if you watch it closely, you’ll figure things out. You don’t actually need a, you know, sort of grumpy kid who has been spending too much time communing with a tree to give you a monologue that explains where someone came from. And so, I felt like this was not the version of the show that is its best self, either as sort of a dense fantasy text or as a sort of grand television spectacle, and that was a little bit of a bummer.
Caleb Watney: Well, I appreciate all of your honesty in terms of a blatant assessment of the show. Without further ado, we will move to our first section, which is economics. So, I think a good way of kind of being introduced to these ideas and a lot of the institutions that form this world that we are all very much enthralled with is sort of the big question. Westeros, as far as we know, has 8,000 years of recorded history. The last major economic development that we are aware of was the invention of steel when the Andals invaded about 6,000 years ago. And in the meantime, you know, we have developed driverless cars 2,000 years after the invention of steel. 6,000 years later, though, they are still stuck in basically the same world. And I think that begs the question: Why? And I think lots of people have interesting ideas in here. Some people have suggested it’s like a scarcity of dragons, or maybe it is the volatility of seasonal patterns makes it difficult it plan, or, you know, maybe the Maesters need institutional reform and they are holding back progress, but I would love to know the thoughts of our panelists.
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, if I can start with the really nerdy response, in the novels, and to a lesser extent in the show, there is the idea that there was this city called Valyria that was kind of a legendary city of wonder, a place of great innovation, magic, lots of dragons, plenty of Targaryens, that was destroyed in this mysterious catastrophe. And so, to a certain extent, you can look at Game of Thrones as a story not about a society where technological and economic advancement has stopped, but where something that has been sort of — there is an event that has yet to be explained and maybe will never be explained that either slowed progress or, kind of through development into the past. I would note that there are — you have things like wildfires, you have developments in, I think, weapons production, but less so in sort of the economy, or the everyday economy itself.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So, Westeros does have several factors that economic theorists and historians point to as slowing down growth. One is actually longstanding political unity. For hundreds or thousands of years the Targaryens dominated Westeros in a single unified state and, historically, competition between states, like in early modern Europe, for example, has been important to economic development. Secondly, the institution of the Maesters probably is a problem. They monopolize, for the most part, at least intellectual development and scientific thought and the like, and that slows progress. Moreover, they are oriented to just conserving existing knowledge, like recovering old manuscripts and the like rather than creating new knowledge, and they don’t even do a very good job of conserving the existing knowledge, as we’ve seen in this current season. So, that’s potentially a problem. The fact that there is a severe winter that lasts many years and comes along periodically, that may hold up progress. Some people also claim that the presence of magic and dragons may hold down technological development, though I am not sure this is correct. I would think there are some technologies that are actually synergistic with magic or with dragons that can work well along with them, like, you know, luxury compartments that can help you fly on a dragon, or make better use of dragons and the like…
Alyssa Rosenberg: It’s a limited market, though. It’s like private jets.
Ilya Somin: It’s a limited market at first, but, well, at first only the rich could fly jets. Today, almost everybody can. You would imagine at first only a few wealthy people, dragon queens or whatnot, can fly on a dragon, but as you breed more transport dragons and so forth over time, maybe the average common person of Westeros could commute by dragon, and the like.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Don’t you get into resource problems there, though? I mean, dragons need to eat a lot to keep growing, so…
Ilya Somin: There’s a whole big continent.
Alyssa Rosenberg: What population of dragons can Westeros actually support?
Peter Suderman: Is there a dragon production facility, and what are the regulations that are prohibiting it from being more effective?
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, obviously the dragon pit is an example of overregulation, right?
Ilya Somin: So, the dragon pit was actually a late development, but early on, of course, the Targaryens did try to monopolize the breeding of dragons for the obvious reason that they didn’t want anybody else to have any and offset their military advantage. So, there are all these factors that may stifle economic development. That said, I frankly don’t think there are enough to lead to anything like 6,000 years of total stagnation, and even 0.1% growth per year should have led to a lot more development than you actually have here, so I feel like either there’s sort of supernatural forces that are creating economic stagnation, maybe the gods of the seven, or sort of the other gods in the show, or to suggest the needs of the plot where you want 6,000 years of medieval history and background as opposed to 6,000 years of technological development.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, we’re at Cato, so I also have to ask isn’t a monarchy a problem? I mean, you have the contrast between Westeros, which is dominated by, you know, a royal monarchy and a bunch of sort of stagnant, noble houses, and then you have the free cities like Braavos and Volantis…
Ilya Somin: And why aren’t they developing more? That’s actually an even bigger mystery than why Westeros doesn’t develop, because Essos, unlike Westeros, does have many of the preconditions for development. There is competition between jurisdictions, there is trade, there is financial institutions…
Alyssa Rosenberg: There is a new service economy — you have the Faceless Men.
Ilya Somin: Yeah, there’s an excellent service economy. They have servants of all kinds, including some for sale, right?
Matt Yglesias: I mean I do think that the Essos contrast is key to sort of think about this, because the social institutions over there are so different and it seems to me that Essos is portrayed as somewhat more prosperous than Westeros. They have a more sophisticated society, a somewhat higher level of material culture, but it’s not fundamentally different even though they have what seems like a more conducive to growth sort of system of political fragmentation. They don’t have Maesters monopolizing knowledge. They are still held back by something. I think that you have to assume that it has something to do with the seasons, right? The variable-length seasons are so prominent in the world-building and the mythology of Planetos that they must be playing a critical role here, because it’s not really clear to me that the plot in any way does require the 6,000 years of stagnation, right? If you just kind of chopped some zeros off a few of those numbers, I don’t know that anything in the core of the story that we have seen would actually look all that different, just as the multi-length seasons have not played a crucial role in what we’ve seen so far, but we do know that these are sort of two pillars of world-building, right? That the society is very old, and the society is afflicted by a very odd, sort of, weather. And there must be some kind of linkage between them, that probably a huge amount of the savings and planning that exists is very narrowly focused on trying to preserve food for the winters, right, rather than on building up other kinds of productive resources. It also must really make it difficult. I was joking about zoning but it’s hard to develop the kind of agricultural surpluses that would let you have cities and more specialization of labor when you not only need to grow enough food to feed people, but you need to grow enough food to feed people sort of through an unknown, no harvest, three, four, six, seven — we don’t even know how long these winters last, but you can imagine that would be really sort of devastating to urban life, and that it would impact both continents that we’ve seen even though they have different kinds of societies. Another issue, potentially, is coal. There is a tradition, in the historical literature, at any rate, of arguing that the presence of coal deposits was really critical to the industrial revolution in England. As far as we know, they don’t have any of that there, for reasons that are somewhat unclear, but it is possible that you simply can’t develop the technology of industrialization without those kinds of natural resources.
Caleb Watney: If I may just, quickly, on that point — do you think that wildfire is stable enough? I mean, it seems to be substance with the largest output per gram of any substance we’ve seen in Westeros. Can wildfire be used to fuel an energy renaissance?
Alyssa Rosenberg: I think part of the problem is that you sort of can’t stop it once it’s started, right? It’s not like it’s variable current. It’s, you know, you set it off, you better be prepared to burn it for a long time.
Matt Yglesias: The Valeryans had some kind of firepits, right?
Alyssa Rosenberg: You know, I would have to check on that.
Matt Yglesias: That’s…
Peter Suderman: So, I mean part of the problem here is that, so we have, with wildfire or with whatever, is beyond all of these kinds of social technological explanations which I do think have some merit, and I think the seasons are obviously a big part of it, what Westeros and the rest of the world of Game of Thrones lacks is the idea of progress. And you just don’t see anyone in the show ever have a sense that things will be radically different fifty, or a hundred, or five hundred years from now that basically assumed that things will be the — people will still be living in castles, and pulling carts behind them, and there may be a few dragons around, but mostly we’ll do things with donkeys and mules, and people will fight with swords. There’s not, for example, there’s not a lot of science fiction that you can find in the world of Game of Thrones, because people don’t have this sense that the world of the future is one that is going to be radically different, and that’s true in human history as well. The idea of economic progress, of technological progress, is a relatively new one and it’s an idea that is extremely powerful once a society kind of gets it in its head, but it’s just not an idea that has ever come to Westeros, that has ever come to the world of Game of Thrones, and instead what they have is an idea that everything is a zero-sum game, that everything is stagnant, that either you win or you lose, or you bend the knee, and that’s it. And when that’s the idea that everyone, including, and especially, the people in power and the people who are the leadership of the society and kind of set the tone for how a society is going to think, then no one is going to think well, let’s harness wildfire and figure out how to start an energy revolution. They are just going to think wildfire is dangerous, I guess we can use it as a weapon like we’ve always done for 6,000 years.
Alyssa Rosenberg: I want to push back on that though a little bit, Peter, because you do have a number of characters in the series who do see the possibility that things can be different, that history can be different. Their focus just isn’t economic, it’s social. You have Mance Rayder who is the king beyond the wall who has this unbelievably daring idea of putting together a confederation of people who will still be relatively free and able to choose their leaders, but they’ll be unified for the first time as a society and they’ll do this unbelievably daring thing of relocating their entire society to a new place. To a certain extent, Daenerys Targaryen has the same plan, right? I mean, she wants to unify the folks in Slaver’s Bay, the Dothraki, she wants to get the Dothraki to do something that they explicitly don’t do, which is to cross the Narrow Sea, go to Westeros and to conquer and then somehow assimilate into this new society, so I don’t think it’s quite true that people don’t have an idea of what progress looks like. I mean, you have Tyrion Lannister talking about alternative governance strategies for Westeros. It’s just that those people are thinking politically and socially, not economically.
Ilya Somin: I would push back in some ways even more in that I don’t think you have to have the idea of progress to make progress. There wasn’t much in the way of an idea of progress in the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans, they still made a lot of progress. The actual Middle Ages, which, today, we think of oh, that was a period of total stagnation, like in Westeros, maybe that stereotype gave Martin the idea for what he did but there was actually a lot of technological progress in the Middle Ages, particularly in agriculture, in trade and shipbuilding, the invention of the stirrup occurred during the early Middle Ages, that was a big deal, the invention of crop rotation and other agricultural techniques. And so even if people don’t have a grand idea of progress, they might have an idea if I can harness wildfire to help produce things I can make a lot of money. If I can build a better mousetrap and catch more mice, you know, the lord or the merchant will pay be more money than for the cruddy mousetrap which is currently on the market and so forth, and those kinds of things did cause progress in the Middle Ages at a slower rate than later, but they did occur and it seems like in the world of Westeros there are people who are entrepreneurial in that sort of way that we see. We see merchants, we see the Iron Bank, we see people who do this kind of thing and want to expect it over time. There would be gradual technology progress even if poor institutions and poor incentives prevented it from being as great as it could be.
Matt Yglesias: It is worth saying, I mean, I don’t think that we know it’s been entirely stagnant, that we focus mostly on the sort of military equipment that they fight with, which appears very medieval. Plate mail, swords, things like that. Their communication technology is much more advanced than medieval Europe in terms of their well-trained birds. And their advances in the life sciences and medicine seem to be beyond what we had in medieval Europe, and that’s even before the resurrections and things like that. You know, in the books they seem to have some understand of how to disinfect wounds, for example, fairly effectively. They have a moon tea, which seems to work for — produce medical abortions, so there are some — we also, it’s not entirely clear to me what the state of their shipbuilding technology is, but at times Euron seems to be able to sail very quickly.
Ilya Somin: And build ships very quickly, too.
Matt Yglesias: Build ships very quickly, so, you know we don’t — they clearly have not developed gunpowder or the printing press, which are important, sort of marquis inventions in real-world history, but there were some aspects in which they have a very impressive technological domain, and we don’t see much of consumer goods one way or the other and don’t really know what exists there, and we, in particular, don’t know what’s new. So, it’s possible that we are seeing a very, very slow progress rather than an absolute stagnation.
Peter Suderman: On the other hand, the ravens are getting much faster very rapidly.
Matt Yglesias: Yes.
Ilya Somin: So, they do have very advanced genetic engineering of ravens which seem to have been developed in the course of the season. Also, very fast shipbuilding and clearly there must be mechanized armies at this point, because they are moving at the rate of World War II armies rather than at the rate of medieval armies, even at the rate that their own armies moved in seasons two, three, and four during the War of the Five Kings.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Also, the Three-Eyed Raven appears to be the internet.
Ilya Somin: Yeah.
Matt Yglesias: A tree Wikipedia.
Ilya Somin: And his information is much more reliable than what you can get on the internet, too, so in that respect they are more advanced technologically than we are.
Caleb Watney: So, it seems to me, specifically in Westeros, the Maesters are a major barrier to progress. So, if you were hired as Archmaester of the Citadel, what institutional reforms would you undertake to facilitate growth in Westeros?
Alyssa Rosenberg: Admit women. Team Gilly!
Ilya Somin: I would break up the system of citadels, make them independent, and they’d compete with each other. It might have the same effect on technological and philosophical development in Westeros that the Reformation had in Western Europe, where the Catholic Church’s monopoly in intellectual life was broken and you had competing centers. And yes, including women, including other groups, including people who don’t believe in a dominant religion. That would be a good thing, too.
Matt Yglesias: Yeah, the effort also to create the Maesters as a politically neutral institution, I can see why they think that’s a good idea. It sounds very high-minded, but it also seems, in many ways, counterproductive to having competing, you know, efforts if different political authorities are trying to be a friendly terrain to scholars to obtain and use more advanced technology to take advantage of it. You can imagine both, sort of, competition among the scholars, but also much more emphasis on, I’m not sure if you would call it commercialization, but, at any rate, putting information to use rather than kind of hoarding it in old books. It seems bad. The use of celibacy as well as a sort of requirement for entry is creating a very strong disincentive for people to pursue any kind of knowledge or scholarship. You are giving up any sort of claim to family life and certain aspects of human pleasure and, you know, that doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Ilya Somin: It wasn’t a great idea in Star Wars, either, with the Jedi.
Caleb Watney: Yeah. So, just kind of — sorry, Peter, did you want to go ahead?
Peter Suderman: I mean, I agree with all of this. I guess I would just sort of say that what the Maesters should be pushing for is liberal democratic self-government and you know, and a kind of much more open and transparent society that is not ruled by blood and by, you know, by authoritarians who may or may not be nice and may or may not have the best interests of their people at heart, and that is, you know, sort of traditionally a function of, kind of, of academia and of political advisors, and it is one that they are not fulfilling very well.
Caleb Watney: Certainly. So, next we are going to move on to international relations, and I think a good entry into this is Daenerys at the beginning of season seven. So, she has alliances all over Westeros, she has a massive navy, and, most importantly, she has three dragons. She considers whether or not she should just go in and bomb King’s Landing and just kind of end the war there, but she ultimately chooses not to. And I think you can draw some comparisons there to the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Should she have firebombed King’s Landing, resulting in massive civilian casualties but maybe ending the war more decisively early, or did she end up doing the right thing?
Peter Suderman: She should have taken out the Night King with her dragon before trying to save Jon. And, I mean, once you’ve made — I don’t think I know about the first decision. I have like a very strong idea. Obviously, you shouldn’t like, you know, kill the thousands or millions of people in the world that you’re trying to rule, but if you’re trying to destroy the White Walkers, take out the White Walkers who it’s useful to destroy. She had an opportunity and she missed it.
Matt Yglesias: I — the dragon fire also seems to me to be a more targeted weapon than the dialogue suggested. I mean it was a confusing thing where you are being told that the only way to attack King’s Landing with the dragons would be to destroy the whole city, but then you see the dragons aiming very precise beams of fire, suggesting you could have just hit the Red Keep and then, you know, maybe thrown in some firefighters there. So, there were some odd plot dynamics in this season and that, to me, was like really high on the list.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So, this is an example of the plot-driven stupidity that I was discussing earlier, that at the end of season six you have a situation where Daenerys and her allies have an enormous advantage over Cersei and her forces, but the screenwriter needed some way for this conflict to drag out over all of season seven, as opposed to Daenerys just coming in, taking King’s Landing, crushing the Lannister resistance, and we are on to something else relatively quickly, and it’s pretty obvious that doing that not only would have been better strategy, but it would have been more humane, too, because it would have saved a great deal in terms of lives and treasure, even aside from the looming war against the Night King. As already mentioned, you know, dragons are not super precise, they may not be quite as good as drones, but they’re not nuclear weapons either. You could probably burn down just the palace plus whatever barracks the Lannister troops are in and, you know, there would be some civilian casualties from that, but not as many as you get from the fighting that actually occurs, where Highgarden gets pillaged and a lot of it destroyed, or from some of the other fighting that we see. Moreover, it could be that a lot of Lannister troops and allies would just surrender once they see the writing on the wall. Cersei isn’t exactly all that popular, and so it could be that there would be even less casualties than seemed to be the case. This is a sufficiently obvious strategy that a competent military or political strategist should have just suggested it to Daenerys and she should have readily agreed. The only reason why they adopt Tyrion’s overcomplicated plan is that that’s one of the few ways to make this part of the plot actually interesting and exciting over a period of five or six episodes, as opposed to just a rapid cakewalk where Daenerys destroys the enemy forces. But maybe, maybe there’s a hidden feminist message here, because Daenerys is forced to leave behind her best military strategist in Essos, Daario Naharis, the mercenary leader who was her friend with benefits, for the previous couple of seasons, and he says why are you leaving me behind? A king would have no problem bringing a mistress with him, so why shouldn’t the queen have the same rights? She’s like no, I can’t afford to do this, the nobility of Westeros wouldn’t like it if I were doing this and have to leave open the possibility of a political marriage. So, because there is this sexist double standard that Daenerys has to accommodate herself to, many, many lives are lost because she has to rely on Tyrion for her military advice, and while he’s a smart guy, he clearly is not a competent military strategist.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Let’s talk about Daario Naharis for a minute. I mean, I think obviously a sellsword who helps you sneak into a couple of cities is not necessarily the person who you need to help plan an invasion of conquest. I also think it’s completely insane that she leaves him behind to rule Slaver’s Bay and the fact that the series has not adequately grappled with the fact that she has conquered the society and then essentially left it behind to fall apart is really, really, really screwed up to me, but, you know, I just write about them, I don’t actually write them. I think that, to go back to the initial comparison, it’s not quite apt, right? I mean, there’s a difference between bombing a society that you simply want to get to submit to you and that you’re going to leave and you’re going to go home. And conquering a place that you expect to rule and to establish a dynasty in for a very long time, you know, maybe you can use dragons in a targeted way. That said, the Red Keep is pretty well-fortified, so if Cersei, and Gregor Clegane, and Qyburn go down and have the world’s most depressing coffee klatch in, you know, the Black Cells or something, you are not necessarily going to be able to get her with a targeted dragon fire strike. And if you melt, you know, a city that has an enormous amount of both the population and the economic activity of Westeros, that’s probably not the greatest move long-term. I think a big problem with this series beyond the questions of plot that Ilya talks about is that, you know, there isn’t a sense of the society that Dany is here to conquer, right? In the earlier seasons, we have some more sense of the small folk. You have the folks who team up with the Brotherhood Without Banners, you have people like Gendry who turns out to be someone very famous and important, but is not at the moment. You have people like Hot Pies. You have a sense of world that Dany wants to conquer. That has essentially disappeared by this point in the series. You know, right now the populous of Westeros is essentially being represented by Randall and Dickon Tarly shortly before they are roasted alive. And, you know, so those are the eyes through which you are seeing this conquering force. And, frankly, you know, this sort of invasion of not just a lady on a dragon but people from a bunch of different cultures who, you know, the people in Westeros have no experience with, and so you have no real sense of how anyone is going to respond to Dany and that makes her, I think, dilemmas harder to parse, because you don’t see her weighing a population that she actually wants to rule, you just see her moving pieces around on the painted table.
Peter Suderman: Yeah, I think this is probably why I lean against firebombing King’s Landing. I mean, so much of the show is not just concerned with the taking of power, but with establishing that it is legitimate, and part of the reason why she hesitates, a big part, is because she wants to establish herself as a legitimate ruler who is accepted by the people of this world and if you go and take, and use dragon fire to destroy even a small part of King’s Landing, that is something people are going to remember and it’s going to make it much harder to rule in the aftermath.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Also, if you part of a lineage where your father had a habit of just burning alive anyone who bothered him, it’s probably not a great idea to just incinerate an enormous number of people at will if you want to prove that you’re different. It’s just a thought.
Caleb Watney: I think, though, this kind of connects well and actually, Alyssa, you mentioned earlier, Daario being stuck in Meereen. She is so obsessed with, you know, being seen as legitimate in Westeros that she hightails it out of Meereen, but given institutional stickiness, should we expect that slavery is just going to, you know, leave Meereen? Won’t it collapse back? Do we have any faith that Daario will be able to, you know, maintain the break in institutions that she tried to put in there? And if you don’t think it will stick, what should she have done?
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, in the novel, slavery comes back to Astapor, the first city that she conquers. You know, she leaves a theoretically wise council of people to rule them and then finds out six months later that people are desperately desirous to sell themselves back into slavery so that they can have something to do and something to eat, so I think the institutional stickiness in Slaver’s Bay I would suspect is going to be low.
Ilya Somin: So, one of the strengths of the series is that it does emphasize how effective transformation of social problems and political systems does require institutional solutions and not just putting the right person in power. And, both in Westeros and in Essos, there is a lot of episodes and scenes, in both the books and the movie — oh that’s right, a TV series — which emphasized this, you know, whether Meereen will revert back or not I think is kind of iffy. On the one hand, she doesn’t really create that much in the way of an institutional foundation. On the other hand, she does exterminate by this point most of the preexisting ruling class, therefore it will be very hard for them to get back into power, if only because most of them are dead, they were killed in the initial sack of the city in the Harpy rebellion, and then other such incidents in the Battle of Meereen. Moreover, to the extent that most of the population, including many of the people in power, or former slaves, or people sympathetic to former slaves, it seems unlikely that slavery will come back in its old form, but it is very possible that some other form of tyranny or either some other form of forced labor, perhaps, will come back. And while Daario is a very good military strategist, it’s not that likely that he is a very competent political leader or has great ideas for how to govern Meereen. Maybe Daenerys has sent back some occasional instructions saying well here’s some, you know, some other institutions you can establish, but I’m not super optimistic on that point thought I think it may well end up being better in the preexisting system so the real criteria by which you judge progress is not, is there an ideal Jeffersonian democracy here that has been established, it’s is it better than a situation where a large proportion of population was in slavery? I think the answer to that question might be yes, even though overall by any objective standard it still might be a pretty sucky society.
Matt Yglesias: You know, I think the track record of this kind of violent overthrow of an existing political order is often not that great. You know, we see in the real world that there’s a tendency for a sort of a new regime created by force to itself become authoritarian. I think the question here is, you know, is the baseline condition in old Meereen so bad that even a not-that-great new situation you’d say, you know, it’s still an improvement, all things considered. I think that’s what Ilya was saying. You could also imagine, though, a situation, you know, Russian Revolution style where you take a pretty bad regime, overthrow it, and eventually what consolidates in its place is something that is worse, and, you know, there’s not a lot of thoughtfulness about this, right? I mean, when Daenerys wrestles with this to an extent when she is the queen about what am I doing here, but when she makes the decision to do the handoff to Daario, she becomes very, I would say, cavalier about you know, what’s the actual situation here? I mean, what’s Daario’s competency to do this job in a way that’s consistent with her values, given how difficult she, herself, has found it to execute on the plan that she had. I think that, on some level, it seems like she is recognizing that the task is harder than she had realized initially and is happy to sort of wash her hands of it. We don’t see her all that interested when she makes it over to Dragonstone in checking in on Daario’s progress and, you know, I think that’s telling in some ways.
Ilya Somin: Neither Daenerys nor virtually all the other leaders that we see really think in terms of institutions, as opposed to just putting the right person in power, so, presumably she puts Daario in charge because, A, she has to put him somewhere and she can’t take him with her, and B, because it seems like he is still in love with her, he is not going to betray her — probably, she hopes — and, you know, that’s about as deeply as she had thought about this particular matter and she doesn’t ask, you know, should there be some kind of checks and balances? You know, what protections should there be for the population? Should there be a, you know, a Bill of Rights, or even a Magna Carta, or something of the sort, these kinds of thoughts don’t really cross her mind.
Peter Suderman: I mean, regardless of what happens I think it reflects rather poorly on Daenerys as a leader. And, you know, in some ways the show sets her up to be this kind of moral, you know, this extremely moral person who we are supposed to, you know, think oh, this is a good leader, and in fact she is really not. I mean, like all Targaryens, she is kind of power mad and doesn’t really think about her subjects except to the extent that they make her feel good.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, and part of what we see, both in Meereen and in Westeros, is that she is relatively uninterested in the actual questions of governance, right? I mean, when Tyrion raises the possibility of figuring out a succession sort of as a way of broaching what the actual form of government is going to be like, she basically has a temper tantrum. You know, in Meereen, she is basically leaving behind her hunky sellsword because he is nice, or loyal, or he thinks she is really hot and so he won’t betray her, I mean there’s not a theory of governance here. There’s a lot of talk about breaking the wheel, but there is very little analysis of what the wheel is made of, what it would take to break it, and what you build in its place to have as a structure to hold up the rest of your society.
Caleb Watney: So, what would it mean to break the wheel? Tyrion, you know, brings up, I think a couple episodes ago, that she should start thinking about her succession plan and he kind of briefly lists, you know, you could try doing a more democratic election. Would that work in Westeros? What’s the best strategy for her to practically break the wheel?
Matt Yglesias: I mean, it seems like you need some kind of move toward a rule of law. I mean, I think that even talking about how are you going to select the next king or queen is almost not quite the point. As far as we can tell, there are no real legal institutions at all operating. They have this trial by combat system that is absurd…
Peter Suderman: Or sometimes trial by Sansa saying you’re dead.
Matt Yglesias: Right. And there’s a brief moment, right, as the High Sparrow and his movement begin to sort of gain steam, when you could imagine a kind of productive tension between church and state emerging that would create some kind of competing power centers and agreed-upon rules, although it instead immediately tips toward him seeming to have absolute power and then Cersei blowing everybody up and then people seeming to accept that as a legitimate source of political authority. But this is the crucial development, I think, that you see in societies as they begin to take off before any kind of real political democracy you have some sort of checks and balances on the power of the king, some kind of acknowledge limits, and Daenerys does not seem at all inclined to that. The reliance on dragons that comes from her family and that she has, herself, is very, is antithetical to the notion of some kind of a social compact with other competing elements because she monopolizes the dragons.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, the closest thing you have to a colonel of both the rule of law and a democratic system is the Night’s Watch, right? I mean, the Night’s Watch is the social institution that sort of stands apart from any particular regime, but provides a ballast to it, right? If you have committed a crime either, you know, against person or property or against the regime, you can go to the wall, have that wiped out, but also be sort of removed from politics. The wall itself is governed by a rough rule of law if you desert, if you are treasonous to it, theoretically if you run off to Mole’s Town and get a little something, something, you can be punished in a variety of ways. You have a democratic election system, you have sort of a governance structure underneath the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and part of what is really sad about the story of the Night’s Watch over the series is that you see that become corrupted and fall apart. You know, you have the massacre at Craster’s, when Lord Commander Mormont leads the rangers beyond the wall that sort of upends that structure that has been durable and then is no longer. Part of what is sort of dangerous that you see happening with Dany right now, nobody is running off to consult with poor Dolorous Edd at Castle Black, they are just running around essentially performing the functions of the Night’s Watch rather than incorporating any of that expertise beyond sort of Tormund and Jon and, you know, bits and bobs of all of that floating around. So, you have this nascent institution that, you know, has opinions about how society should be run, has expertise, is not necessarily sort of as cloistered as the Maesters, and that provides a, you know, sort of a social outlet in society, but over the course of the series it falls apart.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So, I think the key here that unifies many of these comments is thinking in institutional terms and also of decentralization of power, so competing power centers, like actually emerge in medieval Europe, free cities, merchant’s guilds, trading centers, nobles who had some kind of authority that couldn’t just be overridden by the crown anytime and there are a lot of other things like that. In Westeros, virtually all the competing forces, despite their differences on other issues, they still think in personalistic terms, putting the right person in power, in particularly the right person on the throne. So, I think the problem is not that Daenerys doesn’t care about the people or that some other ruler does, but I think she actually does, at least more than the others. She frees tens of thousands of slaves, that’s more than any of the others have accomplished to any significant degree, but she, too, has this intellectual limitation that she thinks mainly in personalistic terms. She talks about breaking the wheel, and so there’s a sense it can be a different system, but it seems like her thinking about what that system would be like hasn’t progressed beyond, I will be on the throne and I will not be a bad person like my father was, like Cersei is, and like all these other people are, and, you know, once I’ve done that everything will, you know, naturally work itself out. And you can see well, she’s obviously stupid and blind, but this is a way of thinking which is endemic to that society and actually too much of our real-world history, as well. We see it even today in liberal democratic societies, where candidates promise us things like, I will bring change you can believe in, or, you know, give me power, I alone can do it, I will solve your problems. That’s a better and easier campaign strategy than saying well, you know, I will build some good institutions and there will be some good incentives to promote more economic growth, right? That doesn’t fit in your thirty-second ad very well. And, so, given that we are prone to this way of thinking ourselves, it shouldn’t surprise us that people in personalistic societies are even more prone to it.
Peter Suderman: Yeah, I mean the first step towards breaking the wheel is to figure out a transition mechanism, and those are very difficult to figure out in any society. If you look at some of the economics research on cooperation games, it is really, really difficult to setup rules where people will effectively and productively cooperate with each other. In most of these games the typical outcome is failure, where everybody just starts punishing each other, because altruistic punishers end up basically saying no, I don’t care if it hurts me, I am actually going to hurt you because I dislike you for some reason. I’m not going to trade with you, I’m not going to do anything productive. And so, probably what they need is some sort of pilot program. Some way that they can setup like little cities, little zones…
Alyssa Rosenberg: Wasn’t that supposed to be Slaver’s Bay? I mean, Slaver’s Bay is essentially the sort of experimentation zone.
Peter Suderman: I mean, but not just one. You need, you know, half a dozen, dozens of these things, and you need to build in conditions for success and conditions for failure and with any society you need to spend some time figuring out what works, and that’s something that no one in Game of Thrones does. They are not really concerned with the quality of the rules and the effectiveness of the social rules that surround them, because everybody is either out to side with power or take it for themselves. And so you don’t really see, you just don’t see a kind of systematic thinking about how to setup a society that is going to be materially different, that is going to be productive, that is going to advance and be better, not just for those who are taking power, but for the subjects and for the little people who are sort of underneath them.
Matt Yglesias: I mean, we have talked about this a lot in the context of Daenerys, but I think it’s even more striking with Robb Stark, who is trying to found a whole new political entity, the Kingdom of the North, he proclaimed himself king, and then the first thing he does is sort of invade the Westerlands. Because he knows how to fight and he knows who his enemies are, and he has this military cast behind him that has anointed him as the king, but he doesn’t have any vision at any point in time of…
Peter Suderman: Institutional inertia is real.
Matt Yglesias: …what the Kingdom of the North is, or even what it is for, or why a typical northern person who doesn’t have a personal grudge against the Lannister family would want to care about any of this, and it leads him in some ways to his ultimately unsound, kind of, military approach, right? I mean, why can’t they wage a defensive battle to secure their homes and their homeland is in part, I think, tied to the fact that they don’t have a natural agenda for building this new kingdom, this new nation. When Jon puts himself in essentially the same position, he at least has the excuse that, you know, these zombies are a much more real and acute threat to common people than the Lannisters ever were and the sort of need to mobilize for the military emergency I think you can sympathize with. But, to proclaim yourself the political leader of a brand new country and then have nothing to say about how things are going to impact you, you started with that quote about, you know, Aragorn’s tax policy, but I mean, what’s Robb Stark’s tax policy?
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, and part of what you see dying in the early season, in the first season of Game of Thrones, is that distinct sense of northern identity. I mean, you know, you have Bran saying, you know, our way is the old way, going out to see his father behead the deserter from the Night’s Watch. I mean, Ned Stark is sort of the repository of the idea of a particular kind of northern justice and identity and also, frankly, a defensive strategy. One of the things you see in the first season is him telling Howland Reed, who is this old comrade of his, to secure the Neck, which is this sort of narrow passage to the north in this swampy region. And so, again, there is the idea of the defensive strategy, the distinct northern kingdom. And remember, I mean, these were the Seven Kingdoms. Robb and Jon aren’t so much trying to found something new as kind of break the confederacy of the Seven Kingdoms and return to a time when the north was ruled independently, but that institutional memory and that sort of cultural identity have been disintegrating, and disintegrate further over the course of the series. In a lot of ways Game of Thrones is a story about losing all of the tools that you need to break the wheel and build something new.
Caleb Watney: Yeah. Well, that brings us to our final section, which is on culture. So, my first question here is: Assuming the White Walkers can be driven back, Dany has still brought over a massive tribe of Dothraki, who are very different culturally from, you know, the rest of Westeros’s society. So, how can the leaders facilitate assimilation of the Dothraki into Westeros’s society, assuming that assimilation is even desirable or feasible.
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, not just the Dothraki, the Unsullied, right? You effectively imported five or six thousand people who can’t have kids, who are incredibly culturally distinct, almost to the point of monasticism. And so, it’s not just, you know, let’s bring a lot of Mongol hoards to England, you have a bunch of different groups who, frankly, don’t seem poised to get along terribly well. I mean, the Unsullied also don’t have, you know, skills other than fighting people, so you’ve got sort of a surplus of people who are essentially professional soldiers.
Ilya Somin: So, both of these groups pose problems, like one is more severe than the others. The Unsullied are actually sort of a self-limiting problem…
Alyssa Rosenberg: Yeah.
Ilya Somin: …for one thing they cannot reproduce, and therefore there really will not be sort of a permanent restive minority. Moreover, as they get older they would be less of a problem. Lots of social science shows that as men age they are less likely to be violent, they are less likely to engage in the kind of activities that we see younger men engaging in in Westeros, but also sometimes in real life. And, in addition, there is an obvious potential role for them. They can be a kind of standing army and Westeros is large enough and wealthy enough they can probably support a few thousand Unsullied as a standing army, especially since there will be some attrition from the war against the Night King. There probably already has been attrition of the Unsullied. One of the logistical issues they haven’t dealt with well is you know, how do the Unsullied find replacements for casualties, since no more new Unsullied, presumably I hope, are being produced. The Dothraki are much more a problem, partly because there are many more of them. They are a whole society, not just a military unit, and obviously they have a culture of rape and pillage and other unsavory kinds of activities, to the extent that the historical analogy to them is the Mongols, there is actually a history of the Mongols over time settling down in some of the areas they conquered, particularly in China, and to some degree assimilating one can imagine that, you know, they could take up professions like raising horses or even farming, and the like, and some of them also could do long-term military service depending on whether Daenerys wants to fight additional wars or not, assuming she is still in power at the end of conflict. But this would be more of a problem than the other one, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem that she has thought carefully about, though it might be mitigated somewhat in that she’s not just their leader now, she’s this great sort of mythical religious figure, so at least for a time they might obey orders from her that they don’t particularly like just because they hold her so much in awe, but if she ends up trying to suppress their culture and do things which they consider really unnatural or unpleasant or just not much fun, you know, over time that loyalty might win. Maybe there would be a follow-up series, you know, tales of the Dothraki or something, and how they try to assimilate to Westeros or fail to do so.
Matt Yglesias: And optimistically, Westeros does seem to have a fairly robust tradition of religious toleration that is unlike the history of Europe, that you have the old gods and the new, they seem to tolerate the Growned God perhaps to a fault over there, and the Iron islanders, though, are an interesting perhaps precursor of what we are looking at with the Dothraki, where they have been incorporated into the Seven Kingdoms, but never really in a comfortable way, right? There’s this recurrence throughout history of Iron islander rebellions, strong, effective kings kind of try and keep their antics tamped down, and they raid elsewhere, but it’s been a system for, you know, sort of getting them to pledge personal allegiance to various kinds of kings without actually following the law in any kind of way, and I think that that would be the sort of, to me, risk with the Dothraki, is that they will remain loyal to Daenerys that to the extent that she delivers sort of personal, forceful orders to them, don’t do this, don’t do that, you know, they will listen to her but that fundamentally this is a group of people that is not interested in sort of settling down and becoming small-scale farmers or whatever it is that you might do in Westeros and they don’t have the institutional capacity to sort of enforce that kind of rule on them. They have also, I mean, they have come here as conquerors and it is at odds with Daenerys’s aspiration to not just sort of burn everyone to death, right? I mean, if she did come in and just sort of kill everyone, then you could assimilate the Dothraki as a new, kind of ruling class, but she doesn’t want to do that, but then you’re going to have a real challenge of coexistence.
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean…
Peter Suderman: I think is where the rule of law nonviolence, you know, the expectation of nonviolence comes in, right? And that’s just not something that Daenerys has ever had for the Dothraki, for over reasons, right? She has, in fact, expected them to be quite violent, encouraged them, and so, you know, integration means that you are going to have to have, and the idea of equality under the law, and consistence. Perhaps not overly harsh, but consistent punishment for infractions, as well as kind of a concerted effort to integrate the Dothraki into society and to give them economic opportunity you have to show them that there is something better than the, you know, the life of horse riding and rape and pillage, which, you know, might be a little bit difficult, but I think this is just, this is one of those issues where someone like Daenerys is going to have a really hard time thinking about this simply because she is so disinterested in questions of institutional incentives and the idea of a kind of basic equality under the law.
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, I think, to circle back around, though, we know that the Dothraki are riding hard up the Kingsroad, they are supposed to be at Winterfell in a fortnight, existential threats can also be a great transformer. One thing we’ve seen that since Jon let the wildlings through the wall, and got murdered for it, is that the existential threat faced by the north has pretty much eliminated the problems that everyone expected to emerge when the wildlings crossed the wall. Tormund is commanding at Eastwatch and that’s apparently going okay. You know, that has not been some sort of recurring problem for Sansa and Arya up at Winterfell. You know, maybe one of the things about the Night King is not only does he turn everyone he touches into dead people, but turns everyone he faces into citizens of Westeros.
Ilya Somin: Maybe, but I think a lot of this also is tied into the economic issues that we started out with and that with both the Dothraki and the Ironborn, one of the main reasons why they rape and pillage is because it is a lot better than the alternatives that they have available to them, so you can either scrounge for a living on the Iron Islands, you know, among the rocks or whatever, or you can, you know, rape, pillage, and steal cool stuff. And that second alternative looks pretty good compared to the first one, and similarly, with the, you know, the Dothraki, and it’s only if there is a job market and economic growth which provides opportunity. And this is actually true with real-world immigration in the U.S. Immigrants have much lower crime rates than natives. One reason why because they integrate into the job market. In countries where refugees don’t integrate into the job market, the job market has closed, like in some European countries the situation is worse. So, hereto having a more dynamic economic system, if that exists, you might say you know what, risking my life is not as good an idea as doubling or tripling my wealth over the next ten years without risking my life. If, on the other hand, the only alternative is either near starvation or rape and pillage, go rape and pillage would be the, you know, the answer to that for many people.
Caleb Watney: Well, I am next going to move us into taking some questions from Twitter, and then also from the audience. So, I’ll start off with one from Twitter: Thinking about sort of Game of Thrones houses as almost corporate entities, how can they maintain policy goals over successive generations? Is there kind of like a principal actor problem here?
Ilya Somin: I don’t think necessarily because unlike corporations, these are essentially family businesses, right? And the reason, ideally at least, why people can trust each other is they are all family, they all have this same goal of keeping up the wealth and power of the house over time. Now, in families like the Lannisters and the Targaryens and some others, this sort of breaks down and you have sibling antagonisms or even people killing their parents and so forth, but in general part of the reason for family-run institutions is precisely to reduce principal wage and problems, to make it easier for people to trust each other. Of course you do face the problem that sometimes the most competent person is not actually a member of the family, and that’s one reason why the family-run business model is not always the best model for a lot of social institutions, but for more sort of personalistic societies which are overall low-trust societies, it sort of makes sense and you see time and again even a dysfunctional family like the Lannisters, we are all Lannisters, we should be able to get together, we should serve the family and, you know, we see that recently with Sansa and Arya, the Stark sisters, getting back together and so forth. So, this is a society where it’s on the whole much easier to build trust between relatives than it is to build trust in more impersonal ways.
Peter Suderman: Clear mission statements. And I’m not entirely kidding. I’m a little bit kidding. The Lannisters are known for what? They always pay their debts, and this is something that is a clear part of the family identity that has been passed down through generations and has stuck. And it is because it is clear, it is easy to teach, and then can demonstrate its importance to the family’s fortunes, both politically and economically. And so those sorts of mission statements can help the families maintain a kind of a clarity about what they want to do, what they exist to do, and to keep that going through successive generations.
Caleb Watney: Great. Next question: Which of the four major religions, the Seven, the Lord of Light, the red god, or the Drowned God, seems the most conducive to ongoing societal development?
Matt Yglesias: Well, the Lord of Light can bring people back from the dead, which I think is pretty impressive. They dance over that pretty casually in the show. And like Jon mentions it and then people are like, oh, that’s interesting. There’s no like well, maybe we should track down the woman who did that, and even if we think she gave some bad advice in the past, like put her to work, try to understand this, talk to the Maesters, see how it works, I mean this is part of what we were talking about, the lack of progress there. I mean, it’s a sort of known fact that some of these red priests can resurrect people, but nobody seems to really like hone in on that fact or try to explore it or exploit in any kind of way, but it’s definitely an impressive quality.
Ilya Somin: One of the many reasons why the White expedition was very foolish is that they lost Thoros of Myr, a man who is much more valuable than the White because he actually can raise people from the dead, which seems like a pretty useful skill that you might want to have. It just seems that way to me. I doubt that any of these religions are really all that conducive to progress but I do think historically religions that are more pluralistic may be more conducive to it in that a monotheistic religion makes a strong claim this is the only god, anybody who doesn’t believe in that god or our particular interpretation of him is a heretic and should be suppressed, for obvious reasons that’s more problematic for intellectual and scientific progress in a religion that says well, there’s a bunch of gods. There might be more. It’s sort of pluralistic in the way that perhaps ancient Greek and Roman religion was, where they pretty readily assimilated new ideas and even new gods from other societies because the claims of the existing gods were less clearly exclusive. That said, you know, none of these religions are all that oriented towards progress and it may be that either you need some sort of reformation within the existing religion or you need more secular belief systems rising or some combination of the two.
Caleb Watney: Great. We’ll take one more question from Twitter, which is: Could the Unsullied function as some sort of administrative group like Ottoman janissaries?
Ilya Somin: The janissaries were not an administrative group. They were actually mercenaries in a special unit of troops in the Ottoman Empire, so yes, they could be like janissaries in that a military force that is of a different ethnic or racial group than the dominant population and it is kept out of politics but obviously it is self-limiting because they will get older or there will be casualties and they can’t really be replaced, whereas, of course, the janissaries could.
Caleb Watney: Great. Okay, we are going to take a couple of questions from the audience now. Sir — up front in the red shirt.
Audience Member #1: So, what we’ve been doing so far is kind of in-universe analysis of Westeros, but stepping back, you know, the god of Westeros is George R. R. Martin and he is the one that has been interfering with things and making them what they are. The showrunners, obviously of the TV show, but George R. R. Martin is known for subverting expectations over and over again in his fiction. And if you would think about something, what is the ultimate expectation of the series of books and shows that is going to be subverted by George in the future if he ever finishes it?
Alyssa Rosenberg: Please!
Audience Member #1: Or is not finishing it the subverted expectation?
Alyssa Rosenberg: Well, I mean I have to say, you know The Wheel of Time series kind of beat him to that and Brandon Sanderson has already said that he will not finish Game of Thrones because of the sexual and violent content in the series. I mean, I wrote a piece about this earlier this year and I think that, you know, when it comes down to it, high fantasy is generally a story about a hero who does something good with magic, and by his personal goodness, restores order to the world. And I think that there are two ways that you can subvert that narrative, right? Either the hero doesn’t restore order to the world, the Night King conquers Westeros and sits on a cold throne and the continent becomes dead and completely stagnant, or you can have a story where the hero is on some level victorious but is so sort of morally and psychologically destroyed by the experience that it’s impossible to feel any pleasure in the victory. And you know, to a certain extent you get a little bit of that in Tolkien. You know, Frodo can’t really live in human society anymore and has to go off and live among the Elves, but come on, that’s a pretty good option. The Elves are awesome. But I think, I mean, one, there has been a certain amount of speculation that Jon is this figure from the novels who is not, sort of not as prominent from the show but this figure of legend, Azor Ahai, who threw off the Long Night by tempering this magical sword that Stannis Baratheon is supposed to have. It’s really amazing how much of this stuff is just lingering around my brain. I wonder what would happen if I just deleted all of it. I would probably, you know, win the Nobel Prize. But so, in the legend, Azor Ahai tempers this magical sword by killing his wife with it. And so, you could see an ending of this where Jon kills Dany, thereby forging a magical sword that allows him to kill the Night King, but what is it worth it if he doesn’t have love, or something like that. So, I mean, I think either you don’t get the happy ending, or the happy is so compromised that it sort of plays against your enjoyment of it. Those would be my two guesses.
Ilya Somin: There’s a third type of subversion that could happen, and that is, instead of the outcome either being an ambiguous ending or a sad ending which would be one type of subversion, it could be that there might be a kind of happy ending, but it occurs through some kind of institutional change as opposed to the right person, the good person coming to power. So, instead of Aragorn getting on the throne and ruling for a century and solving the problems of Middle Earth to some degree, you have some kind of more institutional fix, though I would not that some of the issues with Aragorn are dealt with in the appendices in the Lord of the Rings, where it is described that people didn’t just live happily ever after and he did do some institutional changes, so perhaps that could be our next panel, the appendices to Lord of the Rings and the institutional lessons that they teach us.
Alyssa Rosenberg: I’m there. I’m here for it.
Ilya Somin: Great.
Matt Yglesias: You know, I mean, it’s possible that the Night King is going to come down to King’s Landing, he is going to raise a lot of the points that we had here, and say you know, you guys really need to think about the structure of your society or something. I mean, he seems to have things pretty well together as far as we can tell up north.
Ilya Somin: Need to think about integrating the undead better.
Matt Yglesias: Right. And, you know, like, what are you doing, Dothraki, like this just doesn’t really make sense, and some off-stage characters we’ve forgotten about. Poor Edmure, I think, is still kicking around somewhere, and he could work out a deal, and, you know, that would subvert things.
Peter Suderman: I mean the big question that George R. R. Martin is asking with the series is do heroes win by virtue of being heroes? And maybe even in a larger way, do heroes even exist? Is this idea of a good person, an essentially good person who deserves to win, is that something that is real? And, so, my expectation is a lot like Alyssa’s, that the end will in some profound and substantive way answer no, or we can’t really be sure of that.
Caleb Watney: Great. We’ll take one more question.
Alyssa Rosenberg: You’re drawing this out here.
Caleb Watney: I want you to raise your hand higher, show that you really want it. Sir in the green shirt.
Ilya Somin: When you play the game of hands…
Alyssa Rosenberg: You raise or you die.
Caleb Watney: You get chosen or you don’t. There’s no dying.
Ilya Somin: All hands must die.
Audience Member #2: Could part of the economic stagnation be the Iron Bank’s fault and should they audit and end the Iron Bank?
Alyssa Rosenberg: I mean, as far as we can tell the Iron Bank lends to everybody, as opposed to, you know, House Lannister or House Tyrell, so they are probably a force for more economic — I don’t know the terms for these things, I’m just a critic — but they are probably a greater engine for economic growth than the systems of lending through the noble houses, wouldn’t we think, right? I mean, they are also, you know, run out of the free city of Bravos, and so my guess would be that they have a more expansive approach to all of this than some of the more traditional Westerosi banking institutions.
Peter Suderman: I’m not pro-Lannister or anything, but I’m always impressed by Cersei being the only person on the show who actually seems to understand fiscal policy and the use of, and like the importance of credit. And you saw this in this season, right, is that like she understands oh, I can borrow and I can use that and I can use our house’s good name…
Alyssa Rosenberg: But Golden Company was founded by Targaryen, you know, illegitimate Targaryens. They are not going for Cersei.
Matt Yglesias: It would be good to have historical price data about Westeros, and so we could really assess what is going on. I think…
Peter Suderman: This is what the Maesters should be doing, right?
Alyssa Rosenberg: We actually do have a certain amount of historical price data in the first novels, when you see prices escalating for just like regular — what is the word for things that you have to have? Staples.
Matt Yglesias: Yeah. Well, we see that wartime shortages cause price increases…
Alyssa Rosenberg: Sure.
Matt Yglesias: …but you know, if you look back at like the Dunk and Egg Tales, or the Princess and the Queen and try to look at prices from the distant past and see if there is an inflationary pattern, I am afraid in my brief efforts to look into this, Martin has been a little sloppy in terms of saying what things cost over time and it makes it difficult to really assess, you know, whether the Iron Bank is overprinting.
Ilya Somin: That’s the whole reason why they had to appoint Littlefinger as the master of coin so that he could sort out the price level and have an inflation target.
Caleb Watney: Great. Okay, and then the very last question, I just want a two-word answer from each of you. Who is the most likely to end up on the Iron Throne and who should end up on the Iron Throne? Feel free to start wherever you want.
Matt Yglesias: I think most likely it’s Jon, but it should be the Night King.
Ilya Somin: It’s a close call and most likely but probably Jon, though Daenerys has a very real possibility as well. On the other question, it’s very easy, no one.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Dolorous Edd institutes democratic socialism?
Peter Suderman: Yeah, my colleague Robby Soave made a compelling case that it is actually going to be Sansa who ends up ruling and that this last episode sort of is setting up Sansa as an effective administrator but I agree, the Iron Throne should be destroyed. There should be no one.
Caleb Watney: Great. Well, give a hand to all of our panelists. I think they deserve it.
