Hereditary Monarchy: At Least You Know Which Idiot Is Next

Hereditary monarchy seems like a ridiculous way to pick a leader, yet it dominates most of human political history. We argue the reason is transaction costs: succession systems survive when they settle “who rules next” cheaply enough to prevent recurring civil war. 
• Why hereditary monarchy is historically prevalent compared with democracy and universal suffrage 
• Why “divine right” stories often rationalize a choice people already find tolerable 
• Thomas Paine’s critique of hereditary succession and what it misses 
• Hobbes on the state of nature as what happens when sovereignty is contested 
• Succession as the master coordination problem of political order 
• Transaction costs applied to elections, enforcement, legitimacy, and rent seeking 
• Why elective monarchy can become an armed auction for total power 
• Bright line rules versus discretionary selection and why speed can beat “better” 
• How constitutional design lowers the cost of leadership transition when it works 
• The legitimacy problem and why dynasties converge on endogamy 
• The genetic consequences of endogamy and the Habsburg cautionary tale 
• Twedges, book recommendation, and a listener letter on board game “math trades” 

LINKS:

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, February 1776

Michael Munger, The Ugly Pig, 20224

A.P. Martinich, Thomas Hobbes:  A Biography, 1999.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

Neal Schultz, Suicide Kings: Hereditary Monarchy, 2025

Tbadel Barter App

Cosmos Institute, Coasian Bargaining at Scale, 2025

If you have questions or comments, or want to suggest a future topic, email the show at taitc.email@gmail.com !

You can follow Mike Munger on Twitter at @mungowitz 

Transcript

Season Kickoff And The Big Puzzle

Michael Munger 0:01

This is Mike Munger, the knower of important things from Duke University. This is the first podcast of season four and the first of the weekly summer episodes. Why is hereditary monarchy so common? For much of history, for many nations, some version of hereditary monarchy has been the system that seems best to survive. I asked Claude to do a rough estimate for all nations since 5000 BCE. What proportion of nation years have been governed by hereditary monarchy compared with democracy, especially universal suffrage democracy? Claude came up with a minimum of seventy percent, more likely close to eighty per cent of all nation years of the past seven thousand two hundred. That is seventy per cent of all people at all nations in any given year have been ruled by hereditary monarchy. Now for something like democracy, using the broadest definition, remember ancient Greece was actually oligarchic, as was the Roman Republic, but let's count them. The answer is five percent. If you want universal suffrage, it's about one percent. Why is hereditary monarchy so prevalent and so durable? Well, if you're listening to this podcast, you already know the answer. Two new twedges, a book at a week, a letter, and more. Straight at a Creedmoor, this is Tidy C.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

I thought they talk about a system where there were no transaction costs, but it's an imaginary system. There always are transaction costs.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

When it is costly to transact, institutions matter, and it is costly to transact.

Why Monarchy Dominates Human History

Michael Munger 2:05

Hereditary monarchy is on its face a preposterous arrangement. The person who will govern millions, commanding armies, levying taxes, making law, is not selected by merit, not by elections, not by the council of wise people, but by the biological accident of being born to the right person, usually the right father. Across recorded history, this system has been the dominant form of human government. Five continents, four millennia, it reappeared continuously and independently in civilizations that had no contact with one another. That is a puzzle demanding an explanation. Now the usual explanation is that kings and aristocrats constructed legitimizing ideologies, divine right, mandate of heaven, to entrench their power. That's true, but it's confusing cause and effect. That was the justification for doing the thing that people had decided that they wanted. It was a way of steam control. This might explain why incumbents preferred monarchy. It doesn't explain why subjects tolerated or even welcomed it, or why countries that used hereditary monarchy survived and prospered better than countries that did not. The better answer, I'll argue, is one that would have surprised nobody who's taken an economics course, it's transaction costs. Hereditary monarchy, for all its manifest irrationality as a personnel selection mechanism, solves a coordination problem that alternative arrangements solve, but far more expensively. The currency of that expense is blood. Still, people have questioned it. One of the most famous challenges was Thomas Paine in common sense, quoting, It is not so much the absurdity as the evil of hereditary succession which concerns mankind. Did it ensure a race of good and wise men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens the door to the foolish, the wicked, and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent. Selected from the rest of mankind, their minds are early poisoned by importance, and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions. I'll skip ahead a little bit in common sense, because pain anticipates the most likely argument. Quoting again The most plausible plea which hath ever been offered in favor of hereditary succession is that it preserves a nation from civil wars, and were this true it would be weighty. Whereas it is the most barefaced falsity ever imposed upon mankind, the whole history of England disowns the fact. Thirty kings and two miners have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the conquest, in which time, that's the Norman Conquest, in which time there have been, including the Revolution, no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions. Wherefore instead of making for peace it makes against it and destroys the very foundation it seems to

Thomas Paine Versus Hereditary Succession

Michael Munger 5:25

stand on. End of quote. That's fair enough, but our good friend Thomas Paine here is committing the pretty pig fallacy. It's quite true that hereditary monarchy, especially in England, was not all that successful in preventing wars. But all it has to be is better than the other systems, where you have a gigantic civil war every time a king dies. So to understand why hereditary succession is valuable, we have to understand what it replaces. Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, in the shadow of the English Civil War, gave the canonical account. In the state of nature, the condition without sovereign authority, life is, in his famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But this is not about a hypothetical prehistory, it's about what actually happens when sovereign authority dissolves or is contested. In chapter eight of Leviathan, Hobbes extends the analysis directly to the world of competing rulers. Though there had never been any time wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another, yet at all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointed and their eyes fixed on one another. So the state of nature is not merely the condition of primitive people, it's the condition between modern sovereigns. It's most relevantly

Hobbes And The Succession Problem

Michael Munger 6:58

for our purposes the condition within a polity, when the question of who rules is open to contest. So every form of government has to solve the succession problem. What happens when the current ruler dies, retires, is for some reason removed? In a democracy we hold elections. In an oligarchy a council deliberates. In a military dictatorship, a strong man may designate an heir, or doesn't, and ends up dying, and chaos follows. Hobbes recognized succession as the master problem of political ordering, and he addressed it with unusual precision in chapter 19 of Leviathan, of the several kinds of commonwealth by institution and of succession to the sovereign power. The key passage deserves quotation because it's quite lucid. Of all these forms of government, the matter being mortal, so that not only monarchs but also whole assemblies die, it is necessary for the conservation of the peace of men, that as there was order taken for an artificial man, so there will be order also taken for an artificial eternity of life, without which men that are governed by an assembly should return into the condition of war in every age, and they that are governed by one man as soon as their governor dieth. This artificial eternity is that which men call the right of succession. Now, admittedly, that's aspirational. That's what you're trying to achieve, to have smooth transitions of power. Sure, there often are not, but without hereditary monarchy, there's never a smooth transition of power. So let me read that again. Without which men that are governed by an assembly should return into the condition of war in every age, and they that are governed by one man as soon as their governor dieth. Succession is not a procedural nicety. It's the mechanism by which peace is not perpetually relitigated, relitigated, and refought at every death. So in the vocabulary of modern economics, it's the institution that eliminates a catastrophically costly recurring transaction and ex post recontracting. Hobbes then draws the logical conclusion. There is no perfect form of government. Go pretty pig, go pretty pig. There is no perfect form of government where the disposing of the succession is not in the present sovereign. Any arrangement, that the end of quote, any arrangement that leaves the succession undecided or contestable is by definition an imperfect form of government, because it reintroduces the problem that government was created to solve. Now, in a democracy, if you have legitimate elections, the outcomes of which are accepted even by the losers, that's a determinate way to be able to decide. But once again, if you lose that, you have the same problem that you would have in a monarchy without heredity.

Transaction Costs As The Explanation

Michael Munger 9:59

Well, let's translate Hobbes into the framework of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson. Transaction cost is any cost incurred in making an exchange or transfer. Search, negotiation, monitoring, enforcement. So the exchange at issue in succession is the transfer of political authority from one ruler to the next. We all agree we need one. Question is which one is it going to be? We'd all be better off if we could pick one, but I'll be better off still if I can pick mine, and you'll be better off still if you can pick yours. Different succession systems then have radically different transaction costs. Elective systems require at a minimum that someone determine who's eligible to vote, who's eligible to stand, how many votes, how will votes be counted, who enforces the result. Each of those steps is a site of potential contestation and rent seeking. When the stakes are total political power, if the government is not limited by the Constitution, the incentive to cheat, to bribe, to threaten, or to fight is at its maximum. Elective monarchy, which existed in the Holy Roman Empire and in Poland, was not an improvement over hereditary monarchy. It was a recurrent auction of rent seeking for supreme power, conducted among armed men with civil war as the dispute resolution mechanism. The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth's elective monarchy contributed directly to the Republic's instability and its ultimate partition. Hobbes saw this clearly. An elective king, he argued, is not truly a sovereign at all. Elective kings are not sovereigns but ministers of the sovereign, nor limited kings. Sovereigns but ministers of them that have the sovereign power. The real sovereign is whoever controls the election, and if the succession is genuinely open, if there is none that can give the sovereignty after the decease of him that was first elected, then the elected sovereign is quoting obliged by the law of nature to provide by establishing his successor to keep those that had trusted him with the government from relapsing into the miserable condition of civil war. End of quote. So what Hobbes is saying is even an elected ruler, if he's truly sovereign, is logically to comp is logically compelled, if he cares about his people, to convert his office into a hereditary one, because election and genuine sovereignty are always going to be intention, because they're can the elections are contestable. The fully rational elected sovereign must, to prevent civil war, clearly designate his successor, at which point he is creating a dynasty. Of course, you don't need a contested election where one candidate is saying that the election was stolen. Contested successions are simply like the elective case, but without the formalities of holding an election. If a ruler dies without a clear heir or if there are multiple claimants, the transaction cost of selecting the next ruler is paid in full in violence and the cost of rent seeking. The War of the Roses in England, 1455 to 1487, resulted from a contested plantagenet succession. The Thirty Years' War of 1618 through 1648

Why Elections Can Turn Violent

Michael Munger 13:20

was, among other things, a catastrophic contest over succession and sovereignty in Central Europe. The Roman Empire's year of the four emperors, 69 AD, demonstrated that even the greatest state in the ancient world would convulse when succession was unclear. These are not aberrations, they're the base rate for non-hereditary succession. Hereditary succession, by contrast, reduces the transaction cost of succession toward zero, not to zero, because there's always going to be disputed paternity, childless monarchs, rival claimants with distant blood relations, but toward zero. The rule the eldest legitimate son inherits is a bright line rule, and bright line rules are valuable precisely because they eliminate the negotiation and contestation that discretionary rules invite. It's very tempting to think, well, if we have a discretionary rule, we'll choose someone better. Yes, if you have a hereditary rule, you'll choose someone faster, and that may be better. When everyone knows in advance who the next king will be, there are no profitable coalitions to be built against him before the old king dies. The coordination problem is taken off the table. Now, Hobbes is admirably honest about what he's arguing. He doesn't claim that the hereditary monarchy is ideal. He acknowledges, in chapter 19, a list of genuine inconveniences of monarchy, including the risk that sovereignty descends upon an infant. But then he deploys what is essentially a transaction cost argument to rebut the objection. To say there is inconvenience in putting the use of the sovereign power into the hand of a man or an assembly of men is to say that all government is more inconvenient than confusion in civil war. End of quote. And of course, that's not true. Most of the time, government is much more convenient than confusion in civil war. It's not very hard to beat that. And this was not hypothetical for Hobbes. He was living through it over and over again. So Hobbes is not claiming that hereditary monarchy is good. It's that the alternative, an open question about who rules every time a king dies, is worse, much worse. And he identifies precisely where the danger in a minority regency comes from, not from the system, but from ambition. Quoting, and therefore all the danger that can be pretended must arise from the contention of those that for an office of so great honor and profit may become competitors. End of quote. The danger's not monarchy. The danger is competition for the office of being the monarch. Hereditary succession suppresses that competition by making it illegitimate and crucially by making it futile. If it's already settled, who will be king? There's nothing to compete for. Well, the transaction cost framework directs our attention to the right comparison. Questions never

Bright Line Rules Prevent Civil War

Michael Munger 16:18

is this institution perfect, because no institutions are. That's the point of the pretty pig problem. Question is always compared to what? Hereditary monarchy, compared to a system that reopens the succession question at each death or each step down from the presidency, is not really different, it's categorically superior along the one dimension that matters enormously. It does not repeatedly threaten to dissolve society back into the state of nature. So that explains the remarkable convergence across independent civilizations. The Zhao dynasty in China, pharaonic succession in Egypt, the Vedic kingdoms of India, the Mayan city-states, monarchies of West Africa. They all independently converged on hereditary succession as the dominant norm. It wasn't the product of some shared cultural inheritance, because these are disjoint cultures. It was the product of selection pressure. Politics that solved the succession problem survived. The nations that solved that problem survived. Polities that didn't dissolved, sometimes bloodily, sometimes by conquest, always expensively. Everybody loses. Hobbes makes the comparative point explicit when he observes that a large assembly is in practice no better than an infant monarch. Quoting, in great commonwealths, the sovereign assembly, in all great dangers and troubles, have need of costodes libertatus, that is, of dictators or protectors of their authority, which there are as much as temporary monarchs to whom for a time they may commit the entire exercise of their power, and have at the end of that time been oftener deprived thereof than infant kings by their protectors, regents, or any other tutors. Close quote. Assemblies, in other words, are so difficult to manage that they're like infant kings. They tend to produce monarchs anyway, the de facto strongman who resolves the coordination problem that the assembly cannot. Oliver Cromwell was functionally a monarch who was chosen because of the incapacity of the parliament to act. Augustus was functionally a monarch. The transaction cost of collective decision making under uncertainty are so high that individuals bearing emergency authority repeatedly converted temporary mandates into permanent rule. Well, it'd be easy to conclude that modernity has solved this problem, that democracy and constitutionalism have replaced succession with something better. And of course, they have. When they work, they have. There's no question that a constitutional republic is better than a hereditary monarch. Full stop,

Civilizations Converge On The Same Rule

Michael Munger 18:59

I don't want anything that I say to question that. A functioning constitutional monarchy is the best system of government that we have discovered. Written constitutions, fixed terms, electoral rules, judicial review substantially lower the transaction cost of leadership transition in stable democracies. But it's worth noting how much institutional design in modern democracies is devoted precisely to pre-committing to succession rules. The U.S. Constitution specifies a line of succession. The 25th Amendment addresses presidential incapacity. Electoral college rules, term limits, impeachment procedures are all mechanisms for pre-answering the question, who governs next, before the question becomes urgent because it's not answered. The entire apparatus of constitutional democracy is in no small part a sophisticated solution to the same transaction cost problem that Hobbes identified. An open succession question is a civil war waiting to happen. Where those institutions are weak, where constitutions are not honored, where militaries intervene, where elections are contested, the underlying Hobesian dynamic reasserts itself with predictable violence. The history of sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and the Middle East in the 20th century is substantially a history of polities that could not solve the succession problem reliably, and they have paid for it dearly over and over again. Now, hereditary succession solves the coordination problem of who rules next, but it immediately generates a second order problem, who is a legitimate heir. This requires not only a clear rule of descent, usually on the father's side, but also certainty about the mother's

When Assemblies Create Strongmen

Michael Munger 20:43

lineage and status. The solution most royal dynasties converge on was endogamy, the practice of marrying only within a recognized class of royals. If the queen is herself of royal blood, her children's legitimacy is beyond dispute. A commoner queen introduces questions. Is she faithful? Are those really the king's children? Is a child of mixed royal and common blood truly entitled to rule? Now these aren't really merely snobbish concerns, they're coordination problems in disguise. Any ambiguity about an heir's legitimacy is an invitation for a rival claimant to contest the succession. And contested successions are catastrophically expensive. That's just what we're trying to avoid. Royal endogamy was therefore a rational institutional response. It raised the cost of challenging an heir's legitimacy, that ensuring that both the patrilineal and matrilineal lines of descent were unimpeachable. But there's a problem. This solution carries a brutal genetic tax. When the eligible marriage pool is restricted to a small class of interrelated dynasties, and European royalty by the 19th century had become functionally a single extended family, the probability of inheriting Two copies of a deleterious recessive gene rises sharply with each generation. The Habsburg jaw, the hemophilia that spread from Queen Victoria through the royal houses of Russia, Spain, and Prussia, the extraordinary rate of infant mortality among inbred royal lines, none of those are coincidences. They're the predictable consequence of a selection rule that prioritized coordination certainty over genetic diversity. A monarch who married outside the royal class would have introduced hybrid vigor, more robust offspring, lower infant mortality, healthy heirs, but at the cost of reopening exactly the legitimacy question that that endogamy was designed to close. This is a genuine institutional dilemma, not easily resolved. The very practice that kept the succession rule clear tended over generations to undermine

Democracy Works When Rules Hold

Michael Munger 22:51

the biological capacity to produce a successor at all. The Habsburgs, whose motto was Let others wage war, you happy Austria, marry, married their way to continental dominance and then very nearly married themselves out of existence, as Charles II of Spain, the product of generations of cousin marriage, died in 1700, childless, mentally impaired, and physically incapacitated, triggering the War of the Spanish Succession. The transaction cost of not marrying outside the dynasty, it turned out, could also be paid in blood. The problem's self-correcting, unfortunately, in a bloody sense. A kingdom led by a drooling idiot, and I don't mean metaphorically, an actual drooling in bit inbred idiot, because a bloodline will be subject to the original unfriendly takeover from outside. To avoid this, it's likely that RH Coast style side payments will be made internally, perhaps with a regency. But once such accommodations and exceptions are allowed, the whole purpose of the Bright Line rule is corrupted and we're back to brutal civil wars of succession over competing but dubious claims. Well, to close, the prevalence of hereditary monarchy across human history is not a mystery, and it's not merely a story of exploitation or self-interest on the part of incumbent rulers. It's a story of institutional selection. The institution that survives is the one that solves the most pressing

Endogamy And The Legitimacy Trap

Michael Munger 24:27

problem, that is succession, at the lowest cost and most reliably. The most pressing problem of political order is not who governs, it's how the question of who governs gets settled without fighting a war. Hereditary monarchy answers that question cheaply and immediately, does so by making the answer known in advance, by ruling out competition for the office, and by making the transfer of power automatic rather than negotiated. All of this is precisely what a transaction cost economist would predict, when the stakes of an exchange are very high, when information is imperfect, and when enforcement is costly, bright line rules and precommitted allocations will dominate discretionary contested processes. Hobbes saw this in 1651 in the ruins of the Civil War, after the execution of Charles. He did not have the vocabulary of transaction costs, but he had the insight the artificial eternity of hereditary succession is not a monarchical vanity. It's an institutional solution to the most dangerous coordination problem that human societies face. Not how to choose a good ruler, but to have a good rule for choosing some ruler without fighting about it every time. So why is it that hereditary monarchy is by far the most frequently observed system of government? Well, the answer is you know. Whoa, that sound means it's time for the twedge. First, in a monarchy, one of two things are sure to happen. One bad, the other worse. The bad thing is if you don't have enough legitimate heirs. The second is you do have enough. Yeesh. That's from a uh Substack by Neil Schultz, and it's about hereditary monarchy, it's called Suicide Kings, after the card, and I'll put up a link to that. It's a terrific article. Second, a visitor asks a historian, what's the main advantage of hereditary monarchy over democracy? And the historian says, Well, simplicity. You never have to go through the suspense of an election to find out which idiot is in charge. You know from birth. Book of the week. It was written as a biography of Thomas Hobbes. Um I'm we're living at the beach now for most of the summer, and I just finished Hobbes, a biography by A. P. Martinich. That's M-A-R-T-I-N-I-C-H, 1999 from Cambridge University Press. Really terrific biography, in depth, lively written, and you will learn a lot about Hobbes as I did. The letter This is from back in December. I'm sorry that I'm just getting to it. It's from GM in Fort Collins, Colorado. Dear Mike, after listening to you for 20 years on various podcasts, I finally have an email worthy of note. I just listened to the episode on how money killed barter, and I enjoyed the episode. You may remember the episode was from Jassim Baker in on Tabottle, the Barter app. Back to the letter. It reminded me of something you might find interesting and is relevant to the transaction cost in bartering. I was curious if you had heard of math trades before. Years ago I used to be fairly active in trading board games on a website called Board Game Geek. People would run what were called math trades, where you could trade games you no longer wanted for games you did want. The idea was to get around the challenge of finding someone who wanted the game that you had and also had a game that you wanted and felt the exchange was fair too. You would list all the games and actually other stuff you were willing to trade away and submitted it. Once everyone did that, you would then, for each item you listed, list other items you would accept in exchange for them. And these are hypothetical things. These are a list of things that you would accept. Back

Twedges Book Pick And Listener Letter

Michael Munger 28:40

to the letter. You could list multiple items for a single item and so on. Say I'd trade away one super big game for these three small ones. You might even say I'd trade this for that if the other person covers shipping on both sides of the exchange. Once everyone did that, the organizer would run an algorithm, and this is the magic part, that maximized the number of trades over multiple cycles. I give game A to X, X gives game B to Y, Y then gives game C to me. In practice, though, the number of cycles, the number of nodes, was huge. Some of these trades were so large it was hard to keep track, but as long as everybody acted their part, then the trade would work out. So when it ran, you'd get an email saying send whatever game to whatever person, off it went, and then the transaction cleared. There were still plenty of transaction costs, especially in going through the big list and setting up what you'd accept for trades for various items. It also had the usual challenge of trust, but is restricted to people registered on the website and you could provide feedback on each person who sent you the game. I haven't looked in for a long time, but my guesses these are still going on on the website these days. I found the whole process fascinating and have wondered if these only occur in some sort of weird sweet spot markets where goods are similar but not identical, and rare enough that the chances of parties in an exchange having a match are low. It would be silly to go to the trouble of all the ranking and matching to say swap Candyland for Monopoly, when you can find these at most garage sales. Are you familiar with this concept? Have you heard of them happening in other markets? Finally, you mentioned AI agents potentially helping people find matches on the bartering app that your guest created, and that further reducing and that further reducing bartering transaction cost. At the risk of telling you about something you may already have read, there's an interesting Substack article published a couple of months ago about relevant agents and the potential elimination of transaction cost. Uh it's on Cosmos, Cosy and Bargaining at Scale, and I'll put up a link in the show notes. Back to the letter. Best and thanks for the thought-provoking discussions. GM, Fort Collins, Colorado. Well, thank you, GM. No, I'd never heard of any of that. Those are those are great. I'm sorry it took me so long to get to your letter, but it it was I I enjoyed thinking about this, and I will put up those links and think more about them myself. So thanks for writing. That's it for this week. There'll be another new episode put up one week from today, Tuesday, June 16th.