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Musings Report 2021-18 5-1-21 How Nations Fail: Elites See No Reason to Sacrifice Anything
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How Nations Fail: Elites See No Reason to Sacrifice Anything
If we don't understand how complex social systems such as nation-states lose stability and fail, then we can't possibly know how to fix what's broken, i.e. design a replacement system that re-establishes stability and maintains in via dynamic homeostasis, the same model embedded in ecosystems and organisms.
The 2013 book "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" discusses the differences between failed states and successful states, and concludes that the failed states are fundamentally kleptocracies that answer to a self-serving elite while successful states are answerable to the broad populace.
To summarize: When the few benefit at the expense of the many, the resulting kleptocracy ends up a failed state. When states maintain meaningful, transparent ways of responding to public needs and demands, the result is a successful state.
This is of course a simplification. The perverse effects of colonialism linger, the development of civic organizations public institutions, values and identities that make up what I call the social ontology are contingent and not pre-ordained, and nations with low-cost surplus energy can be quite successful kleptocracies until the energy surplus runs out.
What interests me is the process by which successful states decay into failed states. How did previously successful political, social and economic systems change such that they no longer generated productive synergies (2021 Musings Reports #3 and #8) but slid into fatal synergies?
From the point of view of how systems fail to maintain dynamic stability, three factors pop out:
1. Elites become too successful in sluicing the nation's income, wealth and political power into their own hands.
2. Since the system continues to thrive despite their dominance, then there is obviously no need to change anything--especially if it reduces their share of the nation's wealth and political power.
3. The elites ignore the intangible decay of leadership, the real-world dynamics of cost and scarcity and over-estimate their own capabilities and the resilience of the system.
I recently described the feedback loop that occurs when a wealthy elite can purchase political power: "as a result of their campaign contributions and lobbying, the elites' wealth continues expanding, enhancing their political power to further expand their wealth, and so on."
In a healthy system, there are mechanisms that limit elite ownership of wealth and political power to what the system can bear. Over time, the feedback I described increases elite wealth and power to a point where the limits are crushed and the elite feedback gathers momentum.
With institutional limits no longer in the way, the elite reaches the point where the political system no longer responds to the broad public at all, and the vast majority of income-producing wealth is already in the hands of the elite.
The U.S. is already at this final stage: Wealth/Power Inequality and the Slide Into Disorder.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
"Contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States."
This dominance throws the system out of balance such that, as David Parsons recently put it:
(Elite-dominated) "Capitalism makes everyone homeless and then makes award-winning movies about how resilient people are for living in their cars."
The apparent success of the system even as it grows ever more imbalanced generates a self-serving confidence in the Elites that "since we're doing so incredibly well, everyone else must be doing well, too."
Or if not incredibly well, at least tolerably well. But this self-serving view is illusory. Beneath the surface, major subsystems are attempting to re-establish stability, but the instability is so extreme that the measures being deployed are also extreme.
These policy extremes only push the system further out of balance in other directions, creating fatal synergies as imbalances pile up and reinforce each other.
See the chart of money supply as one example of many.
But the elite is blinded by their confidence and greed to these accelerating imbalances. They reckon that managing the narratives (a.k.a. propaganda), minor policy tweaks and creating more currency and credit are all that's needed to maintain what they consider the optimal form of stability: they own 99% of political power and 97% of all the income from capital.
If any sacrifices are necessary, then they should be borne by the bottom 95%, or failing that, the bottom 99.5%.
I've often noted that the wealth of Rome's political and economic elite went from being 20 times the wealth of a landowning farmer or craftsman to 200,000 times the commoners' wealth at the end of the Western Empire.
Now that three individuals own more wealth than half the American populace, I think we can safely declare we've reached the same extreme.
The first tranche of American presidents left office less wealthy than when they entered because serving in public office was understood as a noble and valued sacrifice of time and wealth. Now presidents leave office far wealthier than when they entered public service.
Per #3, the elite no longer sees any compelling reason to sacrifice their income, wealth and power to stabilize the system or benefit the common good.
Given their dominance, their willingness to use their wealth and power to protect their dominance dooms the system to destabilization and collapse, as the resources and value system required to successfully navigate eras of instability and scarcity are no longer available to the state or public.
In effect, the elite uses its power not to restabilize the system it depends on for its wealth and power but to hoard its extreme dominance and protect it from any threats.
A once vibrant ecosystem has become a monoculture whose stability is far more precarious than it appears on the surface, as the resilience of monocultures is entirely artificial.
Two recent books illuminate corners of this destabilizing monoculture:
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West
‘Jackpot’ Looks at How Inequality Is Experienced by the Very, Very Rich
Correspondent Jim B. summarized historian Arnold Toynbee's study of the rise and fall of civilizations: "Civilizations fail when their elites change from an admired dynamic creative class to a despised Establishment of corrupt rentiers, an entrenched governing class unfit to govern."
In my view, we are in the final stages of this accelerating destabilization and refusal of the elite to sacrifice any meaningful share of their wealth and power to save the system from self-reinforcing fatal synergies.
Highlights of the Blog
Posts:
America Is Exceptionally...Kleptocratic: Wealth/Power Inequality and the Slide Into Disorder 4/29/21
Warning Light Flashing Red 4/27/21
What's Yours Is Now Mine: America's Era of Accelerating Expropriation 4/26/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
After opening dozens of coconuts over the past three years, I finally encountered the fabled coconut heart which is a brief stage in the sprouting of the coconut.
Not all fallen coconuts sprout. In some cases, the meat dries up and when opened is nothing but a dusty residue.
Here is a video link about coconut hearts.
Coconut heart. inside coconut fruit. Embryo bud of a coconut tree it tastes sweet,crisp delicious.
Coconut Apple Inside coconut fruit perhaps the rarest natural delicacy I ever encountered is tumbung. The yellow tumbung is coconut embryo, occurring naturally if ripe coconut is not consumed after a certain period of time. It is not sold anywhere and it is purely by destiny that you will find one in your coconut.
Being a carpenter, I don't husk coconuts, I saw them in half with a Sawzall, then remove the meat (no easy trick) with a special curved-blade hand tool made in Brazil.
Then we peel off the hard brown layer on the meat (photo). This is also non-trivial, as this layer is quite tough. Once the meat has been rinsed, we then shred or slice it into thin strips using a vegetable grater.
The strips we bake and use in homemade granola, the shredded coconut goes into cookies, cakes and pies. We cut open, cleaned and grated 11 coconuts which yielded about 22 cups of finely grated meat and about 8 cups of chips/thin-sliced coconut.
From Left Field
How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously: For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo. -- long but worth the effort, as the story has many layers and says much about the government and the zeitgeist of different eras.
What The Boom In Fraud Says About The Current Market Environment -- We're in the final blow-off stage of speculative mania, akin to taxi drivers touting stocks in fall 1929--it was a signal to sell, as the speculative mania has reached a peak and a crash from such heights was inevitable.
The Funky Academic: How The Pentagon Controls Hollywood (8:51) (via Patrick S.)
The Need To Regulate Big Tech - Part 1: Protecting The People From Pernicious Manipulation
The Need To Regulate Big Tech - Part 2: Moral Hazards In Space -- important topic, difficult to understand all the issues and options...
Economics: What to Do About an Unreformable Discipline? (Steve Keen)
The Many Ways We're Being Manipulated Out Of Our Money | Dr. Robert Cialdini (video interview)
Left is the new right
India Blames a Virus variant as its Covid-19 Crisis Deepens
Affluent Americans Rush to Retire in New ‘Life-Is-Short’ Mindset
The Dark-Money Tipping Point
The Evolution of Social Power
"Nothing so undermines your financial judgement as the sight of your neighbor getting rich." J.P. Morgan
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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