Over at Spiked Joel Kotkin is pondering “Why Globalism Failed,” what with China and India ascendant. Back in the day the globalists
foresaw the emergence of a system controlled by an ever-expanding army of technocrats and professionals, concentrated in a handful of great cosmopolitan cities, riding on ‘advanced’ industries and services.
Now not so much. He comes down to this:
Once-confident globalists failed to pay attention to three critical issues: the continued importance of the material realm, the crucial role of demographic change and, lastly, the importance of culture.
But I think that the way to understand the situation is to look at President Xi’s little problem (from Instapundit).
For years, Xi Jinping has browbeaten China’s big private-sector companies as he increased Communist Party control of the economy, all while codifying the primacy of national-security. Now it seems he’s surprised at the result…
In recent weeks, there’s been a raft of party and government statements and pledges and meetings with executives (foreign and domestic) to assure them that China is open for business.
May I make a suggestion? You political leaders have No Idea how the economy works. And you can see that in the idea of “increased Communist Party control of the economy, all while codifying the primacy of national-security.”
Hey, President Xi: that just about tells it all. The only point of political control of the economy is to go to war: War on Fascists, War on COVID. Otherwise, stay out of it, you politicians!
And the same goes for you globalists! You have No Idea how the economy works; you have No Idea what is coming down the pike next. You have No Idea whether AI is the biggest thing since sliced bread or just a flash in the pan. All you know is that you guys should be in charge. But, as President Xi is finding out: maybe that’s not such a good idea, because the economy defies top-down control.
In other words: Stay in Your Lane. The politics lane is fighting the enemy. Period.
You should pay attention to George Gilder. He says that the whole point of anything new is Surprise! And he gets that from Claude Shannon’s information theory. (Check it out: for and against.)
There’s also an interesting piece from Jeffrey A. Tucker about our current economic malaise, with lots of charts from St. Louis Fed FRED. He shows how real GDP growth has been slowing decade by decade. He shows how personal savings has been going down, decade by decade. And he shows how real personal income has stagnated since the War on COVID.
I wonder why? Could it be because of this, from our good friends at usgovernmentspending.com:
that US entitlement spending —gubmint pensions, gubmint health care, gubmint welfare — has been going up, year on year, as a percent of GDP for the last century and more? You think?
I’m reading lefty David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and right now he is laying into the capitalist age of the past 400 years, that it’s all a scam: “central banks, bond markets, short-selling, brokerage houses, speculative bubbles, securitization, annuities”.
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor…
There is, and has always been, a curious affinity between wage labor and slavery.
Or it could be that capitalism has been a complete accident, that nobody planned, and nobody, to this day, understands?
Here’s a concept. We humans like to minimize risk. Experts call it “risk aversion.” One way to avoid risk is to work for wages, rather than going into business. Another is to volunteer as a slave or a welfare check: “head for food.” Another is to cash in your savings for an annuity. Another is to put your savings into bonds rather than equities.
Notice that David Graeber’s list of scams is actually a list of risk preferences, from the crazy high, in speculative bubbles, to the very low, in annuities.
It could be that the solution to all our problems is Elon Musk’s idea to Occupy Mars. Or maybe not.