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Stephen's avatar

This is a very thoughtful piece that seems to link political incentives with individual psychology to explain the current failure of western policies.

The inertia that you talk about has some similarity to the corporate world, that I am more familiar with. Companies of all sizes have an amazing inability to change how they operate too. The tendency is always to keep doing the same things. This is great when conditions are conducive to the recipe that made them successful in the first place. All companies, even successful ones, make multitudes of mistakes and when you work with them you typically wonder just why they are successful! Usually, they happen to have an environment that is favourable and can get away with a large amount of incompetence. But this breaks down if the environment changes. They then generally struggle to adapt for similar reasons to the ones you give. But they always claim that they can change and often even understand that they need to intellectually. It is just that change is so painful. Even with a top down CEO who gets it.

I think the west is in a similar situation. For the past thirty years the US specifically has had her unipolar moment and more broadly the wider west has dominated for the past three centuries or so. We could get away with bad decisions during the unipolar moment because ultimately it did not matter. There were very few real threats and foreign policy aggression (which is what it really was) was directed at countries that had no ability to fight back. Everyone else felt cowed, perhaps got resentful too but could not do anything about it. The rise of China and the post 90s recovery of Russia post have changed all this. There is now a price to pay for pursuing policies and using hammers that do not work. A different environment. But, as you say and as happens in corporations the inertia is very high and recognition of that new reality is very difficult. So we will stumble on. Until we hit the buffers. I think the change when it comes will be very painful indeed. But it will.

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toolate's avatar

Did I miss the part about not changing course because it has been ever so profitable for some parties?

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