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Stephen's avatar

I agree very much with this.

All societies have rent seeking sectors but the modern day west is one giant rent seeking system across domestic politics, economics and international affairs. Makes me think very much of Michael Hudson’s critique and the rent seeking behaviour feels very associated with the “financialisation” of western economies.

At the same time, I think it fits well with other themes you have explored such as the decreasing capability of our government machine. After all, the creation of efficient government in the west was very much associated domestically with: the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century that challenged the extractive ancien regime; Enlightenment Thinking that encouraged rationality; and the interstate competition within Europe that gave a geopolitical impetus for effective government. All three of these drivers seem less relevant today as we have outsourced productive capability, are increasingly closing our minds to rationality in favour of mandated ideology and international institutional monopolies replace nation states.

My own historical reflection is usually on the Nineteenth Century: my core specialist period. When one reads texts of (for example) UK Royal Commission reports of that era one gets a genuine sense of a governing class that was genuinely seeking improvement. Clearly, they made mistakes and we castigate then today for imperialism and so forth, albeit I do not believe we are so much better. But they got things done. The debacle of the British performance in the Crimean War was met by the government having to resign and the official Roebuck Committee that reported within a year or so while the war was still in flight. It did not mince its words and castigated various parts of the administration. The issues were very much dealt with too in the interim, including even building a new railway for supplies in the Crimea. When one compares that with the lamentable inability this century of the British MoD to deal with equipment issues in Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of a decade (snatch Land Rovers come to mind) the contrast is inescapable. Today, the entire reflex seems to be to cover everything up so that the insiders can carry on extracting careers and profits from the system. Ukraine is the more recent notable example, of course. The west is clearly regressing. My suspicion is that the Chinese equivalent of Royal Commission reports and follow ups are likely to resemble UK nineteenth century ones far more than anything we produce today in most of the west.

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Lex's avatar

I didn’t expect anyone to actually get to the root of our problems in an essay. But if I had to hazard a guess at who might be able to do it I would have put you on the list. This is just sadly brilliant.

It’s not a criticism, but I think we should give more credit to those hunter-gatherers. There’s a fair amount of evidence that they practiced cultivation. Since their migration were generally seasonal, they could take advantage of tending a berry patch during the summer. There’s some fairly strong arguments that rice was domesticated in Japan and then abandoned. It’s probably a shame that our ancestors mostly worked in organic material, from what we can tell many of them were talented craftspeople.

None of this affects your essay, and those societies would still be classified as extractive.

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