Tootfinder

I've been reading Ray Dailo's "Principles for dealing with the changing world order" in which he charts the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms and dynasties.
The main cycle, he reckons is:
1) Winner of a war consolidates power, unites the population (often through oppression)
2) A smart cooperative equitable educated society with meritocracy means good societal progress and wide sharing of the wealth.
3) Long period of peace, building good tech and military and financial systems.
4) Leadership corrupts: Excessive debt, money-printing, inequality, financial ruin, no sense of solidarity, then a natural disaster pushes it over the edge
5) The fall: Escalating rebellions, very bad inequality, internal conflicts
6) Civil war, revolution, eventually a strong leader proves the winner and back to 1.
We in the western civilization are very clearly in the late states of this kind of cycle, and it's frankly terrifying with the weapons we have these days when it comes to a war.
The leadership is too corrupt to try and fix the inequality or invest in that well educated, equitable, cooperative society.
He explicitly agrees with Marx and implicitly with me a lot more than I'd have expected from the rabid capitalist that Ray Dailo is.
It's interesting to hear his emphasis on inequality and how a prosperous society depends upon sharing the gains of prosperity widely. You tend to hear hyper-capitalists mostly emphasizing that capital's gains should go to capital, and Ray is certainly suggesting the opposite here. That if that happens, it corrupts the leadership and ends with cronyism and debt and revolution.
We seem to basically agree what creates good prosperous peaceful civil society, and that capitalism in the Anglican world isn't doing it, and that fucked up corrupt government is why we aren't doing it.
We'd offer fairly different prescriptions though I think.
#reading #books #economics

do you ever just re-invent luddites by accident?
I don't think the problem with AI or robots is themselves (ecological damage and IP theft is still a concern), it's the centralization of capital
spreadsheet software replacing human calculators
like... if you use AI or robotics... it should come from a worker controlled cooperative.
it should not centralize capital into the buy-n-large bezosphere of rent-everything economics.
(this is related to structural unemployment / technological unemployment - and might be a way to introduce someone to the idea of how structural racism is different than they imagine, because technology advancements seem like a force you can't stop or question, entrenched into the fabric of society - when they absolutely should be fair and equitable)