This is not about rich society abandoning its people. (That's the US healthcare mess.)
This is about advances in the technology allowing the people to take care of themselves in cases when the overall society is so poor that it can't provide the central electricity grid.
I am citing here from the conclusions of that book (better, have a look yourself):
Overall, we found sanctions to be at least partially successful in 34 percent
of the cases that we documented.
By our standards, successful cases are those with an overall success score of 9 or higher. We emphasize that a score of 9 does not mean that economic sanctions achieved a foreign policy triumph. It means only that sanctions made a modest contribution to a goal that was partly realized, often at some political cost to
the sender country.
Yet in many cases, it is fair to say that sanctions were a necessary
component of the overall campaign that focused primarily on the projection of military force.
Second, we classify some sanctions as failing to produce a real change in
the target’s behavior when their primary if unstated purpose—namely,
demonstrating resolve at home, signaling disapproval abroad, or simple
punishment—may have been fully realized.
"The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership."
No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country.
The people in the know know very well that that never works.
The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy.
The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
> point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA
This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.)
It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys.
Ironically the amount of sanctions the US put in place around the world is a large driving force for the decline of LIO and emergence of things like BRICS and SCO. I'm sure sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela are going to lead to regime change any moment now. The more you know, the more grotesque it all becomes, fortunately most know nothing.
Jain, as Germans say. It is not impossible to transfer the money (e.g. if you by a chance have accounts in certain banks on either side). Russian foreign trade still exists, Russian tourists still buy tours and spend money abroad etc. It’s even more complicated picture, of course.
Yeah, it is similar to dismissing any information that contradicts the official narrative as 'conspiracy theory', without actually going the length to do actual real fact checking.
On the other hand, if a foreign country really wanted to destabilize you, can they do anything better than to exploit real grievances of the local population?
Knocking you over with military force technically destabilizes things far more than just existing grievances which may have gone off without their intervention at all. Perhaps more destabilization than they even want things to be.
> Knocking you over with military force technically destabilizes things far more
There are just as many examples of national identity being forged in war than there are it being removed.
For example, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine had no affinity for Kyiv and didn't think of themselves as Ukrainian before Russia invaded. Now they do.
"As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well."
Umm, it does not work like that, look at the Scandinavian-type socialism.
The collective wealth is in the functioning education & health system, social support net, working public transport and such. Not a type of wealth that the government can usurp for themselves, to the detriment/exclusion of the remainder of the society.
Corruption is endemic in many places, but somehow the chance of regime change is more correlated with unwillingness to follow the USA dictate than with corruption ....
The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody.
No need to go far, just look at the result of lobbying in the USA.
Btw, while there are many famines caused by despots (Stalin's, Mao's, Red Khmer's), there is also Bengal's famine of 1943.
One must also point out that China in the last 40 years have done perhaps more regarding the poverty mitigation than anybody else in the human history (capitalism, especially the wild one, has actually quite patchy record...)
The Chinese people did all of the work, their government simply allowed them, returning some of their own money in the form of state investment. Who pays for "state" investment?
The Chinese government did a lot of smart policies, empowering their people to unleash their entrepreneurial drive, helping them with targeted investment where that was deemed to get good long term/strategic payoff. This was not passive 'let them do what they want', it was (and still is) an actively guided process - there is enough information about that in the net.
It also failed in many ways, but overall influence is highly positive, the results speak for themselves.
Failing to see that is a sign of ideological blindness.
> The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody.
perhaps "rules" was a poor choice of word. What I meant was more a belief in society in general, a belief in the nation, in fairness. I guess in one-word: selfishness. I believe the _real_ political divide is between those who are selfish and those who are not.
still, ideological zealots really unselfishly believe in their case, whether that is fundamental christianity/islam/communism/capitalism (ok, maybe capitalism not, almost by definition, capitalism is about greed) and are willing to inflict unbelievable horrors in the name of their ideology
one should also not forget that there exist deep cultural differences and what is considered 'fair' and 'belief in society' is quite different e.g. between the western judo-christianism and eastern societies
Lobbying isn't used to exacerbate the social divide. It's used to achieve incremental policy wins and prevent incremental policy losses for the clients of the lobbyists. This is what the general public needs to do as well if they want the government to better represent their interests, but they have little interest in that. People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide, and the overwhelmingly negative sentiment to lobbying is evidence of this.
Colonialism is a form of centralized planning, which catastrophically fails for the same reasons that it does in communist regimes.
China is evidence of capitalism's incredibly successful record of poverty mitigation. They've retained some communist style central planning, but the "bad" part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of wealth, as mentioned upthread, which China allows just like any capitalist country.
Lobbying to create laws that benefit rich people/big corporations and make the life of ordinary people tougher directly exacerbate the socio-economic divide.
Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality.
The reality being that the system is designed by rich, for rich, to maintain and improve their position.
"People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide" What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless?
"Colonialism is a form of centralized planning" - no, colonialism (and neocolonialism) is a form of institutionalized looting, historically highly successful (see the graph of the GDP (as a percentage of the whole world GDP) of Great Britain vs India for a nice example)
No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power, by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state. I suspect one of the reasons China was able to maintain its upward trajectory was their ability to separate the political power from the wealth (see the case of Jack Ma what happens if the wealth starts to impinge on political power in China). From the point of view of West, they did some highly questionable decisions that costed them trillions (squashing the blockchain miners, bursting property bubble, going hard after excessive gaming and internet time by kids) and would not be conceivable in the west, but overall might be net positive for the society at all.
> Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality.
Lobbying is not a tool designed for the rich/powerful. It is literally just communicating with to politicians your interests. Corporations spend a lot on lobbying, but that's because they have to pay "corporate rates". Grass-roots organizations only need to pay for the basic expenses of their lobbyists. The NAACP successfully lobbied for multiple Civil Rights Acts with a much smaller budget than nonprofit organizations today.
> What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless?
Yes. People's reactions to corporations getting better at lobbying was to act like it's something only evil people do, so that they could feel better about themselves. As a result, grassroots lobbying has declined and knowledge of how to do so has been lost [1]. This is a gift to billionaires that they never could have dreamed of.
> institutionalized looting
Sure, but that is a central plan.
> No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power
The CCP has unlimited power, which was why they could arbitrarily silence Jack Ma, without even formally accusing him of anything.
> by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state
This is a way bigger problem in China than the US. China does not collect enough tax revenue to fund its local governments, so many departments are essentially funded by corruption.
1.) "Lobbying is not a tool designed for the rich/powerful. It is literally just communicating with to politicians your interests. Corporations spend a lot on lobbying, but that's because they have to pay "corporate rates"."
Sorry, no. In other countries what goes as 'lobbying' in US would be mostly classified as blatant corruption of the politics. Citizens United also...
Corporations are centralized entities that have access to a lot of money and (also through money) to lobbying specialists with know-how hot to push their interests.
Normal citizens face and uphill struggle in every step - they have to get organized, get money, get specialists. This is not a level playing field, and the argumentation that it is, is exactly what those with an advantage engage in.
Shouldn't voting for the people who represent your interests be actually enough? What the lobbying does is that whoever you vote-in, if not already corrupted, will be corrupted by the lobbyists. So democracy (will of the people) is just a theory, wool over your eyes, similarly as communism was, the practice is totally different. People are waking up to that, and that's the reason for the rise of all anti-system parties all over the west.
2.) more grass-roots involvement: yes. Thinking that that is enough: hell no, people did that, got disillusioned when that repeatedly yields minimal results
3.) Colonisation of North America was not a central plan. You repeatedly bringing central plan just points to your ideological blinders.
4.) Ultimately, it is not about who has the power and where does the legitimacy of power come from, but how is that power wielded. Wield it to improve the lives of your citizens, you gain legitimacy even if you got the power in an illegitimate way. Wield it to enrich a narrow elite, at the expense of everybody else, and you will start to lose the legitimacy, even if you originally got it fairly. Nothing new there.
What is new is that the elites in China managed the country in a way that significantly improved the lives of its citizens, while the elites in the west managed their way into dystopian future ruled by mega-corporations, with melting middle class and unsustainable levels of debt.
This goes against the prevailing wisdom in the west that liberal democracies are the only ones capable of taking care of their citizens, while the authoritarian rest is just a cesspool of corruption and inept governance.
Other examples of authoritarian countries reaching (or at least starting in a significant way their path to) prosperity are Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan... (all of them were authoritarian at the time their economic boom started and progressed).
> In other countries what goes as 'lobbying' in US would be mostly classified as blatant corruption of the politics.
Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. Every democratic country has professional lobbyists.
> Corporations are centralized entities that have access to a lot of money and (also through money) to lobbying specialists
Indeed the purpose of money is to purchase goods and services. That doesn't contradict anything that I said. My point is that you don't need a lot of money to lobby. There are plenty of people who are willing to lobby for just causes for their bare minimum expenses. Nowadays, people have forgotten it is even an option.
> Normal citizens face and uphill struggle in every step - they have to get organized, get money, get specialists.
Achieving goals requires investment and effort. Boo hoo. The demographic that frequents HN absolutely has the time and money to make meaningful changes in the world that they complain about, yet they act like they're helpless victims.
> Shouldn't voting for the people who represent your interests be actually enough?
For one, voters only care about vibes. They don't give a shit about policy. Mitch McConnell reassured fellow Republicans that voters would "get over" the Medicaid cuts. He may be evil, but he is good at what he does and is 100% correct here. This attitude goes across the political spectrum. The most popular politicians on the left (e.g. AOC and Sanders) have some of the weakest
Even in a best case scenario of an informed voter base, voting still isn't enough. Politicians and their dozen or so staffers can't be experts in every aspect of society.
> Colonisation of North America was not a central plan.
It's almost as if you brought up a famine in a different continent. Colonization of land and resources is different from the colonization of a people, which is central planning.
> Ultimately, it is not about who has the power and where does the legitimacy of power come from, but how is that power wielded.
I think the bottleneck for this is still the cost of the physical hw of the robot, and its maintenance.
You need a fairly robust one that needs little maintenance, with a multitude of good sensors and precise actuators to be even remotely useful for sufficiently wide range of tasks (so that you have economy of scales). None of that comes cheap.
This is about advances in the technology allowing the people to take care of themselves in cases when the overall society is so poor that it can't provide the central electricity grid.
reply