Isegoria

I’ve been meaning to read Amy Chua’s World on Fire for some time. Now Foseti reviews it:

Ms Chua’s argument is that countries in the developing world (with a few exceptions) are characterized by: 1) large indigenous populations that are poor and 2) market-dominant minorities. In many countries a small subset of the population controls the vast majority of the country’s wealth. This small subset — the market-dominant minority — also happens to be a distinct racial or ethnic group.

Most countries in the developed world are not characterized by such a relationship — they do not have a market-dominant minority (rather they have a market-dominant majority).

Ms Chua goes on to argue that this difference between the developing and the developed world implies that the policies that created wealth in the developed world — i.e. free markets and democracy — will not work in the developing world.

Instead, free markets will cause more wealth to accrue to the market-dominant minority. While democracy will empower the disgruntled majority. The result is likely to be ugly and violent.

Chua tries to explain with a hypothetical:

Since the creation of Microsoft, the software industry has produced the largest crop of billionaires and multibillionaires in American history.

Now imagine that all these billionaires were ethnic Chinese, and that Chinese-Americans, although just 2 percent of the population, also controlled Time Warner, General Electric, Chase Manhattan, United Airlines, Exxon Mobil, and the rest of America’s largest corporations and banks, plus Rockefeller Center and two-thirds of the country’s prime real estate.

Then imagine that the roughly 75 percent of the U.S. population who consider themselves “white” were dirt poor, owned no land, and, as a group, had experienced no upward mobility as far back as anyone can remember. If you can picture this, you will have approximated the core social dynamic that characterizes much of the non-Western world.

Foseti notes a couple of glaring flaws and wonders if Chua was too politically correct to address the truth:

She is incredibly observant with respect to racial and ethnic differences, yet she fails to notice that the same racial and ethnic groups keep rising to the top regardless of where they are. Is this really an accident? For example, the Chinese are dominant in virtually every southeast Asian economy. China itself — and the other northeast Asian countries — don’t have market-dominating minorities. Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the Chinese are smarter? Jews seem to rise to the top everywhere as well. Ms Chua not only doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion. She rejects it in one sentence.
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Ms Chua is also unfortunately pro-democracy. In reading her book, the reader is confronted by lots of violence that springs from democratic movements. It should not be a stretch to conclude that such a system simply will not work in the presence of “diversity” and free markets. Ms Chua refrains from considering any alternatives — as if such a thought is verboten.

Aretae believes that rulers and citizens have wildly different interests, and that the primary problem of government is constraining rulers so that they don’t take advantage of citizens (too much).

Devin Finbarr doesn’t quite agree and asks, What are the perceived interests of the rulers?

For some lawful autocrats the interest was to grow their kingdom like a garden. That meant establishing justice and the rule of law, and encouraging economic development (examples: Lord Cromer, Henry II, Porfirio D?, William Penn)

For some lawful autocrats their percieved interest was to fight wars of private aggrandizement that ended up draining their countries resources (examples: John of England, Alexander II of Russia)

For most unlawful autocrats or oligarchs the percieved interest has been to enact bloody purges and repression in order to secure their rule (Stalin, Mao, Hitler).

In China, the rulers want to maintain power. They believe the best way to maintain power is to give China rapid growth, because this will keep the Chinese people satiated and prove to the people that the rulers are well fit for the job. The rulers probably also want economic growth for their own personal pride — they look good when they can boast about new technological achievements or spectacular GDP figures. The rulers interests are generally aligned with the people’s although not perfectly aligned (in particular, the rulers care way too much about big flashy projects and too little about simple quality of life improvements).

Rulers chosen by a democratic election, by a selectorate that is small, well educated, and homogenous, and that generally agree on having the same goals, and is generally pacific and moral in culture, will behave responsibly and act reasonably in the interests of the people (examples: Denmark, Switzerland, Vermont).

Rulers chosen by a democratic election by a selectorate that is large, fractured and of diverse interests will make promises to specific voting blocks and interests that will enrich those factions at the expense of the whole.

Rulers chosen by a democratic election by a selectorate that is jingoistic and covetous of their neighbors land, will start wars to invade their neighbors and take their land (19th Century America, Germany under Hitler)

Rulers chosen by a broad merchant aristocracy or an open aristocracy of wealth will tend to promote the interests of business and commerce. Depending on circumstances, that may promote growth, or the aristocracy might combine to restrain new market entrants. (Examples: 19th Century Britain, Venice, Hanseatic League, Dutch Republic)

Rulers chosen by a profit seeking corporation, where the corporation is run by enlightened management and operating in a place and time where there are high returns to human capital investments, will generally provide an attractive environment to attract and enhance human capital (examples: Pullman towns, Celebration, Florida, private cities in India, Banana Republic Guatemala).

Rulers chosen by a profit seeking corporation operating in the 19th century Congo will act with extreme short sightedness and cruelty. The corporate executives are far away and cannot directly manage the operation. Thus they have to set a quota and let the local workers manage how to hit the quota. But the death rate for white colonists was over 50% a year. Thus the incentive for local workers was to tap as much rubber as soon as possible and get the hell out. And with such a high death rate, the workers are naturally the dregs of Europe.

The goal of the formalist is to study governing institutions of the past and present, learn from them, and discover general design patterns that can be used to produce good government in the future. I keep an ongoing list of design patterns here.

Intellectuals have been weaponizing the poor for centuries, Shannon Love says:

For nearly 300 years, leftists and their ideological predecessors have been urging the “poor” to rise up and take from the “rich”. The intellectual justifications for why the poor have a moral and practical right to rise up continuously shift while the practical outcome of who actually ends up with the most benefit remains a constant. Clearly, the constant drives the creation of the justifications and not the other way around.

The constant is clear: manipulative intellectuals, i.e., people whose primary skills lie in manipulating the thoughts and emotions of others via persuasive communication, always end up on top of the new social and political order when the “poor” rise up.

Robespierre used a justification very different in detail than those used by Lenin, yet both were manipulative intellectuals and both ended up on top, however briefly, of their respective revolutions. We can see the same pattern today, even in America. No matter what the subject at hand — the economy, foreign policy, the environment, etc. — the leftwing manipulative intellectuals always argue for a solution which leaves them with more power, influence and status. Others may or not benefit from any particular solution proposed by the Left but the manipulative intellectuals always benefit. Any solution that might benefit the poor but which does not directly benefit manipulative intellectuals — e.g., school choice — gets shot down.

When leftist intellectuals argue that the poor should “rise up” in any manner, they just seek to exploit the travails of the poor for their own selfish benefit. The intellectuals take the anger and resentment of the poor, justified or not, and shape those emotions into a political tool to drive a change which will first and foremost benefit the leftist manipulative intellectuals.

In short, manipulative intellectuals seek to weaponize the poor.

Weaponizing the poor is easy. All social mammals, including humans, are no doubt genetically programmed to seek to subvert those who possess more status. We all face the temptation to take instead of make. Everyone can be tempted by an argument that we deserve something someone else has. The manipulative intellectuals simply direct our base impulses like an engineer diverting a river.

Leftists don’t actually care much about improving the lot of the poor. When they advocate some shift of resources to the poor they are just paying their troops. Pre-industrial aristocrats paid their armies primarily by giving them the opportunity to loot. Even when they paid their troops directly, they did so with money and land taken from their adversaries. War paid for war.

Leftists use the same technique. They “pay” poor people to fight for the interests of the manipulative intellectuals by creating moral, legal and political justifications for why the poor can loot the political and social rivals of the manipulative intellectuals. Just as with the aristocrats, the weaponized poor get just a notional chance of a small material improvement in their lives while the manipulative intellectuals get to dominate society.

Just as the nobles of old did not care how much damage they did to the communal wealth during a war as long as they personally came out ahead, manipulative intellectuals don’t care if society as a whole or the poor specifically come out the worse as long as the lot of the manipulative intellectuals improves. That is why we get places like Detroit or 1970s Britain. The manipulative intellectuals drove those regions into the ground while improving their own fortunes.

When the Left does provide an improvement in the lives of the poor, it does so largely by accident. Just as a stopped clock is correct twice a day, the Left’s continual weaponization of the poor does sometimes by sheer chance align with the poor’s actual best interest.

Every Colonel Qaddafi has his Major Jolloud, Cringely says:

I have no idea if Major Jolloud is still alive or not. Certainly he doesn’t come up in a Google search, except in a reference to something I wrote right here back in 1998. But that doesn’t matter because whether his name has changed or not, there will always be a Major Jolloud in Qaddafi’s Libya. And that’s why we’ve seen so far 200 protesters die in that country.

I’ve always been struck by the similar styles of Qaddafi and Fidel Castro of Cuba. In fact I think Qaddafi based his public persona on Castro, they are so much alike. These men rose as revolutionaries, remember, and like to be identified with their military backgrounds. But going further, they’ve deliberately tried to maintain a common touch by Castro wearing fatigues, never a dress uniform, and Qaddafi — an absolute dictator — never taking a military rank above colonel.

Both men pretend to answer to some form of revolutionary council, to be not above the law — their law, of course. And each tries for folksy touches to connect himself with the common people. For Castro it’s baseball (he’s a pitcher, or was) and for Qaddafi it’s embracing a Bedouin heritage that’s not real for him or for his largely urban nation. He camps-out in the desert with his tent and his carpets, his air conditioning and satellite TV.

In order to maintain that folksiness while at the same time run a ruthlessly repressive regime, both men have been very successful in pushing down by one level the bad-guy role. The muscle starts somewhere just below the top, and in Libya that’s with Major Jolloud.

Thirty-five years ago when I knew him, Qaddafi was a young gun and very full of himself, but the sense I always had was that he knew it was all for show and he didn’t really take himself too seriously. I asked him one time, for example, how to spell his name. After all we’ve seen it in print with a G and a K and a Q: which did he prefer? “Spell it any way you like, ” he said (in pretty fair English, by the way — something else that seems to have strategically disappeared over the years). “All that matters is spelling it correctly in Arabic.”

Major Jolloud was something altogether different. Qaddafi’s second-in-command back then, he either didn’t know there was showbiz in the Colonel’s act or he simply didn’t care. Jolloud saw his role as extending the rule of a ruthless tyrant as efficiently and as far as possible. My friend Jacek Kalabinski, who was covering Libya for the Communist radio network in Poland at that time, though he later became a leader himself in the Solidarity movement, put it best: “You can see death in Jolloud’s eyes.”

At the heart of every command decision for Jolloud was the option that someone would die, or at least that‘s the way it seemed. You could joke a bit with Qaddafi, as you can imagine I did, but not with Jolloud, who appeared to have no sense of humor at all.

Nor did anyone who worked for Jolloud. They all believed the revolutionary fiction and were determined to enforce it as needed against the people of Libya — killing citizens if they must to preserve the revolution that had freed those very people from the long-forgotten monarchy.

Libya had probably needed political change back in 1969 when Qaddafi and others (conveniently gone shortly thereafter, notice) took down the monarchy. I think history will show, though, that the cure was worse than the disease.

So now we have Libyan troops killing Libyan citizens in both protests and funeral processions. This is completely consistent with Major Jolloud. And it will continue until the government falls or all the protest leaders are dead. Not until the protests end — until the leaders are dead. That’s Major Jolloud’s way and the people of Libya probably know that by now.

Libya is not Tunisia, not Egypt, and not even Saudi Arabia. Libya is a case unto itself. Today’s version of Major Jolloud will see the protests there quickly over followed by months of assassinations to make sure they never happen again. Or if new protest leaders keep emerging to replace those who fall, then Libya, too, will experience regime change, which I guarantee will involve at some point an attempt by Colonel Qaddafi to resume his revolutionary identity and claim leadership of the very movement that is against him now.

Hopefully that dodge will fail, but it will inevitably involve Qaddafi turning on Jolloud, trying to make his number two into the bogeyman before having him killed.

“Scary, isn’t he? ” Qaddafi once asked me of Jolloud.

Yes.

Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times reports that there is a place on the Right for a few Godless conservatives:

As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did the education take. They are atheist conservatives — Mr. Khan an apostate to his family’s Islamic faith, Ms. Mac Donald to her left-wing education.

They are part of a small faction on the right: conservatives with no use for religion. Since 2008, they have been contributors to the blog Secular Right, where they argue that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them.

And they serve as public proof that an irreligious conservative can exist.