We've abandoned the post-WW2 command economy model in favor of the Milton Friedman economic vision of a hundred million little Econoids working in selfish personal interest.
The national leadership used to have huge bureaucracies who had accumulated a lifetime's worth of experience managing the flow of commerce in order to optimize outputs. We used to run enormous surpluses as a result - particularly in the immediate post-war era, when military surplus was being given away to anyone with a friend in Congress and a hand out. And we used to be the largest industrial economy standing, thanks to half a century of continuous warfare demolishing the dividends of the early industrial revolution everywhere else.
I don't think its necessarily fair to say "the ruling class isn't smart". They're generally more well-educated, they're more in tune with breaking news and with the attitudes of leadership figures, and they're doing a far better job of communicating between themselves and forcing a narrative on the plebiscite than the plebs have been in organizing each other.
But a lot of what big businesses had to leverage in the 1950s/60s/70s, in terms of state-managed economic data gathering and development, is gone. A lot more is only available through the lens of Big Data, whose business interests are geared more towards gamifying the acquisition and distribution of information than optimizing the economy as a whole.
We don't have a Cold War unified national government anymore. We've got a thousand petite fiefdoms playing tug-of-war with the husk of empire. No matter how Genius any given individual capitalist happens to be, they are no longer working as a collaborative unit. They're openly at odds with one another.
accumulate more wealth than you can possibly spend in ten thousand lifetimes
tell yourself it's for your children, and your children's children, so they can live like dynastic Gods
make the earth an uninhabitable shithole for them anyway
build underground bunkers where they'll live sheltered from the impoverished masses
need the impoverished masses to perform upkeep on the underground bunkers
invest in life extension technology despite this
need the impoverished masses as guinea pigs to test your life extension technology before using it on yourself
????????????
takeaway: :porky-happy: is on autopilot and literally knows not what they do
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We've abandoned the post-WW2 command economy model in favor of the Milton Friedman economic vision of a hundred million little Econoids working in selfish personal interest.
The national leadership used to have huge bureaucracies who had accumulated a lifetime's worth of experience managing the flow of commerce in order to optimize outputs. We used to run enormous surpluses as a result - particularly in the immediate post-war era, when military surplus was being given away to anyone with a friend in Congress and a hand out. And we used to be the largest industrial economy standing, thanks to half a century of continuous warfare demolishing the dividends of the early industrial revolution everywhere else.
I don't think its necessarily fair to say "the ruling class isn't smart". They're generally more well-educated, they're more in tune with breaking news and with the attitudes of leadership figures, and they're doing a far better job of communicating between themselves and forcing a narrative on the plebiscite than the plebs have been in organizing each other.
But a lot of what big businesses had to leverage in the 1950s/60s/70s, in terms of state-managed economic data gathering and development, is gone. A lot more is only available through the lens of Big Data, whose business interests are geared more towards gamifying the acquisition and distribution of information than optimizing the economy as a whole.
We don't have a Cold War unified national government anymore. We've got a thousand petite fiefdoms playing tug-of-war with the husk of empire. No matter how Genius any given individual capitalist happens to be, they are no longer working as a collaborative unit. They're openly at odds with one another.