If
you read the histories of tribes, kingdoms, empires and nations you will find
some common factors led most of them to ultimately fail. A narrow group of elite
people gained control of political and economic institutions of a society and restructured
them.
●
They structured political institutions to
remove restraints on their use of power.
●
They structured economic institutions to
extract resources from the rest of society.
The
synergistic relationship between extractive economic and political institutions
introduces a strong feedback loop:
“Political institutions enable the elites
controlling political power to choose economic institutions with few
constraints or opposing forces. They also enable the elites to structure future
political institutions and their evolution. Extractive economic institutions
enrich the same elites, and their economic wealth and power help consolidate
their political dominance.”
Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and
Poverty, argue that when you combine rotten regimes, exploitative elites
and self-serving institutions with frail, decentralized states, you have
something close to a prescription for poverty, conflict and even outright
failure.
“Extractive economic and political institutions,
though their details vary under different circumstances,
are always at the root of this failure.” (p. 372)
Today,
a new narrow elite exists, the Global
Power Elite. One of the reasons they exist is that the resources they
have accumulated are larger than nations. They control entities that are larger
and wealthier than many nations – multinational
corporations. Below is a quote from Peter Phillips’ book Giants: The Global Power Elite:
“The richest 1 percent of humanity in 2017
controlled more than half of the world’s wealth; the top 30 percent of the
population controlled more than 95 percent of global wealth, while the
remaining 70 percent of the population had to make do with less than 5 percent
of the world’s resources.”
For
the 1% elite group to extract that much wealth required the restructuring of
political and economic systems of many nations so global wealth would flow into
their hands. Interestingly, Peter Phillips not only exposes what the 1% have
been doing – he provides a list of the
names of the wealthiest members of the group.
Based on what Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson discovered in
their research about why nations fail, if we want to understand how the 1% to
extracted so much wealth from so many nations, we need to identify the
following:
1. rotten regimes
2. exploitative elites
3. self-serving
institutions
4. frail decentralized
states
Political
institutions are thus inexorably intertwined with economic institutions, as the
enforcer of law and order, private property, and contracts, and often as a key
provider of public service.
The people who control inclusive and extractive economic
institutions
both need, use and require the state to achieve their
objectives.
“The” question that needs an accurate answer today is this:
What roles are rotten regimes, exploitative
elites
and leaders of self-serving institutions playing
in using the media and social media to
polarize
and turn members of societies against each
other
in order to keep them from seeing what they
are doing?
In order for America to reverse the dangerous path it is clearly
on, members of society must adopt a shared vision that includes the following:
1. political leaders with
inclusive values and morals that value human life
2. inclusive elites that
use their wealth in ways that benefit all of society
3. leaders of political
and economic institutions that make them accessible to all members of society.
4. strong networked states
If you have a better idea, please let me know. However, based on
what I have learned from over three decades of research, from the earliest
written documents until today – the
common factors listed above have been part of mankind for the last 5,000 years.
Thank
you for reading this. Please share and discuss it with others.
May
your life be blessed with an abundance of TOV,
Jim Myers
Jim Myers
