Sunday, 7.56pm
Sheffield, U.K.
We have the best government that money can buy. – Mark Twain
A paper popped up on my feed today. Kim et al (2024). Strategies of Political Control and Regime Survival in Autocracies.
How do autocracies stay in power?
They use 6 strategies, two repressive, two co-optative, and two indoctrinal.
They can put you in prison, and take away your right to protest or participate in the political process.
They can give you jobs and incentives that make it harder for you to oppose the status quo.
And they can use the media and education to tell people, especially children, what to think.
A lot of places have had autocracies – 103 countries, and 209 regimes in the research.
It’s tempting to look around the world today and see the spectre of autocracy in the politics of the day.
But is that the case?
What do the papers think?
Let’s take the two most important countries around now. The U.S and China. Where are they headed?
The Economist seems split on two thoughts.
The first is that America is doing well and will do better.
It has resources, technology, money… and innovation.
The other is that this might happen inspite of the new administration’s plans.
Take tariffs, for example. The administration argues that they will bring jobs home but instead what they will do is increase prices for consumers.
Laptop prices, for example, might go up 25%.
Looking at the news, coffee will too.
China seems to be in for a more difficult run, but no one is supposed to mention it.
It grew 5% in 2024 – hitting its target.
Although some people found that hard to believe.
Household borrowing is low, property prices are falling and stock markets are anaemic.
Sometimes, if the numbers aren’t what you want them to be, it just means you haven’t done the analysis right.
The things people vote for, if they have a choice, may not be the things they want.
Higher prices, fewer people to do the dirty jobs, and a widening gulf between the have and have nots won’t be fixed easily.
I find it interesting that the papers have stories about computing and history side by side.
On the one side they talk about AI and its promises, or failures.
On the other side they talk about capital and labour and what has happened in the past.
Here’s what I took away.
A system that does not pay people well is one that prioritises profit over society – and the logical consequence is that business will organise itself so that it makes the most money for the lowest cost.
And that’s why manufacturing takes place in low wage countries.
It’s not going to shift back to high-wage countries unless the tariffs are big enough to force it, but of course that raises the price of goods which makes people unhappy.
Apart from the ones with the higher wages.
What we are watching is the imposition of ideology, a top down attempt to reshape how things work.
Which runs counter to the core of thinking, in the US anyway, which is to get out of the way and let people get on with doing what’s in their best interests.
Perhaps the best way to look at the rest of this decade is to remember the old saying.
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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