(12-18-2016, 04:19 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: You're ignoring the effect of dividing the world economy on the dominance of existing elites. As Turchin notes, expanding the economy has the effect of diluting the elites. What passes for an elite in a smaller economy - for example with the market power to manipulate prices - may not have the power to act as an elite in a larger economy.
Dividing the world economy into pieces exacerbated the problem of elite dominance within each of those pieces. In the context of the times, that was a big part of the disaster.
You are grasping for straws here and making it way more complicated than it is. Hell you voted for Trump and do not seem to understand where he is coming from.
How often did Trump talk about the stupid people running America? I look at America and our policies seem stupid to me from an engineering/analytical perspective. If I had Trump's ego I would assume this perception on my part arises because I really am smarter than everyone else and that they really were stupid.* But they aren't stupid. To understand these things you have to see things in such a way that what both sides did makes sense and would be what you too would do if you were them (i.e. if you faced the same incentive structure as they).
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*You know Kinser. A while back Kinser and I discussed the Iraq war. It seemed plain as a pikestaff that the war was about oil. What the hell else would it be about. The strategy, it seemed to me (and him) was to bump off Saddam and install a guy we like better, have him ink deals with American oil companies to develop Iraqi oil infrastructure, then lift the embargo, end the no fly zone and watch the Iraqi economy take off. In a couple of years the new guy could hold an election and win it easily. So they invade, conquer the country in record time, bump off Saddam's family and hangers one (remember the deck of cards) and in goes general Garner who is talking with Iraqi generals looking for a successor to Saddam. All SOP. And then, Garner is gone and in comes this clown Bremer. WTF. Noooooooo I screamed, do you want the quagmire Cheney had predicted in '94. Apparently yes they did.
So why did this happen? Kinser chalked it up to "they were stupid", a truly Trumpian response. And he is a big fan of Trump despite having recently been a Marxist. Trump appears feels the same as Kinser, and tried to cover up his support for the Iraq war during the campaign by lying about it. Given his alpha-male self image, Trump cannot but support any war that comes along. To do otherwise would make him a girly man.
But I knew that Cheney was anything but stupid. So I came up with an alternate hypothesis to explain events. And this led me to becoming isolationist in foreign policy after a quarter if a century if being a realist (I had supported the Iraq war initially until Bremer came in when I saw I had been so horribly horribly wrong.)
Trump, like Kinser doesn't go this extra step and so I am sure will embrace every war opportunity that comes along--just like Clinton, who never met a war she didn't like.