New Kleptocracies

A "big picture" perspective on the present world

I’m often tempted to “go big.”  The panoramic view of things is encouraged by a lifetime of teaching.  You want your student to develop a perspective. i.e. see “the big picture.” 

I’ve been thinking about that today.  Are there some generalizations about the governments and economies of the world today that need to be considered in this way? 

I suggest that we look at the world as reflecting the effects that a global economy has on national governments.  Such a starting point is a choice and can be justified only by its payoff, whether or not it turns out to be a useful way of seeing the world.  (All analyses actually must make such initial choices, examining reality as either x causing y, or y causing x.  I.e. one could just as well begin by looking at how governments affect the global economy.)

I see a global economy with a surplus of capital, accumulated by elites that seek to achieve high rates of return for investment while overall consumption is limited by an unequal distribution of wealth.  A world, that is, where investments in production cannot return the expect 7%.   I see the increase in “rent taking” (the proportionate expansion of income from non-productive activities in financial markets and under quasi-monopoly conditions) as the consequence of this -- a global phenomenon allying an international oligarchy of wealth with the demagogic government leaders of individual states. 

I see some nations able to withstand this rapacious populism through reliance on transitional structures of government whose legitimacy withstands increased rent seeking by oligarchs and the incompetence of populist leadership—for example, the United States. 

(My friends who once served in government regretted disturbances to ordered policy choice and policy implementation as a result of the replacement  of experienced professionals in key parts of the government by sycophantic acolytes of the President, who were over their head in knowledge of government and depended upon simplistic ideologies.  They feel that the Biden restoration has repaired what they see as the damage.)    

But many other states in the world have, or had, fragile structures of legitimized authority.  Ordered, law-based government can, in such societies, be too easily replaced by a form of clientage government reminiscent of the “kleptocracies” that flourished in many African states in the later years of the 20th century.  Populist rule supported by mass propaganda fits nicely with crony capitalism, a system of extreme rent-seeking that impoverishes the people, whose resistance is met by the enhanced police power of the state. 

Try that view on for size.  If the glove fits ….