Ben Hoffman on Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"

This seems strongly related to the problems of "elite overproduction" (Peter Turchin's credited with the phrase) and "embedded growth obligations" (as far as I can tell it's Eric Weinstein's phrase). I've written about the financial mechanisms by which the coalition that won WWII and the Cold War (frequently called "the West," which seems to be an euphemism for Christendom) became structurally committed to systematic overproduction of rentier elites here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/ There's really no way for the system to coherently intend to *reduce* rents, while also intending to increase the amount of measured financial wealth, number of "good jobs," etc in aggregate, when wealth / goodness-of-job is measured in terms of ability to command the labor of others; in such terms, one person can only get rich at the expense of another. Fixing this would require a radical change in how we measure well-being, e.g. we might favor more direct metrics like leisure time, healthspan, lifespan, and fertility rates. We're likely all familiar with Parkinson's Law in this space, and it's helpful to understand the mechanisms by which the professional-managerial class organizes itself as a job-creation scheme for itself, e.g http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/parkinsons-law-ideology-statistics/ But fundamentally the basic mechanism in Christendom seems to be the coalition of shame: Most people only see ways to improve their station in life through complicity in injustice and dishonesty. This causes them to become ashamed, and when enough people in a firm or other organization not under acute performance pressure are ashamed, the ashamed become a natural political coalition that marginalizes the sorts of people who see accountability as a neutral or friendly force: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/ This sort of thing makes it difficult to discuss the problem, as it means that the dominant political coalition is temperamentally opposed to accountability! Such societies can only be meaningfully reformed through systematic accountability applied to the behavior of incumbent elites by some external force, followed by a systematic shift of power away from people with a track record of trying to weaken accountability mechanisms. Such reforms occur along a spectrum of mercy or punitiveness, with the gentlest viable reform approximately represented by South Africa - a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where people have to actually confess their crimes to receive immunity, combined with a formal and explicit reallocation of political power away from the old elite. Mao seems like a moderate, and Pol Pot represents the most hawkish position that has been implemented recently. So far, based on GDP per capita it seems like South Africa did well for a while but stalled out, China is doing very well, and Cambodia is not doing very well at all: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=ZA-KH-CN But judging by fertility rates (a more biologically robust wellness metric less biased towards the perspective of elites) paints a different picture, with the relatively extreme cases of South Africa and Cambodia doing okay, and China doing relatively poorly: https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/indicator/sp-dyn-tfrt-in?view=trend&geos=CHN_ZAF_KHM