| I hate to plug my own writing here, but if you'd like a much deeper exploration of the topic, you'll probably enjoy reading The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier? https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-full-stack-of-soci... A lot of folks on HN have liked and shared it before so I feel like it's okay to share again. My core thesis is that there's a stack of wealth-building strategies: - Feudalism, aka "take & tax other people's productivity" (this is zero-sum) - Mercantilism, aka "sell someone else's productive outputs into someone else's consumption" - Industrialism, aka "Mercantilism but with production brought in-house" - Globalism, aka "export Industrialism to make your customers richer so they can buy more of your products" - Financialism, aka "centralize and allocate flows of capital across time to accelerate any of the other layers in the stack" In reality, most successful countries combine a couple of these, but one tends to be dominant at a time. Most large countries today have passed through this stack and are currently in one of the final 3 layers. A handful of small, well-positioned countries are able to run unique strategies based around supporting neighbours. I chose not to focus on these because they tend to be very specific (e.g. Singapore can only be Singapore because it's located in Singapore, Ireland needs to be in the EU for its tax arbitrage to work, etc.). I would also +1 to epistasis's suggestion in the top comment -- How Asia Works is a great book. If you read it, also read Miti and the Japanese Miracle. My chapter on Industrialism links to those and other related sources. |