It's not an unfair assessment, marred by an identity-related political snark coming out of nowhere at about 80%. Spain really did squander its wealth. There are also differences, of course.
Spain was a real monarchy, although much of the power actually lay in the hands of one royal adviser. In case of Spain's 17th century decline, that was Olivares. But the downfall was not only overspending on warfare, but also personal ambitions (leading to infighting), rebellion (Portugal and Catalonia internally, but in colonies as well), and the ad-hoc structure of financing. The monarch was paying the army out of his own pocket. Lending, tax evasion and consequently renewed taxation formed a death spiral, certainly when the imports from South America faltered (a direct consequence of the war).
So if there's a lesson, it's: structural reforms should be made well in advance. But that lesson can be learned elsewhere, too.
you miss the core point that infrastructure changes were blocked by the same elite-ism of not paying attention to the in-equality in the labor ranks due to over taxation and other ills.
It is political in nature due to the political processes that have a hold on whether and how it might change.
It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."
Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.
Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.
I have to wonder if this comment is made in good faith -
Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?
Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes?
How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies?
Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic faucet, a skin-toned band aid, face login (or whatever apple calls it). There are obvious benefits to hiring or doing studies within your target market.
Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like.
"Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?"
I would argue they always were. The color of a band-aide does not change its main functionality. Neither do any of your other examples. Humans all need a car with 4 wheels and band-aides that stick.
You said you were astonished. Parent poster is just explaining how some people view the world in an attempt to make it a bit less astonishing to you. Why not read it through that lens instead of calling it a binary strawman?
> We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity.
The word ‘merit’ is doing a lot of work here. What traits/aspects of a person would you use to calculate into their merit? I’ll argue that between two people who’ve crossed a finish line at the same time, the one who started furthest from that line is more meritorious. From a hiring/placement perspective however, especially during the first screening, there isn’t a good way to determine a candidate’s starting line.
The dichotomy is a bit wrong as well, but I’ll get into that once we get past the first hurdle (for the curious, it is about a selection bias after an initial screen).
The most eye opening aspect of this issue is how many people find the all white male default to be normal and self evidently meritocratic, and a deviation from that is what they instinctively consider to be contrived.
That only shows your flawed understanding of the issue. Nobody is saying that everything was meritocratic throughout history and that's why the most successful people in the west were white. However, there was a move towards meritocracy that did help many people in disadvantaged groups and throwing that away is foolish and short sighted. Meritocracy was a hard fought win by people who were not white and or male, throwing that away now will not lead anywhere good. It wasn't in societies best interest before meritocracy, why would it be now?
If you want to understand the opposition, you should start by reading and listening to the arguments put forth instead of assuming racism. The fact that you seem to default to that conclusion is showing that your not listening to opposing opinions, and instead utilizing your inherent bias to make a judgement call. Which then reinforces your idea that the other side has no argument, is racist, and therefor should be ignored.
We've been digging this hole for awhile that it seems like we've hit china. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but things are coming to a head (vis-a-vis recent supreme court rulings) and we're not togetherizing we're dividezizing.
I don't think it's hard at all to understand the opposition. Just reread what you wrote what the straightforward good is. I mean to say, be wary of the paving stones you're laying on your path.
> intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin
I can't recommend the article either, it's just a casually-interesting premise to which the author then attaches a trailer of the usual half-wit cries of oppression by some invisible conspiracy threatening the author's narrow comfort zone.
But in doing so, the article does illustrate the characteristics of the loud and untethered lunacy of the libertarian, petroleum-inhaling populist factions that are occupying so much space in social discourse today.
I’m not up on my New Spain history, but it was always my impression that imperial Spain was an extractive economy that grew wealthy by acquiring and selling resources, not from technological or cultural innovation.
That seems entirely different from American (US) history to me, which while also host to a ton of resources, utilized them for productive ends. A whole lot of technological and political innovation happened in the US, especially by the mid-late 1800s. I don’t think there was a similar phenomenon in the Spanish empire?
The insights into the current Dollar hegemony from this article are excellent, but I fail to see the striking similarities.
If one studies the price revolution [0] in Europe mainly taking place during the Spanish Golden century ("Siglo Oro") the statement: [...]access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere at best just forces an analogy but in reality the "Spanish elite" weren't even near it.
America's silver (and to some extend gold) pouring into Western Europe was just one aspect of financial power but without adequate instruments like (1) safe enough infrastructure to protect against piracy, (2) appropriate financial instruments and (3) a solid framework of economics (academic institutions like the "School of Salamanca"[1] could just barely keep up, offered some new insights but ultimately those were tragically forgotten after the fast decline) the "new wealth" couldn't be properly utilized and leveraged. In the end both France and Spain had to declare state bankruptcy over their costly wars to their respective wealthy merchants sitting in cities like Antwerpen. France then emerged as the new center of power in Europe.
The "financial innovations" were mostly driven by the merchant class in the Low Countries who had freedom to establish their own judicial system regarding trade and loans, those were slowly adapted by the Netherlands and later by England.
Jakob Fugger is prime example [2] of that class at that time in Europe having built a monopoly on copper mining, he went on to establish new silver mining techniques in the wake of the Great Bullion Famine.
In 1527 - at his peak - Jakob Fugger resided over 2,800,000 Florins about 2% Europe's GDP at that time or in today's standard an estimated $400 billon fortunate. He was also instrumental into securing a gigantic loan of of about 100,000 ounces of gold for Charles I later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
> But the most revealing parallels relate to a different expansionary dynamic—that of money. The key to so much else that happened to both countries was the appearance of what seemed like unlimited wealth but was actually access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere.
If you can’t tell the difference between stealing a bunch of gold in a gold based economy and the US Dollar, then there is not much hope for a decent analysis.
At that time gold was the universal currency. So everyone wanted gold itself, and nobody cared where you got it from or if it was backed by anything, as long as the gold was real. So to summarize, people only cared about the material medium, not the backing of the Spanish government and economy.
With the US Dollar, nobody wants the paper or ink that is the material medium. People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. The US Dollar could be paper, plastic or digital bits. People wants what it represents, not its medium. This is exactly opposite to Spanish gold.
That's what makes the comparison interesting. Intuitively Spanish colonial gold and contemporary US Treasury bills are very different kinds of national wealth outputs. But what if the outcomes are still the same?
The backing implies the military. A strong military is necessary for any independent, thriving state.
The USA economy is the most dynamic and powerful in the world by a large margin. People want their wealth backed by this and will pay a premium for the right.
It isn’t changing. Look at foreign reserve holdings for the US since the 90s and you’ll see it’s decreased by a total of 2% and is still over 2/3s of all of it. What happened was that during the run-up to Covid the US dollar spiked to nearly 3/4 of all global reserves and has since dipped back down to normal levels.
The libertarians keep saying this. Yet the US continues to sell bonds to international investors who never question if the credit line is overextended. They continue to use the economic model they learned in high school economics class to a more complex economic model that is designed by and for a hegemony.
The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. They wanted it to be the EU and it has not been. They wanted it to be BRICs and that is a flaming dumpster fire right now. Very soon, they will state Africa is a better bet than the US. It's a young, dynamic economy; the very opposite of stable.
The US debt is $32.3 trillion, and skyrocketing. [1] Total debt held by foreign/international investors is $7.3 trillion, and declining (both in absolute $ as well as percent). [2] The largest single holder is the Federal Reserve. Other holders are disproportionately made up of domestic organizations (like pension or mutual funds) which will collapse when the USD collapses, essentially regardless of hedging efforts, so they have no motivation to consider risk of collapse in their evaluations.
Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time.
There's a reason people buy gold. 1kg of Argentinian gold has the same value as 1kg of American gold. And both have the same value as 1kg of gold from any ancient civilization. Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic.
Of course, if you're in the desert and you're thirsty, a bottle of water has more value to you than all the gold in the world, but that doesn't change the fact that through millennia people has seen gold as something valuable that it's not tied to an economy, a country, an empire or even a culture despite de Incas.
See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976 on how it's no good against infaltion:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
Modern society needed something scarce and was hard to manufacture/process (thus ensuring price stability) to use as an intermediate currency between currencies. Those countries agreed to use gold as this intermediate currency. Other ideas have been to use groups of commodities but these incur more complexity since they're purpose is to be consumed in some process.
So does this not give gold an intrinsic value? Economists regard it as a "shiny rock" but I think that is an oversimplification used to make opponents of fiat money look stupid.
> Modern society needed something scarce and was hard to manufacture/process (thus ensuring price stability) to use as an intermediate currency between currencies.
And now we have no intermediary and no one bothers with gold when going between USD and EUR or JPY and CAD. Gold is completely useless for such exchanges in 2023 and would just add overhead. So given that it is worse than useless (being an hinderance due to an extra step) in such transactions, how can it have "intrinsic" value? If you're travelling internationally, do you exchange your domestic currency for gold, cross the border, and then exchange the gold for the destination currency?
What exactly is gold useful for in 2023 besides jewelry and some minor industrial uses? Can you buy groceries? Pay property taxes? Can you show up at a car dealership with a brick or two and get a new ride?
What is the value of me having gold in my possession?
> Those countries agreed to use gold as this intermediate currency.
It was socially agreed to it having value, but if it had "intrinsic" value, (a) no such agreement would have been needed because it would have been self-evident (the Gold Standard was only formalized in 1870), and (b) it would still be valid today. When the agreement stopped the intermediary status also stopped, showing there was nothing "intrinsic" about it: it just happened to be a convenient convention (for a time).
.. and thats the point: the intrinsic value of the US Dollar is has been declining for the last year. Gold holds its value because it can always be used for the things for which it is useful - the US Dollar, not so much.
Beautifully polymathic. We're not so much watching the harbringers, but into the phase of comparing competing theories of decline. I can't see whether his sympathy for Keynes and Carter are necessary conditions for the rest of his thesis, but the demolition of the domestic market and the installation of an affected managerial class who weren't elites in any meaningful way in both Spain and the present certainly rhyme.
Reading the article and nodding my head along at salient points.
Then...
> The American ruling class found itself compelled to spin bizarre fantasies of Russian “disinformation” to explain away the results of the 2016 election. It can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business.
1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1];
2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is completely made up anyway;
3. What backs the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the American military. Just look at all the wars the US has been involved in [2];
4. Colonies often turned into a drain on the colonizer's economy even with all th eexploitation (ie outright theft) going on. The costs of holding a colony only go up as the locals (rightly) become increasingly unhappy about the situation.
There's an interesting parallel with the Roman world here. Carthage, for example, used the common system at the time of tribute for its holdings. Rome, on the other hand, used a system of military alliances that tied the colony to Rome in a much more stable way. Some of Rome's colonies were colonies for a thousand years and became so Roman that even when conquered the conquerors became more Roman than the other way around.
5. The US has largely avoided the colony drain problem with economic imperialism. For example, the US now uses child labor in West Africa through intermediaries [3];
6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. To be cleaer, slavery has never really gone away. It still exists in the form of prison labor (ie convict leasing). You could argue that the reason the US is the most incarcerated nation in the world (ie 4% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is driven by economic exploitation more than anything else.
If you didn't get to the end, there's a bizarre conservative screed at the end:
> [The American ruling class] can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business.
So, transphobia, conspiracy theories and complaints about anti-white racism (which is not real, by definition). I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to a comparison between the Spanish and American empires.
> 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power.
Doubt. The economic decline of the American south was well on its way by the 19th century. That some prisoners today make license plates has no material affect on US GDP - this claim needs sources.
There’s a parallel in beasts of burden. Do some smallholders use them? Yes. Are they economical? No. Mechanization undercut the value proposition of slave labor and beasts of burden due to the costs of upkeep and their nature of needing rest and recuperation. With slaves you also had to have a an infrastructure to keep them from escaping -also true for animals but keeping animals corralled is cheap.
Keeping slaves from escaping is simple: fear. You could be whipped or killed, you were unwelcome anywhere in society, and there were laws enforcing their capture and return. No infrastructure needed.
Slavery was wildly economically feasible, still is. All you need to do is add pressure to the workers and their performance increases. Like Amazon warehouse workers, but, you know, with whippings.
Fear wasn't the only tool --in China (the Qing Dynasty for example) it was socially ingrained that some people were destined to be slaves, this is probably the more successful approach, open to fewer questions or rebellions except when the lords overplay their hands and become cruel.
In 1800, the US was an agrarian backwater. By 1900 the US was an industrial superpower. Industrialization predominantly happened in the North. So you could argue that slavery was an impediment to growth but that ignores what happened in between and the secondary effects.
Specifically, the US built a massive cotton industry [1] that created an enormous amount of wealth and funded expansion of hte United States westward. Cheap labor was essential to that. Even partial mechanization (ie the cotton gin) actually just increased demand for slave labor because cotton became much cheaper as a result.
As for prison labor, the direct economic output of incarcerated persons is relatively small to overall GDP but, just like with slavery, you can't ignore the secondary effects, specifically in suppressing in wages.
Spain was a real monarchy, although much of the power actually lay in the hands of one royal adviser. In case of Spain's 17th century decline, that was Olivares. But the downfall was not only overspending on warfare, but also personal ambitions (leading to infighting), rebellion (Portugal and Catalonia internally, but in colonies as well), and the ad-hoc structure of financing. The monarch was paying the army out of his own pocket. Lending, tax evasion and consequently renewed taxation formed a death spiral, certainly when the imports from South America faltered (a direct consequence of the war).
So if there's a lesson, it's: structural reforms should be made well in advance. But that lesson can be learned elsewhere, too.