That's a great insight
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?tab=t...
I personally - as an American of Norwegian descent - am proud of how they’ve built much of their country…and I hope we can learn from it.
E.g. a welfare state doesn't make sense from a purely GDP-selfish perspective, beyond as a crime-prevention tool, since people on disability benefits don't work. But they still exist.
One might want lets say welfare to the youth/masses and the other wouldn't want it sometimes it feels like just to differentiate themselves from the first or to just contradict it.
We have sort of stopped coming to common agreements in republicans and democrats and heck some democrat bsky user pasted me an AI pic for something and when I said that it doesn't actively contribute to the thread they had the balls to say "Google things.Do your own research. Research." Like uh okay mate, we are on the same page but even then they came across as passive agressive :/
We just infight and never try to reach conclusion's man. And if we do and become tolerant, some intolerant freak hijacks the system, maybe the system's broken a little, I am not sure. but I know its the best hope
https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
It’s a petrostate NATO country that the US can’t nearly as crazily obviously meddle with and more importantly exploit. That is the outlier.
The regional military powers have more population.
Read up on the US robber barons and they didn’t come from old money. The relatively recent (80’s to today) round of Tech billionaires don’t hail back to earlier great fortunes and most VC investors lost money compared to a simple index fund.
The first few rounds of AI investors are already getting screwed.
Counterexample: China. Or plenty of African countries. Being a petrocracy certainly makes authoritarianism easier, but it's not at all a requirement.
It means a particular combination of autocracy and oil-dependence. It results in especially toxic regimes, that can be kept stable for quite a long time.
They stay in power with the help of a paramilitary group of bullies that intimidates people: colectivos. The Venezuelan colectivos are based on the Cuban CDR (committee for the defense of the revolution). And there are other elements of the Cuban "model" of staying in power that has "worked" for 66 years, that Venezuelan regime has adopted. And the CDR resembles the Nazi Sturmabteilung in their modus operandi.
So in the end what's holding the regime together is all violence, all the way down.
The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.