We've abandoned the post-WW2 command economy model in favor of the Milton Friedman economic vision of a hundred million little Econoids working in selfish personal interest.
The national leadership used to have huge bureaucracies who had accumulated a lifetime's worth of experience managing the flow of commerce in order to optimize outputs. We used to run enormous surpluses as a result - particularly in the immediate post-war era, when military surplus was being given away to anyone with a friend in Congress and a hand out. And we used to be the largest industrial economy standing, thanks to half a century of continuous warfare demolishing the dividends of the early industrial revolution everywhere else.
I don't think its necessarily fair to say "the ruling class isn't smart". They're generally more well-educated, they're more in tune with breaking news and with the attitudes of leadership figures, and they're doing a far better job of communicating between themselves and forcing a narrative on the plebiscite than the plebs have been in organizing each other.
But a lot of what big businesses had to leverage in the 1950s/60s/70s, in terms of state-managed economic data gathering and development, is gone. A lot more is only available through the lens of Big Data, whose business interests are geared more towards gamifying the acquisition and distribution of information than optimizing the economy as a whole.
We don't have a Cold War unified national government anymore. We've got a thousand petite fiefdoms playing tug-of-war with the husk of empire. No matter how Genius any given individual capitalist happens to be, they are no longer working as a collaborative unit. They're openly at odds with one another.
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We've abandoned the post-WW2 command economy model in favor of the Milton Friedman economic vision of a hundred million little Econoids working in selfish personal interest.
The national leadership used to have huge bureaucracies who had accumulated a lifetime's worth of experience managing the flow of commerce in order to optimize outputs. We used to run enormous surpluses as a result - particularly in the immediate post-war era, when military surplus was being given away to anyone with a friend in Congress and a hand out. And we used to be the largest industrial economy standing, thanks to half a century of continuous warfare demolishing the dividends of the early industrial revolution everywhere else.
I don't think its necessarily fair to say "the ruling class isn't smart". They're generally more well-educated, they're more in tune with breaking news and with the attitudes of leadership figures, and they're doing a far better job of communicating between themselves and forcing a narrative on the plebiscite than the plebs have been in organizing each other.
But a lot of what big businesses had to leverage in the 1950s/60s/70s, in terms of state-managed economic data gathering and development, is gone. A lot more is only available through the lens of Big Data, whose business interests are geared more towards gamifying the acquisition and distribution of information than optimizing the economy as a whole.
We don't have a Cold War unified national government anymore. We've got a thousand petite fiefdoms playing tug-of-war with the husk of empire. No matter how Genius any given individual capitalist happens to be, they are no longer working as a collaborative unit. They're openly at odds with one another.