Thanks for showing up here on Substack. I appreciate your work and your analysis and I find that you explain your findings in a way that ordinary people like me can understand and digest. Your lack of pretentious rhetoric is refreshing as is your sincerity. I’m looking forward to reading your texts.
It's refreshing to read a little pushback on the "Noah foreign conditions" narratives. I'd not question his economic narratives as I'm not an economist, but I do have boots on the ground experience in China over a >15 year period. Noah doesn't have a clue about China.
I've read your books over the past few years, and am very glad to find you on Substack. Thanks much.
It's worth noting that GDP growth and all other positive things actually started in the last year or two of Yeltsin's rule and didn't speed up that much under Putin (contrary to what Russian media has been saying every five minutes for the last 25 years). Also, you have to factor in oil prices, which crashed in 1986, started rising precisely in 1998 and are still high today compared to the slump of 1986-1998 (see https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart). Once you take oil price dynamics into account, socio-economic explanations for the crisis of 1986-1998 become pretty much unnecessary. I don't know why you don't like Russia being called "a gas station" because that's precisely what it is: in 2020 raw materials accounted for more than 3/4 of its exports and now it's even more.
I would not go as far as gas station though. Commodities as percentage of gdp did reduce from 45% in 2000 vs 28% in 2019. So it’s more nuanced, and such simplification leads to unpleasant surprises in U.S. foreign policy
Not an expert at all, but based on some analysis I’ve followed, mil spending will only explain some of this change in gdp allocation. If that were the case, Russian army will have enough truck and won’t have to use donkeys. But some non-military manufacturing, agriculture and IT (yandex et al) was certainly growing in the past 2 decades.
I've seen estimates that 85% of Russian military spending in 2000-2020 was wasted and/or stolen. There was, of course, some growth in other sectors, and some military expenses were not dead-end but went into arms exports, but most of the improvement in standards of living was due to high commodity prices.
Thanks for this post and your books too, which are all really great!
I'm born in France and started to go to the soviet union in the 80's. Married a Russian. I came back to France but then I've been going to Russia about once a year since then.
So I saw the incredible destruction of the 90's too with my own eyes. People i knew dying from deaths of despair in their 30's.
And then the rebuilding from the 2000's. The rise of the Russian middle class.
The main problem was indeed neoliberalism, oligarchs still having power, though much less than under Eltsin, and relying too much on natural resources.
Sanctions actually helped a lot to make Russian society and government realise it must rebuilding agriculture and industry. Agriculture was rebuilt after the 2014 sanctions at incredible speed. After the 2022 sanctions, there was one year of recession. You could see the foreign shops closed. And then from 2023 rebuilding again. To give the exemple of St Petersbourg, in 2023- 2024, all the closed shops had reopened under different brands, all the old buses and minibuses had been replaced by brand new buses made in Russia, card payment was introduced in all transports, 2 brand new museums were opened. The country looks thriving, in stark contrast to France which is clearly in recession...
Jacques Sapir is a great French economist, specialised in Russian economics and member of the Russian academy of science, who gives a lot of information about Russian economics.
Yes, sanctions had a very positive effect on Russian economy (and some other commenters also noted it). In fact, a number of commentators on Russian telegram I follow are worried about what would happen after sanctions end.
Second, I don't know whether Putin is a kleptocrat or not. Do you have any evidence that he is? I'd like to see it. If you can't point me to such evidence, then it is your bias showing.
Please note that I don't consider the sociopolitical situation in the USA to be much better than that in Russia. There has been a strong current of official corruption in the USA for as long as I've lived here, which is being made much worse by the current regime. But let's not kid ourselves that Russia isn't also a kleptocracy.
So, do you predict that the destructive period will last in the US for about 10 years (and this probably means the rest of the world)? But when did this period start? Did it start in 2025 or at the beginning of Trump's first presidential term?
I think we can pinpoint the beginning quite securely to Jan. 20, 2025. But as the saying goes, revolution has a beginning, but revolution has no end. Put differently, it is somewhat arbitrary to say that the French Revolution ended in 1799. Or that the Russian Revolution ended in 1922, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
It all depends on how one defines what a revolution is. If we define it as an effort to change the political-economic order, then the French Revolution definitely did not end in 1799, because the order that existed before 1789 was not restored. And even more than that, the process of change continued, but in a different way.
Probably the same should be said about the current American change - I think it started with Trump's first term. He started promoting his ideas at that time. Even then, many people in the US and around the world started to change their minds. Right-wing parties in Europe kept coming to power even between Trump's terms. In other words, the process was set in motion.
As for the Russian Revolution, the same observation can be made. Has there been a return to the status quo ante? Or at least did the change stop in 1922 and things have continued the same way ever since?
I understand the scientific desire to find some magic numbers, but perhaps they shouldn't be so narrow and defined. Like everything in human society (as opposed to physics) should be defined approximately, like “this period takes much less time than the next period”. Something like that. The French Revolution cycle took 26 years, but only because of military failure. If there was such a strict repeatability, the USSR's military luck should have ended in 1943.
This does not mean, however, that I am skeptical about the mathematization of history. But on the other hand, it seems to me that historical political economy is already to a large extent a science. Don't you think so?
In this light I wonder how will the United States ever emerge from its own destructive stage?
If Kubler Ross is any source of enlightenment, one must figure that we're swimming in denial right now. We have a president who is babbling for answers, advised by a pathetic, woefully prepared cabinet that is just cosplaying their part. If Kubler Ross is to be right, Stage 2 will soon bring anger to the party. Probably in the form of higher interest rates,
Hmm. I'm an immigrant to this country from the same neck of the woods as you (Romania). Some things are better in that part of the world, some other things are actually worse. There definitely has been a rebuilding phase even under Putin, but at what cost?
I don't know the cost, but I know enough Russian expats to take a wild guess. They have new subway stations and new buildings in the Dream Cities, but get out of the Capital and/or St. Petersburg and into the vast countryside, and it's a very ugly picture...according to the folks that got out.
The communists also did the same. Had vanity projects to show off and appear to keep up with the West in the cities, while they devasted the entire structure of society and the countryside. It can really be argued that Putin's 'rebuidling' aspect is also a smokescreen. Rebuilding what, exactly? The metro station? Please. The brainwashing and fear he also built up will damage entire generations.
Yes, thank you. Like I said, I only know the second hand, but it's a lot of second hands describing Moscow as a fantastic wonderland if you're moneyed, connected and on the inside, a sham if you're not, and a hell hole if you're down on the bottom rungs.
One of the intriguing questions to explore is why 21st century revolutions are so less violent than 20th century ones were.
Trump has just staged a coup in the USA without most people even noticing, and he did it without anyone firing a shot (except at him).
Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and subsequent recovery under Putin, were a walk in the park compared to the revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil war.
This trend actually can be extended back several thousand years. I discuss it in End Times, towards the end. And we will be soon publishing more formal statistical analyses. But the best explanation seems to be the accumulation of social norms and institutions.
I look forward to seeing that work. I am writing about how the 17th century English figured out how to evolve and resolve disputes without resort to violence here: https://thethirdsystem.substack.com/
Your model of revolution seems somewhat forced when applied in an American context. The New Deal involved revolutionary change in American governance, but there was no sign of elite over-production causing it or a period of destruction. Instead there was the building of new institutions.
The Stagflation crisis of the1970's and the "Reagan Revolution". There was no sign of elite over-production and no period of destruction.
Trump is more of an electoral outlier than a revolutionary. The potential always existed in the American system for demagogues. George Wallace in 1968 & 1972 and H. Ross Perot in 1992 tried to do much the same thing. Trump succeeded in winning office with combination of strategy and luck.
Note that George Wallace despite one of the best third party showings in history, decided to run as a Democrat in 1972. Had it not been for a bullet, he might have won. Trump won be working within a major party.
I just watched this video about the accelerating pole shift on the Kim Iverson Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq2xdtMUNY0 I have begun to wonder if electromagnetic influences from Earths magnetosphere and Sun spots have any effect on the unfolding drama of human history? The idea that electromagnetic radiation from various sources can and does affect the complex electrolytic systems in the body, mind and psyche are discussed. It seems plausible that historic events may be influenced by these forces. Apparently, the vast waves of confusion and chaos on planet Earth currently [political, religious and economic upheaval] are somehow being caused or modulated by the pole shift, sun spots and other celestial impulses.
Please note that I wrote "have begun to wonder" and also "It seems plausible that....". I did not endorse or debunk Ben Davidson one way or the other. There have been plenty of researchers down through the ages attempting to make sense of the rise and fall of Civilizations, Empires, Monarchies and States. Oswald Spengler, Ibn Khaldun, Arnold Toynbee, Carol Quigley et al are some of them. Many of these researchers, and others, have offered input ranging through Religion, Metaphysics, Science, Mathematics, Astrology, Aliens, etc. Professor Dave also has "theories" on this and many topics.
I am not so much interested, anymore, in theories about the Who, Where, When and What of human history- since so many researchers have already outlined their take. Even among these "What-are-the-stages" researchers, there are many different interpretations and , of course, disagreement and contention.
No one seems to know for sure, and perhaps, humankind will never know why and how history unfolds in the directions and events the record shows.
My particular interest these days is, "Why do human Civilizations rise and fall, and How does this rise and fall take place"? If Why and How could be understood, perhaps those in "control"[if there is, in fact, control of any kind] of the course of human history would be in a position to guide it in such a manner as to avoid or more effectively manage the many "shit storms" humanity seems forced to endure.
Ben and the probably-too-many other conspiracy theorists have a lot to say and perhaps they are totally out in delusional left field. The ancient and modern theorists are definitely not in agreement. Perhaps a lot of them are also delusional to some extent?
However, the "Stark Fact Remains" that human civilization does pass through repeating stages and, because stages are relative to activity, one must conclude that all activity is based on a cause and effect relationship.
I am interested what your take on this How-Why, Cause-Effect feature of human civilization might be?
Eloquently written, but it overgeneralizes a bit in saying that revolutions rarely create right away. The Jacksonian 's generation 1.0 small "d" democratic Democratic Party, along with its many imitators, was a civilizationally immense exception that shows the opposite is possible: it not only dismantle elite structures like the Second Bank of the United States and deeply entrenched socio-economic networks that dominated public policy, it almost immediately began constructing a robust and decentralized yet still deeply connected new political-economic order.
Through swift institutional reforms, such as the Independent Treasury System, state-level banking laws and regulation, the modification and great expansion of the Academe, etc. Jacksonians redistributed capital formation power and decision making away from entrenched deeply elites and toward more locally responsive institutions: and they did this in the cities and they did this in the country side. This quickly launched a positive developmental phase, leading to widespread development infrastructure, increased access to land and credit for ordinary citizens, increased production of knowledge and access to knowledge, and the expansion of regional and local economies economies
According to the definition I use, the Jacksonian Revolution was no revolution at all. Simply one segment of the Southern slave-holding elites replaced the Jeffersonians. Institutional change occurred, but was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Thus, no destruction.
Respectfully, I don't understand what you mean by no destruction? They literally destroyed the central bank and replaced it and then went far further than that and replaced then proceeded to redesign the financial system in such a ways as to geographically, sectorally, and societally diffuse both access to capital and decision making related to its deployment
Thats largely what I had been taught, but it turns out to be verifiably false. It turns out that while Southern elites were involved to some extent, they ere actually on balance the Jacksonians opponents at the national level, Jacksonianism was simply not a Southern project, it was a mass democratic movement that varied dramatically by region and personal background composition. In Worcester, Massachusetts, for instance, Jacksonians were not planters or aristocrats but a coalition of scientists, artists, mechanics, local merchants, engineers, proto-industrialists, clergy, lawyers, and more. Their efforts rapidly decentralized finance, dismantled entrenched interregional credit monopolies, and empowered local capital systems, evidenced by the proliferation of banks, public works, and educational institutions responsive to local needs.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and there’s something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results in both cases.
Using Massachusetts as microcosm, Worcester Ma -- a socio-economic political community -- gaining the ability to, within limits, for the most part dictate the deployment of its own area capital led to huge investments in everything from new infrastructure and businesses and a high quality technical academy called WPI (at first a predecessor programs(s) to it) and lots else.
Among many other things, things like the establishment of the Independent Treasury System and the end of the Second Bank of the United States were not evolutionary tweaks, they were tectonic political shifts that tore down centralized mechanisms of elite coordination and replaced them with new systems aimed at distributing power across geographies and classes. These changes brought about immediate, widespread, and regionally-tailored growth in infrastructure, credit access, land distribution, and institutional innovation, unlike the elite-centric regime continuity you describes.
I was taught my whole a false story of mere elite rotation. Then I discovered the thousands of state and local legislative battles, the widespread creation of new legal and financial institutions, and the real-time economic democratization that unfolded most across the Northeast, Midwest, and burgeoning West.
Eloquently written, but it overgeneralizes a bit in saying that revolutions rarely create right away. The Jacksonian 's generation 1.0 small "d" democratic Democratic Party, along with its many imitators, was a civilizationally immense exception that shows the opposite is possible: it not only dismantle elite structures like the Second Bank of the United States and deeply entrenched socio-economic networks that dominated public policy, it almost immediately began constructing a robust and decentralized yet still deeply connected new political-economic order.
Through swift institutional reforms, such as the Independent Treasury System, state-level banking laws and regulation, the modification and great expansion of the Academe, etc. Jacksonians redistributed capital formation power and decision making away from entrenched deeply elites and toward more locally responsive institutions: and they did this in the cities and they did this in the country side. This quickly launched a positive developmental phase, leading to widespread development infrastructure, increased access to land and credit for ordinary citizens, increased production of knowledge and access to knowledge, and the expansion of regional and local economies economies
Thanks for showing up here on Substack. I appreciate your work and your analysis and I find that you explain your findings in a way that ordinary people like me can understand and digest. Your lack of pretentious rhetoric is refreshing as is your sincerity. I’m looking forward to reading your texts.
Great piece and glad you are here. Noah Smith’s only value is to illustrate the stupidity of the elites that purport to rule us.
It's refreshing to read a little pushback on the "Noah foreign conditions" narratives. I'd not question his economic narratives as I'm not an economist, but I do have boots on the ground experience in China over a >15 year period. Noah doesn't have a clue about China.
I've read your books over the past few years, and am very glad to find you on Substack. Thanks much.
It's worth noting that GDP growth and all other positive things actually started in the last year or two of Yeltsin's rule and didn't speed up that much under Putin (contrary to what Russian media has been saying every five minutes for the last 25 years). Also, you have to factor in oil prices, which crashed in 1986, started rising precisely in 1998 and are still high today compared to the slump of 1986-1998 (see https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart). Once you take oil price dynamics into account, socio-economic explanations for the crisis of 1986-1998 become pretty much unnecessary. I don't know why you don't like Russia being called "a gas station" because that's precisely what it is: in 2020 raw materials accounted for more than 3/4 of its exports and now it's even more.
I would not go as far as gas station though. Commodities as percentage of gdp did reduce from 45% in 2000 vs 28% in 2019. So it’s more nuanced, and such simplification leads to unpleasant surprises in U.S. foreign policy
But AFAIK that's because of growing military spending, which was officially counted as manufacturing etc.
Not an expert at all, but based on some analysis I’ve followed, mil spending will only explain some of this change in gdp allocation. If that were the case, Russian army will have enough truck and won’t have to use donkeys. But some non-military manufacturing, agriculture and IT (yandex et al) was certainly growing in the past 2 decades.
I've seen estimates that 85% of Russian military spending in 2000-2020 was wasted and/or stolen. There was, of course, some growth in other sectors, and some military expenses were not dead-end but went into arms exports, but most of the improvement in standards of living was due to high commodity prices.
Thanks for this post and your books too, which are all really great!
I'm born in France and started to go to the soviet union in the 80's. Married a Russian. I came back to France but then I've been going to Russia about once a year since then.
So I saw the incredible destruction of the 90's too with my own eyes. People i knew dying from deaths of despair in their 30's.
And then the rebuilding from the 2000's. The rise of the Russian middle class.
The main problem was indeed neoliberalism, oligarchs still having power, though much less than under Eltsin, and relying too much on natural resources.
Sanctions actually helped a lot to make Russian society and government realise it must rebuilding agriculture and industry. Agriculture was rebuilt after the 2014 sanctions at incredible speed. After the 2022 sanctions, there was one year of recession. You could see the foreign shops closed. And then from 2023 rebuilding again. To give the exemple of St Petersbourg, in 2023- 2024, all the closed shops had reopened under different brands, all the old buses and minibuses had been replaced by brand new buses made in Russia, card payment was introduced in all transports, 2 brand new museums were opened. The country looks thriving, in stark contrast to France which is clearly in recession...
Jacques Sapir is a great French economist, specialised in Russian economics and member of the Russian academy of science, who gives a lot of information about Russian economics.
Yes, sanctions had a very positive effect on Russian economy (and some other commenters also noted it). In fact, a number of commentators on Russian telegram I follow are worried about what would happen after sanctions end.
"[Putin] did little to control the kleptocracy"
LOL, Putin IS the kleptocracy.
Your prejudices are showing, my Russian friend.
First, I am not your friend.
Second, I don't know whether Putin is a kleptocrat or not. Do you have any evidence that he is? I'd like to see it. If you can't point me to such evidence, then it is your bias showing.
OK, pal. Honestly I thought it was common knowledge that Putin's Russia is a kleptocracy. Here are a few discussions of the issue:
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-kleptocracy-power-and-plunder-in-putins-russia/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/russia-tomorrow/sanctioned-kleptocracy-how-putins-kremligarchs-have-survived-the-war-and-even-prospered/
https://www.csce.gov/briefings/kleptocrats-kremlin-ties-between-business-and-power-russia/
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/putins-kleptocracy-who-owns-russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin%27s_Kleptocracy
Please note that I don't consider the sociopolitical situation in the USA to be much better than that in Russia. There has been a strong current of official corruption in the USA for as long as I've lived here, which is being made much worse by the current regime. But let's not kid ourselves that Russia isn't also a kleptocracy.
"Rather bizarrely, he argues that the first “actually tried to build a new fascist civilization” (in Note 1"
I think Hitler tried to create an authoritarian fascist state as Putin today. That he was much less successful is of course evident.
So, do you predict that the destructive period will last in the US for about 10 years (and this probably means the rest of the world)? But when did this period start? Did it start in 2025 or at the beginning of Trump's first presidential term?
I think we can pinpoint the beginning quite securely to Jan. 20, 2025. But as the saying goes, revolution has a beginning, but revolution has no end. Put differently, it is somewhat arbitrary to say that the French Revolution ended in 1799. Or that the Russian Revolution ended in 1922, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
I'll have more to say on this in tomorrow's post.
It all depends on how one defines what a revolution is. If we define it as an effort to change the political-economic order, then the French Revolution definitely did not end in 1799, because the order that existed before 1789 was not restored. And even more than that, the process of change continued, but in a different way.
Probably the same should be said about the current American change - I think it started with Trump's first term. He started promoting his ideas at that time. Even then, many people in the US and around the world started to change their minds. Right-wing parties in Europe kept coming to power even between Trump's terms. In other words, the process was set in motion.
As for the Russian Revolution, the same observation can be made. Has there been a return to the status quo ante? Or at least did the change stop in 1922 and things have continued the same way ever since?
I understand the scientific desire to find some magic numbers, but perhaps they shouldn't be so narrow and defined. Like everything in human society (as opposed to physics) should be defined approximately, like “this period takes much less time than the next period”. Something like that. The French Revolution cycle took 26 years, but only because of military failure. If there was such a strict repeatability, the USSR's military luck should have ended in 1943.
That's my humble opinion :-)
This does not mean, however, that I am skeptical about the mathematization of history. But on the other hand, it seems to me that historical political economy is already to a large extent a science. Don't you think so?
love your work too...Great article
In this light I wonder how will the United States ever emerge from its own destructive stage?
If Kubler Ross is any source of enlightenment, one must figure that we're swimming in denial right now. We have a president who is babbling for answers, advised by a pathetic, woefully prepared cabinet that is just cosplaying their part. If Kubler Ross is to be right, Stage 2 will soon bring anger to the party. Probably in the form of higher interest rates,
Hmm. I'm an immigrant to this country from the same neck of the woods as you (Romania). Some things are better in that part of the world, some other things are actually worse. There definitely has been a rebuilding phase even under Putin, but at what cost?
I don't know the cost, but I know enough Russian expats to take a wild guess. They have new subway stations and new buildings in the Dream Cities, but get out of the Capital and/or St. Petersburg and into the vast countryside, and it's a very ugly picture...according to the folks that got out.
The communists also did the same. Had vanity projects to show off and appear to keep up with the West in the cities, while they devasted the entire structure of society and the countryside. It can really be argued that Putin's 'rebuidling' aspect is also a smokescreen. Rebuilding what, exactly? The metro station? Please. The brainwashing and fear he also built up will damage entire generations.
Yes, thank you. Like I said, I only know the second hand, but it's a lot of second hands describing Moscow as a fantastic wonderland if you're moneyed, connected and on the inside, a sham if you're not, and a hell hole if you're down on the bottom rungs.
I feel the USA needs a hard reset
But Wall Street won’t allow that
Ironically it was Wall Street that was pillaging Russia
Private equity is pillaging America right now
My wife asked why did that wonderful store go bankrupt? Private equity I tell her
Why did that hospital close?
Private equity
Our politicians do nothing about the buccaneers destroying our society
Joni Ernst you do not need Medicaid you eventually die anyway pray to get into heaven
Americans are a passive people
They only shoot up schools killing school children
Only country in the world that does that
Passive aggressive
One of the intriguing questions to explore is why 21st century revolutions are so less violent than 20th century ones were.
Trump has just staged a coup in the USA without most people even noticing, and he did it without anyone firing a shot (except at him).
Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and subsequent recovery under Putin, were a walk in the park compared to the revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil war.
Why?
This trend actually can be extended back several thousand years. I discuss it in End Times, towards the end. And we will be soon publishing more formal statistical analyses. But the best explanation seems to be the accumulation of social norms and institutions.
I look forward to seeing that work. I am writing about how the 17th century English figured out how to evolve and resolve disputes without resort to violence here: https://thethirdsystem.substack.com/
Your model of revolution seems somewhat forced when applied in an American context. The New Deal involved revolutionary change in American governance, but there was no sign of elite over-production causing it or a period of destruction. Instead there was the building of new institutions.
The Stagflation crisis of the1970's and the "Reagan Revolution". There was no sign of elite over-production and no period of destruction.
Trump is more of an electoral outlier than a revolutionary. The potential always existed in the American system for demagogues. George Wallace in 1968 & 1972 and H. Ross Perot in 1992 tried to do much the same thing. Trump succeeded in winning office with combination of strategy and luck.
Note that George Wallace despite one of the best third party showings in history, decided to run as a Democrat in 1972. Had it not been for a bullet, he might have won. Trump won be working within a major party.
I just watched this video about the accelerating pole shift on the Kim Iverson Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq2xdtMUNY0 I have begun to wonder if electromagnetic influences from Earths magnetosphere and Sun spots have any effect on the unfolding drama of human history? The idea that electromagnetic radiation from various sources can and does affect the complex electrolytic systems in the body, mind and psyche are discussed. It seems plausible that historic events may be influenced by these forces. Apparently, the vast waves of confusion and chaos on planet Earth currently [political, religious and economic upheaval] are somehow being caused or modulated by the pole shift, sun spots and other celestial impulses.
FYI, on the guy interviewed on the video you mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fTLZTEE7mU&t=18s
Please note that I wrote "have begun to wonder" and also "It seems plausible that....". I did not endorse or debunk Ben Davidson one way or the other. There have been plenty of researchers down through the ages attempting to make sense of the rise and fall of Civilizations, Empires, Monarchies and States. Oswald Spengler, Ibn Khaldun, Arnold Toynbee, Carol Quigley et al are some of them. Many of these researchers, and others, have offered input ranging through Religion, Metaphysics, Science, Mathematics, Astrology, Aliens, etc. Professor Dave also has "theories" on this and many topics.
I am not so much interested, anymore, in theories about the Who, Where, When and What of human history- since so many researchers have already outlined their take. Even among these "What-are-the-stages" researchers, there are many different interpretations and , of course, disagreement and contention.
No one seems to know for sure, and perhaps, humankind will never know why and how history unfolds in the directions and events the record shows.
My particular interest these days is, "Why do human Civilizations rise and fall, and How does this rise and fall take place"? If Why and How could be understood, perhaps those in "control"[if there is, in fact, control of any kind] of the course of human history would be in a position to guide it in such a manner as to avoid or more effectively manage the many "shit storms" humanity seems forced to endure.
Ben and the probably-too-many other conspiracy theorists have a lot to say and perhaps they are totally out in delusional left field. The ancient and modern theorists are definitely not in agreement. Perhaps a lot of them are also delusional to some extent?
However, the "Stark Fact Remains" that human civilization does pass through repeating stages and, because stages are relative to activity, one must conclude that all activity is based on a cause and effect relationship.
I am interested what your take on this How-Why, Cause-Effect feature of human civilization might be?
Eloquently written, but it overgeneralizes a bit in saying that revolutions rarely create right away. The Jacksonian 's generation 1.0 small "d" democratic Democratic Party, along with its many imitators, was a civilizationally immense exception that shows the opposite is possible: it not only dismantle elite structures like the Second Bank of the United States and deeply entrenched socio-economic networks that dominated public policy, it almost immediately began constructing a robust and decentralized yet still deeply connected new political-economic order.
Through swift institutional reforms, such as the Independent Treasury System, state-level banking laws and regulation, the modification and great expansion of the Academe, etc. Jacksonians redistributed capital formation power and decision making away from entrenched deeply elites and toward more locally responsive institutions: and they did this in the cities and they did this in the country side. This quickly launched a positive developmental phase, leading to widespread development infrastructure, increased access to land and credit for ordinary citizens, increased production of knowledge and access to knowledge, and the expansion of regional and local economies economies
According to the definition I use, the Jacksonian Revolution was no revolution at all. Simply one segment of the Southern slave-holding elites replaced the Jeffersonians. Institutional change occurred, but was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Thus, no destruction.
Respectfully, I don't understand what you mean by no destruction? They literally destroyed the central bank and replaced it and then went far further than that and replaced then proceeded to redesign the financial system in such a ways as to geographically, sectorally, and societally diffuse both access to capital and decision making related to its deployment
Thats largely what I had been taught, but it turns out to be verifiably false. It turns out that while Southern elites were involved to some extent, they ere actually on balance the Jacksonians opponents at the national level, Jacksonianism was simply not a Southern project, it was a mass democratic movement that varied dramatically by region and personal background composition. In Worcester, Massachusetts, for instance, Jacksonians were not planters or aristocrats but a coalition of scientists, artists, mechanics, local merchants, engineers, proto-industrialists, clergy, lawyers, and more. Their efforts rapidly decentralized finance, dismantled entrenched interregional credit monopolies, and empowered local capital systems, evidenced by the proliferation of banks, public works, and educational institutions responsive to local needs.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and there’s something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results in both cases.
Using Massachusetts as microcosm, Worcester Ma -- a socio-economic political community -- gaining the ability to, within limits, for the most part dictate the deployment of its own area capital led to huge investments in everything from new infrastructure and businesses and a high quality technical academy called WPI (at first a predecessor programs(s) to it) and lots else.
Among many other things, things like the establishment of the Independent Treasury System and the end of the Second Bank of the United States were not evolutionary tweaks, they were tectonic political shifts that tore down centralized mechanisms of elite coordination and replaced them with new systems aimed at distributing power across geographies and classes. These changes brought about immediate, widespread, and regionally-tailored growth in infrastructure, credit access, land distribution, and institutional innovation, unlike the elite-centric regime continuity you describes.
I was taught my whole a false story of mere elite rotation. Then I discovered the thousands of state and local legislative battles, the widespread creation of new legal and financial institutions, and the real-time economic democratization that unfolded most across the Northeast, Midwest, and burgeoning West.
Eloquently written, but it overgeneralizes a bit in saying that revolutions rarely create right away. The Jacksonian 's generation 1.0 small "d" democratic Democratic Party, along with its many imitators, was a civilizationally immense exception that shows the opposite is possible: it not only dismantle elite structures like the Second Bank of the United States and deeply entrenched socio-economic networks that dominated public policy, it almost immediately began constructing a robust and decentralized yet still deeply connected new political-economic order.
Through swift institutional reforms, such as the Independent Treasury System, state-level banking laws and regulation, the modification and great expansion of the Academe, etc. Jacksonians redistributed capital formation power and decision making away from entrenched deeply elites and toward more locally responsive institutions: and they did this in the cities and they did this in the country side. This quickly launched a positive developmental phase, leading to widespread development infrastructure, increased access to land and credit for ordinary citizens, increased production of knowledge and access to knowledge, and the expansion of regional and local economies economies