The pull of forward and backwardness and the paradoxes of life

How does culture affect the success of capitalism?

 The common charge levelled at communism often is that it fails to account for human nature. That it operates at a utopian idealist level. That most people would rather take the free stuff and not do any work or do the minimal work required for lack of incentives. It is one of the main reason why slavery fails in the modern economy too. You can whip a slave into doing the minimum, but he'll move a bone unless he's compelled, not out of mean spirit or laziness, but sheer logic. The more skill and quality work demands the more incentives become essential to motivate humans. And incentives remain a goldmine of possibilities in economics. That is why slaves were so often offered freedom in Ancient Rome and other societies where slavery survived long. Unlike the far more barbaric and racially based American. Even skilled work was done by slaves in the case of Rome. Anything that were too low to be done by the elites or the citizens. Even something lucrative like accounting. An escape from servitude made for good motivation. That your children would be citizens, even better. As the generations went each generation would gain opportunities from the last. Families would connive to unite land so as to build wealth across generations, living as living pieces of a great machinery. That's probably where the arranged marriage concept came from. And the opposition to love marriages. You were shirking your duties by marrying for love. In a world where wealth was scarce, building wealth was the difference between back breaking about and living off others back breaking labour.

  But that is a topic for another time. The more interesting question then is, does capitalism really account for human nature. It has a record for prosperity, but a century is hardly a great show of reliability in the big picture. Not in the species that received a perfect century of world-class rule under the five good emperors of Rome and then watched it fall apart for 2 centuries afterward. (Check it out if you haven't, it's fascinating. Would you condemn your screw up of a son to death to save the empire and it's future? It would be a hard choice, and t would define the next 2 centuries) So that is what we explore here.

The merits of protectionism. It's fascinating how a beacon of capitalist success might be the perfect example of such an uncapitalist concept. China is famed for it's private business revolution. Protectionism is an idea, that has long been derided as a great source of stagnation. Protect, the local business i.e ban foreign business, or protect local labour, like Andhra Pradesh with it's hundred percent local employees reservation (That's a real thing) All these measures have come to hold the stink of socialism. And yes, a stench indeed is how I would describe socialism is perceived by much of modern India. Without competition the argument goes, there can be no innovation. And thus there will be stagnation. In a purely capitalist world, the consumer knows best, and all is served to him as he pleases. The internal dealings of any buyer and seller are none of our concerns. Let them do as they please. Free them to produce, bring in foreign investment. We rant and rave (at least I do) at each act of regulation, and each restriction placed upon foreign businesses. Us Capitalists, we look at the government as they place regulation upon regulation upon Amazon, trying to find ways to ban their business as Amazon dances around the whip modifying it's business structure over and over until the government gives up. (This ones fascinating if you care to read about it) All there seems to be is a desperate attempt at pulling us back to the old days, before the liberalisation and the new India, that we seem to see today. Business is the lifeblood of this country. It has been for all the powers that have risen and stayed risen since the 20th century. When traders go and complain to the government about their business getting hit by ecommerce, they seem to sticking to an old antiquated order doomed to fail. Adapt or die is the mantra in an ever evolving world. Can't handle the change Deal with it. There is no mercy for the modern businessman. And maybe there shouldn't be. If you are entitled to all the upside (Save some frankly ridiculously high tax) you should probably accept a potential hit on the the downside. Capitalism taketh as it giveth. And for the most part, I've stuck by these ideas. That the long period of socialism that seemingly lost us many a game changing opportunity was a great tragedy wrought by the people, for the people and on the people. God bless Manmohan Singh's Soul and the soul of the western world and everybody in the government that fucked up so bad we practically were forced to open up the economy. It took a near knockout punch, but it got done.

   And the Indian economy revelled in the fresh flow of freedom. As the economy opened the country saw a fresh lease of growth. My parents generations great sadness over the lack of Coca Cola and Pepsi, would now be sated with a whole host of goodies, noone in India had ever scene. From one TV channel to hundred and eventually to thousands. 2-3 cars to global brands and ferrari showrooms. The dough flowed in. Ever since then we've been tought in all sources of information that the path wrought for us that year is the optimal one. Captitalism and free markets shall be our saviour. We must attract foreign investment. This is the narrative of modern India. Of of forward lookers and optimists. To capitalists and free marketers it was a constant source of frustration under Manmohan singh to watch a certain socialist politician from West Bengal rip through every liberalisation attempt our PM brought up. FDI, GST, everything that could be blocked was blocked. Goodbye Walmart, I suppose. While socialist schemes like the food security bill, designed to win elections got passed left and right. 1.2 lack crore per year in expenses, pass it right up! We have a very small set of voters paying the taxes. And when the resentment of the people reached a boil, the current disposition pushed into power, promising growth and development, a welcome change to the narrative. When Deng Xiaoping, visited the United States under Nixon he made a point to visit the space centre and other scientific establishment. On returning he openly supported capitalism. Saying a 'It doesnt matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice'

 And that became the operating philosophy of Communist Party China. If it works we do it. Too many people? Stop having kids. Communism not working. Capitalism working in your neighbours house? Capitalism it is. Roll open the economy. Let us all bow in wonder at the immensity of brilliance it must have taken to successfuly open up the economy as you lead the Communist Party of China. There is far more danger there from rigid idealists than most would consider. An absolute rule is rarely absolute at that scale. All governments operate on systems. And systems give vast amounts of power to the bearecarcy. A beaurecracy that gains and loses from such big bang reforms. A beaurecracty you rely on to get stuff done. Not only do you not get shot and declared a traitor (And let no man use that term on so great a man lightly) you pull together the start of the single greatest growth spree in human history. A half billion people pulled from poverty. Not too many resumes that good in human history.


The Non Free Market Argument
But the interesting bit, and this is the part that fascinates me, is that the move wasn't absolute. Chinese protectionism clamped down on the internet in China, blocking foreign services from operating. No Whatsapp, or Facebook or Google. And contrary to expected stagnation like Indias case pre 1990 it led to innovation. The lack of foreign interference has led to quality apps build by vast companies often comparable to their western counterparts. In the absence of Google came Baidu, without Whatsapp there was WeChat, and so on. Even as China thrived on foreign investment, by manufacturing for the world, it parallelly leveraged closed markets in another sector. To leverage globalisation even as you spit on it at the same time. And it worked. It's fascinating, and repeatable. Nationalising banks is another case. Not usually popular in free market circles. Present changes in sentiment notwithstanding, sarkari has rarely ever been a compliment. More Sarkari is usually not a good thing. But in 1969 when Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 banks, deposits rapidly went up 800 percent. A vast increase. Despite switching to a seemingly less efficient system of control, the result was a game changer, regarded by the RBI as the greatest single most important economic decision since 1947, greater even than the liberalisation of 1991. It was a game changer, resulting in vast increases in the number of bank branches, including the proportion of rural branches. It increased the involvement of the Indian populace in banking. And the reason, heavily was trust. People did not trust bankers. They were a disliked class, and not very well regarded. At least partly with reason. Unintuively sometimes, liberalisation isn't the answer. It should be. As a lover of freedom and the free market, it's fascinating how often backward seeming moves with bandage instead of medicing, type implications tend to pay off. The India of that era needed it. It doesn't need it now. It would hurt from it now. Terribly. In a system with a degree of stability, trust and enough freedom and optimism to grow the free markets work wonders. Wealth if nothing else is likely to flood in. But to all that call socialism evil and a great failure in the great human experiment that is civilisation. It's interesting to see the parts where it works. What may seem like a wasted period of Indian history may not completely be so. The land reforms, land holding limits that were enforced and nationalisation all reek of a bygone era. And let it remain so. But perhaps not with so much distaste. We might find  that some good came from it. Socially the country that got freedom in 1947 needed socialist measures. It needed the land reforms that can legitimately be called theft in modern India, it needed the breaches of freedom that were the blatant nationalisation that took place seemingly at will, like with oil companies, banks and the premier Indian car company today.


   This part will be scrubbed from history eventually. I don't see a friendly disposition to out socialist past arriving soon. I pray infact that it doesn't. But let us not purely willify the people who led it. It was the will of the people after all the voted in the socialists time and again. And the will of the people that encouraged them if not compelled them to act as they did. Even in 1980 when Indira Gandhi pushed forward with a liberalisation with the forward plan, she took a lot of backlash. It isn't always obvious the way that is likely to be looked upon well by those who judge us. But if the past reveals anything to us, let it be that the ends that we seek are not always optimally seeked upon rigid principles. No system is entirely perfect. Not democracy, socialism or fascism. No system adapts perfectly to human nature. Some do better than others. But none perfectly. Because the trick isn't as much to adapt to nature, which is constant, but who we are at that place in time. And that is a function of more than nature, but also place and time. A country with bonded labour does not turn into Europe through liberalisation but instead Somalia. And yet a stable country may yet do well with a fair bit more freedom as history has shown us time and again. It all depends on the people. Who they are. How strongly they are influenced by an idea. The people that are to work the system we develop. Sometimes it's best to just focus on getting the rat, rather than focussing how we get it.

Part 1: The soul of a civilization

 "German Engineering, Japanese Productivity, American Ingenuity and Obesity, European Decadence, French Romance and rudeness, the terms are common. But what do they mean?" The professor is an old man, prodigious by years and achievement.
  "What is it that builds the soul that we so often refer to? Man is infinitely variable, he changes like the wind, blowing hot and cold, generous and selfish, an asshole a moment and a beloved friend the next. The great brutal drug lord Escobar that ran wild nearly a century ago was a renowned family man. Napoleon was hopeless in bed, and Ceasar lived in eternal fear of balding, if at least for political reasons. Man is discrete in his traits, jagged in their combinations. A mishmash of pieces pulled together to certain affect. At scale, you would imagine this would yield a great mass. Amorphous in nature, with no specific traits but the physical ones that seemingly define them." His accent, worn with a little bit of french as he rails and roams the stage, exploring and splattering concepts freely like paint on a blackboard. He carries with him a stick of polished wood that taps the ground with a clack every time he steps anywhere he steps.
 "They say the world makes us. That the deserts made the Inuit and the forests the aborigines. Or is it the other way around? But do we not affect the world around us? Are we not at least partly our own product. The world makes the man, and the man makes the world. A great game of chicken and egg. An eternal cycle." He stares at the class before him. His eyes covered in brown semi-transparent framed glasses.
 "It is tempting" he inflects the world with force. "It is tempting to think that we have agency in all this. That a civilization has an inherent personality. That it was Japanese bravery and ingenuity that aided their reconstruction after the second world war and not the perfect storm of an educated, nationalist populace formed from the Meiji restoration, we talked about last class and a shortage of extractable resources combined with globalization in the '60s that would yield those resources without significant exploitation of the people and encouraging entrepreneurship to produce and process those materials in an era where that would yield far greater profit. That the jew proclivity for banking and mercantile enterprise is a result of some supernatural capability or conspiracy and not a result of mass ostracisation from any and all classical fields, like farming, and really primarily farming. Ban a people from doing all but lending and trading and ban all other people from lending as the church declared at one point and what else would result but a culture that masters and dominates banking. And not just masters as some would tastelessly imply, but also pioneers it. But as those variables disappear so do the warpages. And sooner or later every damn hippy is out collecting interest" He swings his stick pointing at the class.
  "As individuals we are free and people of agency. An individual is unpredictable, a pawn can kill a queen without any regard for position or power. Blood spills the same either way. People evolve and change, warp, intimidate, and cower. But as a group you are influenceable. Your reactions are predictable. You are like a mimosa. A plant that closes to the touch. You respond to stimuli. And quite effectively and to the right eye and arm, predictably. The world can be engineered to you're taste. And society always yields. But never against its nature. You must weaponize the nature of mankind to control it. Understand what they desire, and give it to them, But for a price. The dictator of Albania in the '50s, the 1950s mind you, nearly a century ago spent considerable effort to exterminate religion. He jailed the priest and clergy, appropriated temple and church property and arrested people for following their religion in peace. For years he put his entire weight into it." He smirks, shaking his head as if humored by the failed attempt. As if he could do better. And he probably could, as he had, in his time. Repression 101 as the class was called with a little humor, and sometimes by the professor himself,  for this was not an ordinary professor to deal with. For where do tyrants go to retire if not in bespectacled universities where all is forgiven but never forgotten in the name of objectivity.
 "Human nature, of course, outlasted him. Albania today remains strongly religious. Islam is the biggest religion, with more than 50 percent of the populace, and Christianity also continues strong. No effort of man is ever as wasted as that which goes against his nature. The competent dictator is as much a construction of the people, as they are of him. If you notice, keen students, that that is more religion than much of Europe and America. Prosperity achieved more in decades than Repression ever could. Statistically, the easiest way to make man forget god is to make him rich and idle. A society of 30 hour work weeks and olive oil with toast is hard to keep religious. The nature of Humanity brought to bear. And that's how you bend the populace. With chocolates and cheese and plenty of bread to spare. But never too much lest they might think too much of themselves" He smiles at the class.
 "Questions?"

An hour Later
 Harold smiles to himself as he looks at the door at the students shuffling out of the class. He uncaps the top of his stick and looks over at the one oncoming student as he takes a swig from the stick. Always wise to be a little buzzed for these interactions. The warm rum runs down his throat burning slightly, his throat. "Yes Franklin" He smirks. "What question do you have for me today?"
 "No question, sir. That was a fascinating lecture" He stares at the professor, a little trepidated.
 "I have your results sir. The coroners office gave me a right tight fight on it, but I got it. They were wondering what it was I wanted to do with it?" He looks at him. "I told them I'm doing a project on death rates by ethnicity, location and age." He smirks. "It would be very hard to do that with these" Harold grabs the sheets smiling at the kid, "Your help is appreciated." He nods slightly, hobbling a bit towards the door. Then turns, sensing the kid's hesitance. "I'll get you that 'A' kiddo." The kid nods, smiling slightly, "Thank you sir" he nods and walks past the old man. Harold smirks. The perks of making friends outside the department. Every once in a while they can be useful. And hard to track.

Harold
 In a 117AD when Trajan stood upon his ship surveying the Persian gulf, I wonder if he knew he'd be the last emperor to ever walk those shores? Harold smirks as rolls his palms through the paperwork, I'll find what that fucker did, and have him nailed by morning. On the TV, the errant entrepreneur jibbers and jabbers, about one construction and the next. Great plans that speak of decades unseen, of golden towers and streets of paved silver, or so he'd imply. I know what you did, you motherfucker.

The thought flashes through his head. You didn't just pop out of the womb on that pedestal. It's the tyrant's lesson, if you've made it somewhere, you know what it takes to get there. If blood were as adhesive as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, his hands would be painted red. Or perhaps those of his goons. It's a rare man who does his own dirty work. A rarer one who gets there without ever doing so. The document is a large one, a file with thousands and thousands of names, printed in paper form so as to be unsearchable. Nasty bastard, if only I weren't your match. He works through the pages, pushing date by date, location by location. It's designed not to be scannable. Text that undulates ever so slightly, it's unreadable to the computer. Of course, that's bullshit. That shit would fly in the 20' and maybe the '30s but the truth here is far more simple. There's no way a few warps in the text can confuse a computer that can read bad handwriting as if it were cooked on a typewriter. The truth is, he's messed with the software companies to make sure no software comes out that will cut out his little loops, to read the text. A good way to enforce control. Since most people never run across documents with such text, no major open source solution has been attempted. Why solve something that doesn't affect you? Controlling the variables. He hasn't learnt the first lesson of control yet, the entrepreneur. But he will. Harold will make sure of that, if painfully. He thumbs through files pushing, date by date, place by place. The info is in here somewhere. He knows it. The first farms were located in North India, somewhere in Bihar. A perfect place, fit for exploitation. And the entrepreneur had really dug in. The more Harold had read, all those years ago, he'd been fascinated. The entrepreneur leased the land for peanuts and mechanized the farms at vast scale, building a tax free business empire that over the years rivaled the best. Like all good businesses, he'd integrated vertically, controlling the supply chain, leveraging a great waterways network along the Ganga and Brahmaputra to move goods rapidly and across India. Controlling the manufacturing for the requisite massive farm machinery. Even occasionally selling to competitors. Never at quite the same quality though. That should have been a hint. Most businessmen would have taken the short term gain. Plowing money from every means possible. The plans here were bigger. The margins he was making were unheard off, undercutting all other farms and still swimming in profits. The benefits of unprecedented scale and efficiency. The next thing he knew he had a business that commanded 20 percent of the food flowing into Kolkata and Delhi. He hedged against the weather by spreading his farms along the network and cut his costs to peanuts by leveraging the scale of his network. Nobody could compete. It was surprisingly simple, not easy mind you, but simple on the surface. Underneath, it was all sorts of complicated, with logistics networks so vast, the government would have struggled to build them. The wonders of private enterprise. He found it on the map, Harold. Tapping his fingers upon the paper at the location. A village that no longer existed. In fact, none of them did, for miles and miles now. Factories and factories, spinning up goods, farms, weaving food in the fields and the occasional tenement for the small corps of engineers required to run them. Turns out the city business had turned out to be more lucrative than the farm business. Though less tax-free. But who cares about taxes when you're making money hand over fist. Everybody cares. The thought flashes by as he smirks. Not a man he has seen in all his years with a deep love for those beloved taxes. It had been an elegant idea, and the next thing it was everywhere. Cities so high they would touch the sky. Clumps of towers all interconnecting, capable of housing more people than had ever lived together. The first megacity built in all of human history of even comparable size was Tokyo. And upon that model came even larger constructions than that which once stood out as the gold standard. Where Tokyo housed 40 million people the first great Megacities the entrepreneur would build would grow up to 50-60 million people. Chewing upon the hungry masses that dotted the Indian subcontinent. And soon it was Africa and the middle east too that was engulfed. Wherever there were villages, and a sparsely spread populace living in poverty, there was a megacity, ready to hoover them up and stack them sky-high. Saturating and concentrating opportunities, and building a culture of hope and mobility as he proudly called it. If the country was to ever grow into anything as great as the west ever had, more people had to live in cities, a bright future was almost certain to have more cites, and possibly bigger ones. It was a sharp insight, that drove the entrepreneur driving him to sink all that he could and more into these constructions. It was obvious, an inevitability, but not certain to work. Mistimed brilliance works out to little more than folly. Almost but no cigar is no cigar. And possibly more. But it worked. It would have been a disaster to get the timing wrong. But he got it right. And maybe he aided in making it so. And so did others. Harold's fingers press the buttons on his remote to build up the volume. He looks at the tv. And as he looks at that smug, proud, face expositing away, he smiles. Not over yet Buddy. Not over yet.