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Yes, I think the real takeaway is that people are not rational actors and people in positions of massive power even less so. I think there was an assumption ba
by munificent 5y ago
Yes, I think the real takeaway is that people are not rational actors and people in positions of massive power even less so.
I think there was an assumption baked into globalism that heads of state would behave in the best interest of their citizens, but that's only even approximately true when the country is a functioning democracy. In an authoritarian state, what's good for the leader may vary wildly from what's good for the people. One could argue that the entire point of autocratic power is for the leader to be able to do what their people don't want.
And once you have someone with that level of power and no obligations to the masses, there should be no expectation that they will be have rationally or in the economic interests of the entire country. As long as it benefits their perverse psychology or isolated offshore bank accounts, it's on the table.
- maxerickson 5y agoPretty thin experiment to be making conclusions on though. There can be lots of scenarios where the last 70 years saw lots more war.
- notriddle 5y agoEspecially the "people in power are even less rational" part. The 99% might seem more predictable than the 1% only because the law of large numbers smooths out the random, unpredictable irrational acts.
- munificent 5y agoThat's a good point. It may simultaneously be true that globalism doesn't prevent irrational war to the degree that we had hoped, but it does still prevent it more than some other economic alternative. (Personally, I think the best way to prevent war is non-corrupt democracies with little autocratic power concentration and a strong fair press. Most people don't want to go to war and kill others, so when you give the entire populace agency over what the military does, you get a lot less irrational wars.)