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British elites essentially gave up trying to rule after the Suez Crisis, when Britain's ejection from the superpower club was confirmed. The country has been ai

by scrlk 2y ago

British elites essentially gave up trying to rule after the Suez Crisis, when Britain's ejection from the superpower club was confirmed. The country has been aimlessly bobbing around since under a general policy of "managed decline", and matters have now come to a head. "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." Lee Kuan Yew commented upon it in From Third World to First: "As Britain’s worldwide influence shrank, so did the worldview of its younger parliamentarians and ministers. Some old friends, British commanders who had fought in the last world war and had served in Singapore defending us against Sukarno’s Confrontation, compared the old generation British leaders to oak trees with wide-spreading branches and deep roots. They described their younger leaders as “bonsai oak”, recognisably oak trees, but miniaturised, because their root area had shrunk."

api 2y ago
Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live. I fear the same thing is coming for the USA as it, inevitably, loses its standing as the world's sole great superpower (which it only had for maybe 20 years at most!). We could easily get stuck in a permanent cycle of demagogue after demagogue promising to, well, make us "great again." You see it in individuals too. The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Make someone a celebrity and put them on a pedestal, and it often ruins them forever. It's a fickle thing. When they inevitably go back to being just a regular person, the effect is often to leave the person permanently feeling like a has-been. They flail around for the rest of their lives trying to recapture something that is fleeting instead of enjoying the fact that (1) they achieved something few people achieve and (2) they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. Success is more psychologically dangerous than failure. There's a saying: "whom god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad." I think a better version is "whom god wishes to destroy, he first raises up."
- gjm11 2y ago
  > The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Actually, that's not quite right. The root of both "celebrate" and "celebrity" is a Latin word whose original meaning is something to do with crowdedness. Celebrity (in the older sense of "being famous") means being someone that people crowd around. The original meaning of "celebrate" was to hold a religious service, attended by crowds of people. Later "celebrity" evolved to also mean a person who has the quality of celebrity-in-the-old-sense, and "celebrate" evolved to also mean to hold some other kind of event that attracts crowds. But "celebrity" didn't ever primarily mean "person who is admired", it was always "person who attracts attention". (It is still true that people who are famous and then not famous can find it hard to adapt to the change, of course.)
- graemep 2y ago
  > Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live. I think you are right, but I also think it afflicts the ruling class a lot more. In particular, politicians, who are power seekers by nature, feel the loss more than ordinary people do. IN their minds, not being a super power equates to declined, even if life improves for ordinary people (which it did).
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  England is a has-been society because 1) they are old and have more vacation. You've got less people working less hours. REAL GDP per work hour is up >50% since the early 80s - what people seem to think of as some golden era - and is more than double since the 60s, another golden era according to others - even real GDP PPP adjusted, you're still >50% since the 60s. 2) They decided they wanted to punish hard workers and productive investment and aggressively reward capitalists that "park money" in non-productive assets (like real estate). England could easily reverse these decisions and aggressively reward hard work and investment in productive assets, open the doors to intellectuals, and the hard, smart working people and investment would come pouring in. But, they'll never do that, because boomers. The problem with England is the problem elsewhere. The amount your society needs to improve to let ~1% more people not work every year for ~30 years is incredible. The entire west has done it. But the benefits are going almost exclusively to the retiree class. In the not too far future, if trends continue <50% of adults will be working with very high standards of living. This is absolutely UNHEARD of. At the same time, you'll see basically no benefit at all for the people who actually do the work. This doesn't seem like the best way to distribute productivity gains to society, but it's the way we've chosen, and as long as old people have a say, you better bet they're gonna vote for the status quo or even bigger pension payouts in the future.
spacebanana7 2y ago
The empire was almost always a waste of money. Very few, if any, colonies created enough money for the treasury to justify the cost of maintaining them.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Like with every colonial power, the empire wasn't there to enrich the entire country or the average people, it was enriching the crown and wealthy business magnates involved in the trade, basically the top 1%, the rest were left to wallow in poverty and hard labor.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    I definitely agree there were some individuals who made money from the imperial project, but it wasn't rational at the level of the British state/monarch. > Like with every colonial power... Some colonial powers may have genuinely increased the wealth of the imperial state. The Spanish and Mongol empires stand out in my mind here, although I don't have a precise source of accounting.
- James_K 2y ago
  It's frankly sickening that some people think the empire was an exercise in us helping the third world develop purely out of the goodness of our hearts.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    William Jardine getting half of China addicted to opium and starting a war out of the issue wasn't good for China or Britain.
    - James_K 2y ago
      Well it wasn't good for us unless you count all the money we made out of it before they started fighting back.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
You don't have to be a superpower to be a prosperous society. This loss of superpower status means you need to refocus your efforts on the tractable instead of wallowing in has-been fantasy.
- fidotron 2y ago
  The scary thing about 21st century Britain is the extent to which they now wallow in the never-happened fantasy of the Harry Potter universe to compensate for it. That has changed absolutely everything, not all bad to be sure.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    As an American, I categorically refuse to believe Britain is anything but Harry Potter without magic.
- schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  Yeah, like I don't think Norway or Switzerland have ever been empires, much less superpowers. But they provide a very good standard of living for their citizens.
  - xedrac 2y ago
    Norway's economy is heavily reliant on oil and gas. What of countries that don't have such abundant natural resources?
- tempest_ 2y ago
  Of course that is true but it undeniably helps. I wonder if postwar Britain watching its hegemony decline will be anything like the current decline of the US.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  And "small but prosperous" is exactly what Singapore does well. The UK could learn a lot from Singapore.
emptyfile 2y ago
Getting so tired of HN, every thread has these kinds of vague, ignorant, semi-political comments. Just a throwaway opinion with some unrelated quote to appear smart, not related to the posted link, nothing added to the discussion. The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it: >Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke? Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.
- wobfan 2y ago
  Also somehow the comment above is talking exclusively about influence and power in the "world order" which is not at all what the article is about. Power != Prosperity
- scrlk 2y ago
  I read the article. My comment was prompted by this: > One reason for this is that parts of the British state are fundamentally misaligned with goals like ‘improving living standards’ or ‘increasing wealth’, whether that’s through hand-wringingly incompetent procurement processes, long-term failure to invest in the infrastructure and management required to support ‘moar frontline staff!!’, acute treasury brain, or endless cohorts of committees and quangos. > The current level of ambition, of vision, just doesn’t match up to the situation we’re in. It’s about a failure of state capacity. The article’s entire argument hinges on why British institutions can no longer turn wealth into functioning systems. The post-imperial loss of strategic vision among British elites is not a distraction: it’s the historical foundation of the current malaise. Suez was the moment Britain exited the world stage and never figured out what it stood for domestically in the vacuum that followed. You can’t talk about the failure to invest, coordinate, or reform over decades without asking why the ruling class stopped trying.
- taeric 2y ago
  I think far too much effort was spent building critical frameworks in social sciences without the lesson sticking that it is a two way street. You build the critical framework to frame specific criticisms. By doing that, you can highlight influences that may be missed in another framing. Which isn't a bad thing. But the key there is in building frameworks. Instead, we seem to have built large portions of the public into thinking these are the only frameworks that matter. And so everything has to be tied back to them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by scrlk 2y ago

api 2y ago

Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live. I fear the same thing is coming for the USA as it, inevitably, loses its standing as the world's sole great superpower (which it only had for maybe 20 years at most!). We could easily get stuck in a permanent cycle of demagogue after demagogue promising to, well, make us "great again." You see it in individuals too. The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Make someone a celebrity and put them on a pedestal, and it often ruins them forever. It's a fickle thing. When they inevitably go back to being just a regular person, the effect is often to leave the person permanently feeling like a has-been. They flail around for the rest of their lives trying to recapture something that is fleeting instead of enjoying the fact that (1) they achieved something few people achieve and (2) they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. Success is more psychologically dangerous than failure. There's a saying: "whom god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad." I think a better version is "whom god wishes to destroy, he first raises up."

gjm11 2y ago
> The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Actually, that's not quite right. The root of both "celebrate" and "celebrity" is a Latin word whose original meaning is something to do with crowdedness. Celebrity (in the older sense of "being famous") means being someone that people crowd around. The original meaning of "celebrate" was to hold a religious service, attended by crowds of people. Later "celebrity" evolved to also mean a person who has the quality of celebrity-in-the-old-sense, and "celebrate" evolved to also mean to hold some other kind of event that attracts crowds. But "celebrity" didn't ever primarily mean "person who is admired", it was always "person who attracts attention". (It is still true that people who are famous and then not famous can find it hard to adapt to the change, of course.)
graemep 2y ago
> Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live. I think you are right, but I also think it afflicts the ruling class a lot more. In particular, politicians, who are power seekers by nature, feel the loss more than ordinary people do. IN their minds, not being a super power equates to declined, even if life improves for ordinary people (which it did).
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
England is a has-been society because 1) they are old and have more vacation. You've got less people working less hours. REAL GDP per work hour is up >50% since the early 80s - what people seem to think of as some golden era - and is more than double since the 60s, another golden era according to others - even real GDP PPP adjusted, you're still >50% since the 60s. 2) They decided they wanted to punish hard workers and productive investment and aggressively reward capitalists that "park money" in non-productive assets (like real estate). England could easily reverse these decisions and aggressively reward hard work and investment in productive assets, open the doors to intellectuals, and the hard, smart working people and investment would come pouring in. But, they'll never do that, because boomers. The problem with England is the problem elsewhere. The amount your society needs to improve to let ~1% more people not work every year for ~30 years is incredible. The entire west has done it. But the benefits are going almost exclusively to the retiree class. In the not too far future, if trends continue <50% of adults will be working with very high standards of living. This is absolutely UNHEARD of. At the same time, you'll see basically no benefit at all for the people who actually do the work. This doesn't seem like the best way to distribute productivity gains to society, but it's the way we've chosen, and as long as old people have a say, you better bet they're gonna vote for the status quo or even bigger pension payouts in the future.

spacebanana7 2y ago

The empire was almost always a waste of money. Very few, if any, colonies created enough money for the treasury to justify the cost of maintaining them.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
Like with every colonial power, the empire wasn't there to enrich the entire country or the average people, it was enriching the crown and wealthy business magnates involved in the trade, basically the top 1%, the rest were left to wallow in poverty and hard labor.
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  I definitely agree there were some individuals who made money from the imperial project, but it wasn't rational at the level of the British state/monarch. > Like with every colonial power... Some colonial powers may have genuinely increased the wealth of the imperial state. The Spanish and Mongol empires stand out in my mind here, although I don't have a precise source of accounting.
James_K 2y ago
It's frankly sickening that some people think the empire was an exercise in us helping the third world develop purely out of the goodness of our hearts.
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  William Jardine getting half of China addicted to opium and starting a war out of the issue wasn't good for China or Britain.
  - James_K 2y ago
    Well it wasn't good for us unless you count all the money we made out of it before they started fighting back.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

You don't have to be a superpower to be a prosperous society. This loss of superpower status means you need to refocus your efforts on the tractable instead of wallowing in has-been fantasy.

fidotron 2y ago
The scary thing about 21st century Britain is the extent to which they now wallow in the never-happened fantasy of the Harry Potter universe to compensate for it. That has changed absolutely everything, not all bad to be sure.
- bombcar 2y ago
  As an American, I categorically refuse to believe Britain is anything but Harry Potter without magic.
schnitzelstoat 2y ago
Yeah, like I don't think Norway or Switzerland have ever been empires, much less superpowers. But they provide a very good standard of living for their citizens.
- xedrac 2y ago
  Norway's economy is heavily reliant on oil and gas. What of countries that don't have such abundant natural resources?
tempest_ 2y ago
Of course that is true but it undeniably helps. I wonder if postwar Britain watching its hegemony decline will be anything like the current decline of the US.
HPsquared 2y ago
And "small but prosperous" is exactly what Singapore does well. The UK could learn a lot from Singapore.

emptyfile 2y ago

Getting so tired of HN, every thread has these kinds of vague, ignorant, semi-political comments. Just a throwaway opinion with some unrelated quote to appear smart, not related to the posted link, nothing added to the discussion. The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it: >Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke? Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.

wobfan 2y ago
Also somehow the comment above is talking exclusively about influence and power in the "world order" which is not at all what the article is about. Power != Prosperity
scrlk 2y ago
I read the article. My comment was prompted by this: > One reason for this is that parts of the British state are fundamentally misaligned with goals like ‘improving living standards’ or ‘increasing wealth’, whether that’s through hand-wringingly incompetent procurement processes, long-term failure to invest in the infrastructure and management required to support ‘moar frontline staff!!’, acute treasury brain, or endless cohorts of committees and quangos. > The current level of ambition, of vision, just doesn’t match up to the situation we’re in. It’s about a failure of state capacity. The article’s entire argument hinges on why British institutions can no longer turn wealth into functioning systems. The post-imperial loss of strategic vision among British elites is not a distraction: it’s the historical foundation of the current malaise. Suez was the moment Britain exited the world stage and never figured out what it stood for domestically in the vacuum that followed. You can’t talk about the failure to invest, coordinate, or reform over decades without asking why the ruling class stopped trying.
taeric 2y ago
I think far too much effort was spent building critical frameworks in social sciences without the lesson sticking that it is a two way street. You build the critical framework to frame specific criticisms. By doing that, you can highlight influences that may be missed in another framing. Which isn't a bad thing. But the key there is in building frameworks. Instead, we seem to have built large portions of the public into thinking these are the only frameworks that matter. And so everything has to be tied back to them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]