7 ms·

Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

59 points by smfugit 3y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> But the most revealing parallels relate to a different expansionary dynamic—that of money. The key to so much else that happened to both countries was the appearance of what seemed like unlimited wealth but was actually access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere. If you can’t tell the difference between stealing a bunch of gold in a gold based economy and the US Dollar, then there is not much hope for a decent analysis. At that time gold was the universal currency. So everyone wanted gold itself, and nobody cared where you got it from or if it was backed by anything, as long as the gold was real. So to summarize, people only cared about the material medium, not the backing of the Spanish government and economy. With the US Dollar, nobody wants the paper or ink that is the material medium. People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. The US Dollar could be paper, plastic or digital bits. People wants what it represents, not its medium. This is exactly opposite to Spanish gold.
- louthy 3y ago
  > People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. Really? Or is it that oil is purchased in dollars? There's no other reason to find it useful over say the Euro (for example).
- rightbyte 3y ago
  With enough gold mines under your control, you are essentially printing money.
  - Darmody 3y ago
    Not exactly because gold has an intrinsic value.
    - boffinAudio 3y ago
      .. and thats the point: the intrinsic value of the US Dollar is has been declining for the last year. Gold holds its value because it can always be used for the things for which it is useful - the US Dollar, not so much.
    - throw0101b 3y ago
      > Not exactly because gold has an intrinsic value. Gold has zero intrinsic value. Like all forms of money, its value is a psychological and sociological construct to treat it as if it had value. The Incas for example simply used it for religious and ornamental purposes: * https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-role https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r... Anything can be used as money, including giant rocks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
      - Darmody 3y ago
        Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time. There's a reason people buy gold. 1kg of Argentinian gold has the same value as 1kg of American gold. And both have the same value as 1kg of gold from any ancient civilization. Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic. Of course, if you're in the desert and you're thirsty, a bottle of water has more value to you than all the gold in the world, but that doesn't change the fact that through millennia people has seen gold as something valuable that it's not tied to an economy, a country, an empire or even a culture despite de Incas.
        throw0101b 3y ago
        > Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time. Papers have been written on how it does not: * https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706 * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789 See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976 on how it's no good against infaltion: > Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning. * PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram-TheGoldenConstant.pdf http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram... * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ Having gold as one's monetary base (e.g. Gold Standard) doesn't even help in stabilizing currencies: * https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the-gold-standard-is-the-worlds-worst-economic-idea-in-2-charts/261552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the... * https://archive.ph/FWKcL https://archive.ph/FWKcL > Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic. Big rocks as currency is one example of how any arbitrary object can be treated as such: * https://americanhistory.si.edu/the-value-of-money/origins-money/forms-money https://americanhistory.si.edu/the-value-of-money/origins-mo... Gold (or silver) bars and coins are nothing more than shiny rocks and are just as arbitrary.
- pavlov 3y ago
  That's what makes the comparison interesting. Intuitively Spanish colonial gold and contemporary US Treasury bills are very different kinds of national wealth outputs. But what if the outcomes are still the same?
- roody15 3y ago
  “ People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. ” This may be changing. The US may have overextended its “credit line” if you will.
  - yardie 3y ago
    The libertarians keep saying this. Yet the US continues to sell bonds to international investors who never question if the credit line is overextended. They continue to use the economic model they learned in high school economics class to a more complex economic model that is designed by and for a hegemony. The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. They wanted it to be the EU and it has not been. They wanted it to be BRICs and that is a flaming dumpster fire right now. Very soon, they will state Africa is a better bet than the US. It's a young, dynamic economy; the very opposite of stable.
    - mwbajor 3y ago
      Could this not change in an instant though? "The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. " Its hubris like this that worries people, not partisanship.
      - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        What’s the alternative though? There has to be one for the dollar to fall.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      The US debt is $32.3 trillion, and skyrocketing. [1] Total debt held by foreign/international investors is $7.3 trillion, and declining (both in absolute $ as well as percent). [2] The largest single holder is the Federal Reserve. Other holders are disproportionately made up of domestic organizations (like pension or mutual funds) which will collapse when the USD collapses, essentially regardless of hedging efforts, so they have no motivation to consider risk of collapse in their evaluations. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S
- krona 3y ago
  > People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its military Corrected that for you.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    The backing implies the military. A strong military is necessary for any independent, thriving state. The USA economy is the most dynamic and powerful in the world by a large margin. People want their wealth backed by this and will pay a premium for the right.
    - medo-bear 3y ago
      who this people ?
      - nemo44x 3y ago
        All the people holding trillions in treasuries. The people invested in USA markets. Etc.
tgv 3y ago
It's not an unfair assessment, marred by an identity-related political snark coming out of nowhere at about 80%. Spain really did squander its wealth. There are also differences, of course. Spain was a real monarchy, although much of the power actually lay in the hands of one royal adviser. In case of Spain's 17th century decline, that was Olivares. But the downfall was not only overspending on warfare, but also personal ambitions (leading to infighting), rebellion (Portugal and Catalonia internally, but in colonies as well), and the ad-hoc structure of financing. The monarch was paying the army out of his own pocket. Lending, tax evasion and consequently renewed taxation formed a death spiral, certainly when the imports from South America faltered (a direct consequence of the war). So if there's a lesson, it's: structural reforms should be made well in advance. But that lesson can be learned elsewhere, too.
- fredgrott 3y ago
  you miss the core point that infrastructure changes were blocked by the same elite-ism of not paying attention to the in-equality in the labor ranks due to over taxation and other ills. It is political in nature due to the political processes that have a hold on whether and how it might change.
motohagiography 3y ago
Beautifully polymathic. We're not so much watching the harbringers, but into the phase of comparing competing theories of decline. I can't see whether his sympathy for Keynes and Carter are necessary conditions for the rest of his thesis, but the demolition of the domestic market and the installation of an affected managerial class who weren't elites in any meaningful way in both Spain and the present certainly rhyme.
jmyeet 3y ago
A few bones to pick: 1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1]; 2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is completely made up anyway; 3. What backs the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the American military. Just look at all the wars the US has been involved in [2]; 4. Colonies often turned into a drain on the colonizer's economy even with all th eexploitation (ie outright theft) going on. The costs of holding a colony only go up as the locals (rightly) become increasingly unhappy about the situation. There's an interesting parallel with the Roman world here. Carthage, for example, used the common system at the time of tribute for its holdings. Rome, on the other hand, used a system of military alliances that tied the colony to Rome in a much more stable way. Some of Rome's colonies were colonies for a thousand years and became so Roman that even when conquered the conquerors became more Roman than the other way around. 5. The US has largely avoided the colony drain problem with economic imperialism. For example, the US now uses child labor in West Africa through intermediaries [3]; 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. To be cleaer, slavery has never really gone away. It still exists in the form of prison labor (ie convict leasing). You could argue that the reason the US is the most incarcerated nation in the world (ie 4% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is driven by economic exploitation more than anything else. If you didn't get to the end, there's a bizarre conservative screed at the end: > [The American ruling class] can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business. So, transphobia, conspiracy theories and complaints about anti-white racism (which is not real, by definition). I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to a comparison between the Spanish and American empires. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... [3]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labor-trafficking/child-labor-cocoa https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labo...
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
Starts off as a thought provoking comparison and then suddenly becomes a politically driven doomsday prediction.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yardie 3y ago
Reading the article and nodding my head along at salient points. Then... > The American ruling class found itself compelled to spin bizarre fantasies of Russian “disinformation” to explain away the results of the 2016 election. It can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business. Where the fuck did this come from?
- hef19898 3y ago
  Case of being wrong enough to almost being right?
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  It came from reality.
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  But all of that is true. What makes you surprised at any of that paragraph?
mooreds 3y ago
If you want to learn more about the creation of the Eurodollar offshore market, highly recommend this podcast episode/video from the Odd Lots pdcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-0EN8_WuvK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-0EN8_WuvK8
hcayless 3y ago
It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
- netbioserror 3y ago
  >It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism. We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    The most eye opening aspect of this issue is how many people find the all white male default to be normal and self evidently meritocratic, and a deviation from that is what they instinctively consider to be contrived.
    - lordloki 3y ago
      That only shows your flawed understanding of the issue. Nobody is saying that everything was meritocratic throughout history and that's why the most successful people in the west were white. However, there was a move towards meritocracy that did help many people in disadvantaged groups and throwing that away is foolish and short sighted. Meritocracy was a hard fought win by people who were not white and or male, throwing that away now will not lead anywhere good. It wasn't in societies best interest before meritocracy, why would it be now?
aa1234556 3y ago
[dead]
keiferski 3y ago
I’m not up on my New Spain history, but it was always my impression that imperial Spain was an extractive economy that grew wealthy by acquiring and selling resources, not from technological or cultural innovation. That seems entirely different from American (US) history to me, which while also host to a ton of resources, utilized them for productive ends. A whole lot of technological and political innovation happened in the US, especially by the mid-late 1800s. I don’t think there was a similar phenomenon in the Spanish empire?
dav_Oz 3y ago
The insights into the current Dollar hegemony from this article are excellent, but I fail to see the striking similarities. If one studies the price revolution [0] in Europe mainly taking place during the Spanish Golden century ("Siglo Oro") the statement: [...]access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere at best just forces an analogy but in reality the "Spanish elite" weren't even near it. America's silver (and to some extend gold) pouring into Western Europe was just one aspect of financial power but without adequate instruments like (1) safe enough infrastructure to protect against piracy, (2) appropriate financial instruments and (3) a solid framework of economics (academic institutions like the "School of Salamanca"[1] could just barely keep up, offered some new insights but ultimately those were tragically forgotten after the fast decline) the "new wealth" couldn't be properly utilized and leveraged. In the end both France and Spain had to declare state bankruptcy over their costly wars to their respective wealthy merchants sitting in cities like Antwerpen. France then emerged as the new center of power in Europe. The "financial innovations" were mostly driven by the merchant class in the Low Countries who had freedom to establish their own judicial system regarding trade and loans, those were slowly adapted by the Netherlands and later by England. Jakob Fugger is prime example [2] of that class at that time in Europe having built a monopoly on copper mining, he went on to establish new silver mining techniques in the wake of the Great Bullion Famine. In 1527 - at his peak - Jakob Fugger resided over 2,800,000 Florins about 2% Europe's GDP at that time or in today's standard an estimated $400 billon fortunate. He was also instrumental into securing a gigantic loan of of about 100,000 ounces of gold for Charles I later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. [0]https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-revolution-in-spain-1501-1650/ https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-... [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economic... [2]https://fuggerstrasse.eu/en/history.html https://fuggerstrasse.eu/en/history.html

59 points by smfugit 3y ago

> But the most revealing parallels relate to a different expansionary dynamic—that of money. The key to so much else that happened to both countries was the appearance of what seemed like unlimited wealth but was actually access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere. If you can’t tell the difference between stealing a bunch of gold in a gold based economy and the US Dollar, then there is not much hope for a decent analysis. At that time gold was the universal currency. So everyone wanted gold itself, and nobody cared where you got it from or if it was backed by anything, as long as the gold was real. So to summarize, people only cared about the material medium, not the backing of the Spanish government and economy. With the US Dollar, nobody wants the paper or ink that is the material medium. People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. The US Dollar could be paper, plastic or digital bits. People wants what it represents, not its medium. This is exactly opposite to Spanish gold.

louthy 3y ago
> People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. Really? Or is it that oil is purchased in dollars? There's no other reason to find it useful over say the Euro (for example).
rightbyte 3y ago
With enough gold mines under your control, you are essentially printing money.
- Darmody 3y ago
  Not exactly because gold has an intrinsic value.
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    .. and thats the point: the intrinsic value of the US Dollar is has been declining for the last year. Gold holds its value because it can always be used for the things for which it is useful - the US Dollar, not so much.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > Not exactly because gold has an intrinsic value. Gold has zero intrinsic value. Like all forms of money, its value is a psychological and sociological construct to treat it as if it had value. The Incas for example simply used it for religious and ornamental purposes: * https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-role https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r... Anything can be used as money, including giant rocks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
    - Darmody 3y ago
      Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time. There's a reason people buy gold. 1kg of Argentinian gold has the same value as 1kg of American gold. And both have the same value as 1kg of gold from any ancient civilization. Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic. Of course, if you're in the desert and you're thirsty, a bottle of water has more value to you than all the gold in the world, but that doesn't change the fact that through millennia people has seen gold as something valuable that it's not tied to an economy, a country, an empire or even a culture despite de Incas.
      - throw0101b 3y ago
        > Gold is the only currency that kept it's value through time. Papers have been written on how it does not: * https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706 * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789 See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976 on how it's no good against infaltion: > Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning. * PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram-TheGoldenConstant.pdf http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram... * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ Having gold as one's monetary base (e.g. Gold Standard) doesn't even help in stabilizing currencies: * https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the-gold-standard-is-the-worlds-worst-economic-idea-in-2-charts/261552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the... * https://archive.ph/FWKcL https://archive.ph/FWKcL > Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic. Big rocks as currency is one example of how any arbitrary object can be treated as such: * https://americanhistory.si.edu/the-value-of-money/origins-money/forms-money https://americanhistory.si.edu/the-value-of-money/origins-mo... Gold (or silver) bars and coins are nothing more than shiny rocks and are just as arbitrary.
pavlov 3y ago
That's what makes the comparison interesting. Intuitively Spanish colonial gold and contemporary US Treasury bills are very different kinds of national wealth outputs. But what if the outcomes are still the same?
roody15 3y ago
“ People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. ” This may be changing. The US may have overextended its “credit line” if you will.
- yardie 3y ago
  The libertarians keep saying this. Yet the US continues to sell bonds to international investors who never question if the credit line is overextended. They continue to use the economic model they learned in high school economics class to a more complex economic model that is designed by and for a hegemony. The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. They wanted it to be the EU and it has not been. They wanted it to be BRICs and that is a flaming dumpster fire right now. Very soon, they will state Africa is a better bet than the US. It's a young, dynamic economy; the very opposite of stable.
  - mwbajor 3y ago
    Could this not change in an instant though? "The US has an almost unlimited credit line because investors are clamoring for it. It's literally the best, most stable investment going right now. " Its hubris like this that worries people, not partisanship.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      What’s the alternative though? There has to be one for the dollar to fall.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    The US debt is $32.3 trillion, and skyrocketing. [1] Total debt held by foreign/international investors is $7.3 trillion, and declining (both in absolute $ as well as percent). [2] The largest single holder is the Federal Reserve. Other holders are disproportionately made up of domestic organizations (like pension or mutual funds) which will collapse when the USD collapses, essentially regardless of hedging efforts, so they have no motivation to consider risk of collapse in their evaluations. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HBFIGDQ188S
krona 3y ago
> People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its military Corrected that for you.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nemo44x 3y ago
  The backing implies the military. A strong military is necessary for any independent, thriving state. The USA economy is the most dynamic and powerful in the world by a large margin. People want their wealth backed by this and will pay a premium for the right.
  - medo-bear 3y ago
    who this people ?
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      All the people holding trillions in treasuries. The people invested in USA markets. Etc.

tgv 3y ago

It's not an unfair assessment, marred by an identity-related political snark coming out of nowhere at about 80%. Spain really did squander its wealth. There are also differences, of course. Spain was a real monarchy, although much of the power actually lay in the hands of one royal adviser. In case of Spain's 17th century decline, that was Olivares. But the downfall was not only overspending on warfare, but also personal ambitions (leading to infighting), rebellion (Portugal and Catalonia internally, but in colonies as well), and the ad-hoc structure of financing. The monarch was paying the army out of his own pocket. Lending, tax evasion and consequently renewed taxation formed a death spiral, certainly when the imports from South America faltered (a direct consequence of the war). So if there's a lesson, it's: structural reforms should be made well in advance. But that lesson can be learned elsewhere, too.

fredgrott 3y ago
you miss the core point that infrastructure changes were blocked by the same elite-ism of not paying attention to the in-equality in the labor ranks due to over taxation and other ills. It is political in nature due to the political processes that have a hold on whether and how it might change.

motohagiography 3y ago

Beautifully polymathic. We're not so much watching the harbringers, but into the phase of comparing competing theories of decline. I can't see whether his sympathy for Keynes and Carter are necessary conditions for the rest of his thesis, but the demolition of the domestic market and the installation of an affected managerial class who weren't elites in any meaningful way in both Spain and the present certainly rhyme.

jmyeet 3y ago

A few bones to pick: 1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1]; 2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is completely made up anyway; 3. What backs the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the American military. Just look at all the wars the US has been involved in [2]; 4. Colonies often turned into a drain on the colonizer's economy even with all th eexploitation (ie outright theft) going on. The costs of holding a colony only go up as the locals (rightly) become increasingly unhappy about the situation. There's an interesting parallel with the Roman world here. Carthage, for example, used the common system at the time of tribute for its holdings. Rome, on the other hand, used a system of military alliances that tied the colony to Rome in a much more stable way. Some of Rome's colonies were colonies for a thousand years and became so Roman that even when conquered the conquerors became more Roman than the other way around. 5. The US has largely avoided the colony drain problem with economic imperialism. For example, the US now uses child labor in West Africa through intermediaries [3]; 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. To be cleaer, slavery has never really gone away. It still exists in the form of prison labor (ie convict leasing). You could argue that the reason the US is the most incarcerated nation in the world (ie 4% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is driven by economic exploitation more than anything else. If you didn't get to the end, there's a bizarre conservative screed at the end: > [The American ruling class] can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business. So, transphobia, conspiracy theories and complaints about anti-white racism (which is not real, by definition). I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to a comparison between the Spanish and American empires. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... [3]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labor-trafficking/child-labor-cocoa https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labo...

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago

Starts off as a thought provoking comparison and then suddenly becomes a politically driven doomsday prediction.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yardie 3y ago

Reading the article and nodding my head along at salient points. Then... > The American ruling class found itself compelled to spin bizarre fantasies of Russian “disinformation” to explain away the results of the 2016 election. It can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business. Where the fuck did this come from?

hef19898 3y ago
Case of being wrong enough to almost being right?
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
It came from reality.
LargeTomato 3y ago
But all of that is true. What makes you surprised at any of that paragraph?

mooreds 3y ago

If you want to learn more about the creation of the Eurodollar offshore market, highly recommend this podcast episode/video from the Odd Lots pdcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-0EN8_WuvK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-0EN8_WuvK8

hcayless 3y ago

It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.

netbioserror 3y ago
>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism. We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  The most eye opening aspect of this issue is how many people find the all white male default to be normal and self evidently meritocratic, and a deviation from that is what they instinctively consider to be contrived.
  - lordloki 3y ago
    That only shows your flawed understanding of the issue. Nobody is saying that everything was meritocratic throughout history and that's why the most successful people in the west were white. However, there was a move towards meritocracy that did help many people in disadvantaged groups and throwing that away is foolish and short sighted. Meritocracy was a hard fought win by people who were not white and or male, throwing that away now will not lead anywhere good. It wasn't in societies best interest before meritocracy, why would it be now?

aa1234556 3y ago

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keiferski 3y ago

I’m not up on my New Spain history, but it was always my impression that imperial Spain was an extractive economy that grew wealthy by acquiring and selling resources, not from technological or cultural innovation. That seems entirely different from American (US) history to me, which while also host to a ton of resources, utilized them for productive ends. A whole lot of technological and political innovation happened in the US, especially by the mid-late 1800s. I don’t think there was a similar phenomenon in the Spanish empire?

dav_Oz 3y ago

The insights into the current Dollar hegemony from this article are excellent, but I fail to see the striking similarities. If one studies the price revolution [0] in Europe mainly taking place during the Spanish Golden century ("Siglo Oro") the statement: [...]access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere at best just forces an analogy but in reality the "Spanish elite" weren't even near it. America's silver (and to some extend gold) pouring into Western Europe was just one aspect of financial power but without adequate instruments like (1) safe enough infrastructure to protect against piracy, (2) appropriate financial instruments and (3) a solid framework of economics (academic institutions like the "School of Salamanca"[1] could just barely keep up, offered some new insights but ultimately those were tragically forgotten after the fast decline) the "new wealth" couldn't be properly utilized and leveraged. In the end both France and Spain had to declare state bankruptcy over their costly wars to their respective wealthy merchants sitting in cities like Antwerpen. France then emerged as the new center of power in Europe. The "financial innovations" were mostly driven by the merchant class in the Low Countries who had freedom to establish their own judicial system regarding trade and loans, those were slowly adapted by the Netherlands and later by England. Jakob Fugger is prime example [2] of that class at that time in Europe having built a monopoly on copper mining, he went on to establish new silver mining techniques in the wake of the Great Bullion Famine. In 1527 - at his peak - Jakob Fugger resided over 2,800,000 Florins about 2% Europe's GDP at that time or in today's standard an estimated $400 billon fortunate. He was also instrumental into securing a gigantic loan of of about 100,000 ounces of gold for Charles I later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. [0]https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-revolution-in-spain-1501-1650/ https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-... [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economic... [2]https://fuggerstrasse.eu/en/history.html https://fuggerstrasse.eu/en/history.html