Lobbying and the youth
The current downfall of the Western world is mainly its own making. Covid has shown that authoritarian governments mainly play charades when it comes to solving issues and their rise has mainly been a catch up using copying as well as tactics every rising power has used in the past. No imagination here.
The downfall can be stopped. It sure can be. The main problem is that politics and media as well as managers are not able to cope with the rise in complexity following networks and digitalization. And that leaves the constituency puzzled and allows the rise of clowns like Gaetz and Trump in the US or Hoecke in Germany with all their subcomplex ideas. These people lack any form of imagination and can only govern by idleness or better rejection.
Another problem are dichotomies. It’s either socialism/authoritarianism or capitalism/liberalism.
Every one is laughing about the idea of an “End of history” nowadays. Yet capitalism seems to be the end state of economies in a lot of people’s thinking. The alternative socialism has never been successfully implemented anywhere. Yet it seems the solution.
Philosophically we’ve been a few steps further already in the past. As Lind 1 writes:
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism. Economic liberalism has come in several varieties, including the eclectic and flexible “classical liberalism” of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and J. S. Mill and a more rigidly antistatist ideology, associated with Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman and already called “neoliberalism” by the 1920s.
Neoliberalism had it’s time. It helped to free the economy from institutions modeled on wartime industries. Now we need a new idea of how to organize the economy because neoliberalism is “dying from its own success”.
But what to exepct from dystopians like Rosa or Precht — the finest philosophers the current German generation in power has brought forward.
Crises do not lead to fitness anymore but leave scarves in society just like Covid seems to leave scarves in the lung and create “Long Covid”.
There are four ways to create economic growth and with it progress:
- innovation
- marketing
- lobbying and regulation
- ???
For two centuries now politics has gone full supply-side and has allowed companies to thrive on arbitrage. Shareholders and managers follow the highest rate of return. And it seems more and more the best return results from investments in lobbying activities and its outcomes (eg. stock buybacks) — all mainly cancerous activities on the economy. The result is Potemkin growth.
We estimate that the lobbying group spent $282.7 million on lobbying expenditures and received $62.5 billion in tax savings, or a 220:1 return on investment. Using a statistical regression, we estimate that lobbying activity is highly associated with amount repatriated even after controlling for firm industry, size, profitability, liquidity and growth prospects. […] The tax benefits are accrued to older, larger firms that are declining in market value. 2
What’s disappointing is the conservatism of today’s youth when challenging the current paradigm as is the hypocrisy of todays’s generation in power. The youth is right to challenge with regards to the climate, the environment and “Late Capitalism”. They should challenge in even more domins — eg. education.
But their proposals are uninformed. The whole idea of degrowth can’t be taken seriously given humanity’s history. Humanity sure is on the cusp of degrowth given how bad institutions are with applying new ideas, processes and technologies. But that is disastrous!
The youth is ideologically as static as the old — the ignorance towards nuclear is as stupid as is the “Schuldenbremse”.