Will America Fail and What Role Will the Rich Play?

I published the following information in the TOV Center’s Educational Email today. I wanted to share it with you because we will come across situations like those described below many times as we Explore Biblical Heritages.

If you read the histories of tribes, kingdoms, empires and nations you will find some common factors led most of them to ultimately fail. A narrow group of elite people gained control of political and economic institutions of a society and restructured them.

● They structured political institutions to remove restraints on their use of power.

● They structured economic institutions to extract resources from the rest of society.

The synergistic relationship between extractive economic and political institutions introduces a strong feedback loop:

“Political institutions enable the elites controlling political power to choose economic institutions with few constraints or opposing forces. They also enable the elites to structure future political institutions and their evolution. Extractive economic institutions enrich the same elites, and their economic wealth and power help consolidate their political dominance.”

Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, argue that when you combine rotten regimes, exploitative elites and self-serving institutions with frail, decentralized states, you have something close to a prescription for poverty, conflict and even outright failure.

“Extractive economic and political institutions,

though their details vary under different circumstances,

are always at the root of this failure.” (p. 372)

Today, a new narrow elite exists, the Global Power Elite. One of the reasons they exist is that the resources they have accumulated are larger than nations. They control entities that are larger and wealthier than many nations – multinational corporations. Below is a quote from Peter Phillips’ book Giants: The Global Power Elite:

“The richest 1 percent of humanity in 2017 controlled more than half of the world’s wealth; the top 30 percent of the population controlled more than 95 percent of global wealth, while the remaining 70 percent of the population had to make do with less than 5 percent of the world’s resources.”

For the 1% elite group to extract that much wealth required the restructuring of political and economic systems of many nations so global wealth would flow into their hands. Interestingly, Peter Phillips not only exposes what the 1% have been doing – he provides a list of the names of the wealthiest members of the group.

Based on what Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson discovered in their research about why nations fail, if we want to understand how the 1% to extracted so much wealth from so many nations, we need to identify the following:

1. rotten regimes

2. exploitative elites

3. self-serving institutions

4. frail decentralized states

Political institutions are thus inexorably intertwined with economic institutions, as the enforcer of law and order, private property, and contracts, and often as a key provider of public service.

The people who control inclusive and extractive economic institutions

both need, use and require the state to achieve their objectives.

“The” question that needs an accurate answer today is this:

What roles are rotten regimes, exploitative elites

and leaders of self-serving institutions playing

in using the media and social media to polarize

and turn members of societies against each other

in order to keep them from seeing what they are doing?

In order for America to reverse the dangerous path it is clearly on, members of society must adopt a shared vision that includes the following:

1. political leaders with inclusive values and morals that value human life

2. inclusive elites that make and use their wealth in ways that benefit all of society

3. leaders of political and economic institutions that make them accessible to all members of society

4. strong networked states

If you have a better idea, please let me know. However, based on what I have learned from over three decades of research, from the earliest written documents until today – the common factors listed above have been part of mankind for the last 5,000 years.

Thank you for reading this. Please share and discuss it with others.

Shalom,
Jim Myers

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