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Препечатвам този твърде интересен пост на Чарлз Хю Смит.
How Empires Fall
Charles Hugh Smith |
The
imperial tree falls not because the challenges are too great but because the
core of the tree has been weakened by the gradual loss of surplus, purpose,
institutional effectiveness, intellectual vigor and productive investment.
Comparing
the American Empire with the Roman Empire in its terminal decline is a popular
intellectual parlor game. The comparison is inexact on a number of
fronts, starting with the nature of empire: Rome ruled a territorial empire,
while the U.S. is a hegemony that doesn't need to hold territory (other than
key overseas military bases); its dominance is based on the global projection
of hard and soft power, diplomacy, finance and the monetary regime of the
reserve currency.
Despite the apparent
difference, the two empires share the key characteristic of all enduring
empires: they extract the cost of maintaining the empire from client states
and/or allies.
The mechanisms differ,
but the results are the same: the empire's cost is distributed to those who
benefit from its secure trade routes
.
Two of
the key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline are complacency and
intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination.
Michael Grant described
these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire,
a short book I have been recommending since 2009:
There was no room at all,
in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now
arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status
Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a
single new idea.
This acceptance was
accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even
when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling
fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme
assurance.
This
blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes
of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these
traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid
measures at all.
In other words, if our
idea of intellectual rigor and honesty is Paul Krugman dancing around the
Neo-Keynesian Cargo Cult campfire waving dead chickens and mumbling nonsensical
claims of grand success, we are well and truly doomed.
The chapter titles of the
book give a precis of the other causes Grant identifies:
The
Gulfs Between the Classes
The
Credibility Gap
The
Partnerships That Failed
The
Groups That Opted Out
The
Undermining of Effort
In Goldsworthy's view, a
key driver of decline was the constant political struggle for power drained
resources away from protecting the Imperial borders from barbarian incursions
and addressing the long-term problems facing the Empire.
Such conflicts for the
Imperial throne often led to outright civil war, with factions of the Roman
army meeting on the field of battle.
In other words, Rome
didn't fall so much as erode away, its many strengths squandered on
in-fighting, mismanagement and personal aggrandizement/corruption.
More
telling for the present is Goldsworthy's identification of expansive, sclerotic
bureaucracies that lost sight of their purpose. The
top leadership abandoned the pursuit of the common good for personal gain,
wealth and power. This rot at the top soon spread down the chain of command to
infect and corrupt the entire institutional culture.
As the empire shrank and
lost tax revenues, the Imperial bureaucracies continued growing, much as
parasites attach themselves to a weakened host.
Individual contributions
and institutional success are both difficult to measure in large bureaucracies,
and it is tempting to define success by easily achieved metrics that reflect
positively on individual contributions and the institutional management.
As the organization loses
focus on its original purpose, the core purpose of the institution is given lip
service but is replaced with facsimiles of managerial effectiveness,
bureaucratic infighting over resources and the targeting of easily gamed
metrics as substitutes for actual success.
People who have no skin
in the game behave quite differently from those who face consequences. This
disconnection of risk from consequence is called moral hazard.
Bureaucracies
tend to institutionalize moral hazard: those managing the
institution’s departments rarely suffer any personal consequence when the
institution fails to perform its function. Funds are placed at risk, but the
individuals making the bets with the institution’s money suffer no losses
should their policies result in failure.
By breaking the
institutional purpose into small pieces whose success is measured by easily
gamed targets, the institution can be failing its primary function even as
every department reports continued success in meeting its goals. Repeated
failure and loss of focus erode the institution even as those in charge advance
up the administrative ladder.
In the final years of the
Empire, in the 5th century A.D., this institutional failure led to the
absurdity of detailed descriptions of army units being distributed within the
Imperial bureaucracy, while the actual units themselves--the troops, the
officers and the equipment--had ceased to exist. In some cases, it appears
bureaucrats and officers collected pay for supplying and commanding completely
phantom legions.
The disconnect between
the failure to fulfill the institution’s original function and the leadership’s
rise feeds cynicism in the institution’s employees and erodes their purpose and
initiative. Soon the institutional culture is one of self-aggrandizement,
gaming of departmental targets, protection of budgets and a collapse of the
work ethic to the minimum level needed to avoid dismissal. Personal
responsibility for institutional failure is lost.
Does
this describe the vast state fiefdoms and state-protected cartels of America's
military-industrial complex, sickcare and the education industry? I think the
answer is self-evident: yes. While there are
still hard-working, competent people within these sprawling empires of moral
hazard, these few are not enough to wring long-term success from negligence,
friction and incompetence. All they can do is stave off implosion for a time.
There are many other
causes for Rome's decline, including epidemics of plague, military over-reach,
chronic deficits, debasement of the currency, a parasitic Elite that was immune
to what was left of the rule of law, weak leadership, and rising dependence on
the Central State for bread and circuses.
America is not Rome, just
as the immensely successful Tang Empire in China (700-900 A.D.) was neither
Rome nor America. These dissimilarities should not blind us to the underlying
dynamics in the decline and fall of all great powers, which can be summarized
as the slow erosion of shared purpose, surplus and the productive
investment of that surplus.
When a storm arises--a
conflict with neighboring powers, an outbreak of plague, a disastrous
drought--the imperial tree falls, not because the challenge was too great but
because the core of the tree had been weakened by the gradual loss of surplus,
purpose, institutional effectiveness, intellectual vigor and productive
investment.
