Re: Gaddafi, before him there was Pinochet. Near the end of his reign, Chile agreed to hold a plebiscite on whether to continue the dictatorship. Pinochet lost, and after some pushing from other officers, he stepped down. Then a few years later everyone started trying to prosecute him for all the bad stuff he did and he spent the rest of his life in a legal cloud. Something approximately similar, if a bit less harsh, happened to South Korean ex-dictator Chun Doo-hwan. That'll teach 'em to relinquish power voluntarily.
I worry that the ICC is accomplishing the same thing. If Putin dies tomorrow, Russia is full of people who will face dire legal sanctions if liberals ever take power. I'm worried in pursuit of justice, we're creating a larger and larger caste of tiger-riders.
Sad addendum: Maduro involved a lot of his generals in drug smuggling, thus ensuring that they can never relinquish power. They are all facing 30 years in ADX Florence, and who wants that? Which is why as of this writing his miserable undemocratic kakistocracy appears to be holding on.
But you are missing one thing: Russian liberals will never take power over anything because in reality they are unable and unwilling to actually wield it and shoulder all the burdens that come with it. They want someone else to do all the heavy lifting. That what Yeltsin was all about.
The problem is that the ICC doesn't go far enough. Killing a dictator is much easier than capturing him. The ICC/United States/Ukraine should simply offer a $10 million bounty, and relocation & secret identity in some free country for the family of, anyone who causes the death of Putin.
It's interesting that we are discussing a totalitarian state and how it controls its subjects, and meanwhile accept uncritically the propaganda of our own regime regarding the enemies and allies it has chosen.
Some bodyguard or perhaps random citizen could kill Putin but would probably be instantly killed or arrested. The only way I could see someone killing Putin and being in a position to leave Russia after is if the person staged a successful coup, in which case the person is in control of Russia and $10 million isn't much of an inducement.`
Think this is the first review of a book I've already read, that's fun!
Dealt a lot with Korea in an old professional life, with a lot trips on to the peninsula (but only the Southern half). I can highly recommend B. R. Myer's The Cleanest Race for more insight into the ideology of the DPRK, and what motivates it (spoiler alert: racism to an extent would make Stormfront members raise an eyebrow). I *cannot* recommend the Juche Myth (a dull slog), but I can recommend his blog for more insights (mostly into the South at this point, but also into the North).
One thing I think Lankov underplays (but Myers' hits at pretty hard) is that we often tend to think about the problem of North Korea as replacing a regime and then setting up a new government to run that state. But the Korean Peninsula is a single nation (the Korean people) divided into two states, and the two of them can't keep existing. Nature will enforce a down-select at some point. Legally speaking, neither country recognizes the existence of the other, and any citizen of one is automatically a citizen of the other. So if the North falls, the core (the highest level) songbyun types who've been running the show mostly aren't worried about international tribunals deciding their fates; if they live that long, they've done well. It's the Hostile songbyun and the ROKs who will kill them a lot quicker.
This is also a major problem with any movement towards reunification: the ROK doesn't want the financial hit that's going to have to come with supporting what is one of the most backwards countries on earth. So they continue to try and set up some system (preferably a confederation) where the DPRK can become richer and collapse nicely without interrupting ROK standard of living. Although the ROK's catastrophic fertility rates are going to make issues for this.
“They also believe, again with some good reason, that if they ever are overthrown, the vengeance enacted on them will be bloody. And the number of people who feel this way is huge — one of the sadistically genius things about the North Korean regime is the sheer mass of people who it turns into collaborators.”
This is the exact same belief set that many Southern planters held about the American slavery system. Including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
Yes, I very much was getting that vibe as well. In that case the only thing that ended slavery was foreign (if we can call it that) conquest and economic restructuring, but this would require a far more dramatic form of it.
There’s a good corollary here with how the Soviet state ended up operating at the end, and why this should make us nervous. Basically, as the Soviet Union matured and broke down, it became more and more operated by the managers and less by the central planners. Deal making between factory directors with each other and suppliers, a black market barter system, became the standard way to keep goods flowing from producer to producer to consumer. This was the perfect predecessor to the current “mafia capitalism” system, where the early 90’s Russian scramble to take control of former state assets and enterprises went to the best black marketeers, and thus became centerpieces of organized crime groups.
Gotta have someone teach the spies how to speak Japanese without sounding like a foreigner.
If you brainwash these foreigners, then you get spies that can blend in a lot more easily.
If your spies want to work overseas, they can steal the identities of the people they abducted and pretend to be them with their passports to avoid attention.
You're ascribing human motivations to a machine. You're presumably intelligent enough to work out how to eat a food you hate every day. This would not interfere with your pursuit of other goals; depending on what it is, it might actually improve your health. But why would you? It lowers your utility function's value.
I hate to be pedantic but I'm going to do it anyway. A singularity is not another word for a black hole's point of no return, it's part of a black hole where gravity is infinite, and the laws of physics break down. I believe the term you were looking for was "event horizon", that is the point in a black hole from which nothing can escape (although we have Hawking radiation which sort of negates that as well but beside the point).
I really enjoyed this article and want to read this book now, thank you!
Those random abductions of Japanese have always puzzled me, because the reported object was to put them to work teaching Japanese to North Korean spies. Now, in those days there was no shortage of Japanese communists and socialists who were openly sympathetic to the North Korean regime. Why not recruit teachers from among those people? More than a few of them were, in fact, schoolteachers. But maybe they drew the line at living under communism themselves.
"The Kim Il-Sung of the future won’t need an army of peasants expecting tile roofs if he has an army of killer robots, and ChatGPT is much cheaper than a full-time propaganda minister. Depending on how good AI gets, it will sharply reduce the number of people required to run an effective regime."
There was an ultraparanoid but relatively clearthinking guy on twitter not long ago who thought that this is exactly the elite plan for humanity. Combine with a global drone killchain and it's lights out for free men.
Seriously, this is a strong argument for libertarian populism. Briefly, if the government takes my money, maybe the government will give me a good bus service, maybe not. If the government leaves me my money... I will find someone who will take me from A to B for my money. For sure. NKs do it even when it is fully illegal. Imagine just making this legal.
There is an interesting bias in a lot of libertarian economics in that it nearly always focuses on analyzing somewhere between 1-2 centuries of human history, but only a few select examples within that.
In the short term this is definitely true, but in the long term you have to find a way to prevent capital accumulation and a new state structure in which those who got rich are essentially promoting their own progeny's future wealth and status. So far no society has figured this out unless it was just a bunch of villages, or better yet, a single tribe.
There are lots of "short term" examples of libertarianism working, but none that didn't eventually stop working. It's hard to believe that "liburlz" were the cause of failure in Rome, China, Mesopotamia, Egypt (it had a moment or two), the Arab world, etc., etc., and yet that there's some path to prevent this that somehow if you just believe hard enough (but have no laws to make sure it happens, because laws are government and who needs government) it will come together.
In the absence of government, capital — but also a dozen other strands of power and influence — will create government, given the chance to grow large enough. One could argue that this is how we got civilization in the first place.
LVT would lessen land accumulation by unproductive rentiers. Though your model of civilization's rise is true sometimes, usually it involved initial violent conquest, which markets deter by allowing more positive-sum interactions. In terms of accumulating tangible wealth, people who allocate capital badly lose it to people who allocate it better over time. Unless they can prevent that through regulatory capture, to which the best solution is law and convention keeping regulation minimal and using civil torts for that purpose.
LVT would work more or less but only to the extent it was implemented well and held to. I do think it's a good idea generally, but no solution is better than the commitment or lack thereof of those who create it. Also it doesn't really prevent the amassing of power / wealth by a minority over time. Productive or not.
The "people who allocate capital better over time" end up empowering those who they support in power, eventually, regardless of how virtuous their profitability is. This puts them in a tempting space for corruption, regulatory capture, etc. Eventually either you end up in a neofeudal system, or there's some sort of popular uprising and you get a new sort of economic system lead by the middle class (the working class virtually never lead any revolution, and typically only join once revolution is well underway).
I think the best choice is to just have something that works "for a while" but every system doesn't work for someone, and eventually that "someone" will have enough power or a loud enough voice to start making changes.
Again, most of what you say is based off studying the last 150 years of American history specifically, and to a lesser extent studying counterfactuals in Europe and Japan over the last 100-ish years. It's all nice and neat on paper, but my whole point is that it's a system only as strong as the commitment to it, and doesn't address things like natural monopolies (who's going to build a competing railroad network?), economies of scale (any random nobody can't start up a new microchip company at this point), network effects (should Meta really be able to own every company they are capable of buying, in the social media space?), or externalities that the courts under pressure from the capital-holding class decides aren't that important (see: Dark Waters, or for a rather dramatic example you can see from Google Maps, the Berkeley Pit — especially a fun question if the entity that did destruction to a whole system just folds and the assets go elsewhere: who do you tort?).
If you have a laissez-faire economy and a centralized government, then the only corrective is when diseconomies of scale are rather notable (a lot of service industries are like this, but most capital intensive industries increasingly are not) and the main behemoths in the industry begin to get sclerotic. If you have a democratic government eventually the people will start to vote to control some of the externalities of the system that the courts don't take seriously or the structure simply isn't built to handle.
The government has to actually be quite proactive in maintaining a "free market" economy, if maximizing competition is their ultimate goal. Actually China is pretty good at this, they keep their business class from getting too powerful, but also have a very highly decentralized economic system. Not saying they are an ideal country, only that they have an exceptionally dynamic economy due to this (real estate sector not withstanding, there's a reason they became the world's factory so fast).
Read up on Joseph Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies) and Mancur Olson (The Rise and Decline of Nations). Peter Turchin's work is also instructive on how political and economic systems become unstable over time, but the former describe not instability but the collapse of dynamism. Libertarian purism simply doesn't account for these realities well, except to wish them away by throwing it all in a "government" bucket, and then right clicking to "delete government". But it doesn't address the ways in which corporations, or anyway those who own resources and infrastructure and so forth, become governments over time automatically, whether called such or not.
So in short, if libertarian absolutism is to work, it has to have a rigid structure to zap any emergent "government-like" or power-amassing systems, any economic or regulatory capture by special interest groups, any creeping complexity that makes competition less likely, and, ultimately, has to decide at that point that whoever lives and dies, suffers or succeeds, was simply chosen by God to do so.
Given that a pure capitalist system has never existed, your statement can only be read as ideological. In fact, nearly all complex economic theories are based on a particular form of idealism that can be applied only under certain conditions and for a limited period of time. If the right conditions align as the system is being established, it will succeed for a time. Ultimately, however, all successful systems eventually create prosperity, which inevitably breeds corruption.
There's is no perfect economic philosophy that will universally succeed. To believe any system will be self-correcting in the long term is purely ideological.
Re: Gaddafi, before him there was Pinochet. Near the end of his reign, Chile agreed to hold a plebiscite on whether to continue the dictatorship. Pinochet lost, and after some pushing from other officers, he stepped down. Then a few years later everyone started trying to prosecute him for all the bad stuff he did and he spent the rest of his life in a legal cloud. Something approximately similar, if a bit less harsh, happened to South Korean ex-dictator Chun Doo-hwan. That'll teach 'em to relinquish power voluntarily.
I worry that the ICC is accomplishing the same thing. If Putin dies tomorrow, Russia is full of people who will face dire legal sanctions if liberals ever take power. I'm worried in pursuit of justice, we're creating a larger and larger caste of tiger-riders.
The West has a really weird way with punishments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Veesenmayer personally responsible for about 10% of the Holocaust, 600 000 Hungarian Jews: two years in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwane_Matsui who explicitly ordered Japanese troops to behave normally in Nanking: death, because he did not do enough
That is probably because they did not want to prosecute the real culprit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Yasuhiko_Asaka so they need a high ranking scapegoat.
Sad addendum: Maduro involved a lot of his generals in drug smuggling, thus ensuring that they can never relinquish power. They are all facing 30 years in ADX Florence, and who wants that? Which is why as of this writing his miserable undemocratic kakistocracy appears to be holding on.
But you are missing one thing: Russian liberals will never take power over anything because in reality they are unable and unwilling to actually wield it and shoulder all the burdens that come with it. They want someone else to do all the heavy lifting. That what Yeltsin was all about.
The problem is that the ICC doesn't go far enough. Killing a dictator is much easier than capturing him. The ICC/United States/Ukraine should simply offer a $10 million bounty, and relocation & secret identity in some free country for the family of, anyone who causes the death of Putin.
It's interesting that we are discussing a totalitarian state and how it controls its subjects, and meanwhile accept uncritically the propaganda of our own regime regarding the enemies and allies it has chosen.
Some bodyguard or perhaps random citizen could kill Putin but would probably be instantly killed or arrested. The only way I could see someone killing Putin and being in a position to leave Russia after is if the person staged a successful coup, in which case the person is in control of Russia and $10 million isn't much of an inducement.`
Think this is the first review of a book I've already read, that's fun!
Dealt a lot with Korea in an old professional life, with a lot trips on to the peninsula (but only the Southern half). I can highly recommend B. R. Myer's The Cleanest Race for more insight into the ideology of the DPRK, and what motivates it (spoiler alert: racism to an extent would make Stormfront members raise an eyebrow). I *cannot* recommend the Juche Myth (a dull slog), but I can recommend his blog for more insights (mostly into the South at this point, but also into the North).
https://sthelepress.com/
One thing I think Lankov underplays (but Myers' hits at pretty hard) is that we often tend to think about the problem of North Korea as replacing a regime and then setting up a new government to run that state. But the Korean Peninsula is a single nation (the Korean people) divided into two states, and the two of them can't keep existing. Nature will enforce a down-select at some point. Legally speaking, neither country recognizes the existence of the other, and any citizen of one is automatically a citizen of the other. So if the North falls, the core (the highest level) songbyun types who've been running the show mostly aren't worried about international tribunals deciding their fates; if they live that long, they've done well. It's the Hostile songbyun and the ROKs who will kill them a lot quicker.
This is also a major problem with any movement towards reunification: the ROK doesn't want the financial hit that's going to have to come with supporting what is one of the most backwards countries on earth. So they continue to try and set up some system (preferably a confederation) where the DPRK can become richer and collapse nicely without interrupting ROK standard of living. Although the ROK's catastrophic fertility rates are going to make issues for this.
The post says the book is funny, but I'm curious if in your opinion it's as funny as the post?
Does this ever actually explain what the rational purpose of the submarine abductions was?
“They also believe, again with some good reason, that if they ever are overthrown, the vengeance enacted on them will be bloody. And the number of people who feel this way is huge — one of the sadistically genius things about the North Korean regime is the sheer mass of people who it turns into collaborators.”
This is the exact same belief set that many Southern planters held about the American slavery system. Including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
Yes, I very much was getting that vibe as well. In that case the only thing that ended slavery was foreign (if we can call it that) conquest and economic restructuring, but this would require a far more dramatic form of it.
There’s a good corollary here with how the Soviet state ended up operating at the end, and why this should make us nervous. Basically, as the Soviet Union matured and broke down, it became more and more operated by the managers and less by the central planners. Deal making between factory directors with each other and suppliers, a black market barter system, became the standard way to keep goods flowing from producer to producer to consumer. This was the perfect predecessor to the current “mafia capitalism” system, where the early 90’s Russian scramble to take control of former state assets and enterprises went to the best black marketeers, and thus became centerpieces of organized crime groups.
Great review, but we've got to know: why *did* North Korea secretly kidnap all those Japanese people??
Gotta have someone teach the spies how to speak Japanese without sounding like a foreigner.
If you brainwash these foreigners, then you get spies that can blend in a lot more easily.
If your spies want to work overseas, they can steal the identities of the people they abducted and pretend to be them with their passports to avoid attention.
Also for their skill sets, not all the abductions were random.
> In the limit, you can imagine a single mad king with no human servitors at all, just a computer as his grand vizier.
Just make sure the computer isn't smart enough to realize it doesn't need the mad king.
You're ascribing human motivations to a machine. You're presumably intelligent enough to work out how to eat a food you hate every day. This would not interfere with your pursuit of other goals; depending on what it is, it might actually improve your health. But why would you? It lowers your utility function's value.
Amazing piece. Thank you.
There is an excellent novel on the Booker prize shortlist on the disappearances: “Flashlight” by Susan Choi. Highly recommended!
I hate to be pedantic but I'm going to do it anyway. A singularity is not another word for a black hole's point of no return, it's part of a black hole where gravity is infinite, and the laws of physics break down. I believe the term you were looking for was "event horizon", that is the point in a black hole from which nothing can escape (although we have Hawking radiation which sort of negates that as well but beside the point).
I really enjoyed this article and want to read this book now, thank you!
Those random abductions of Japanese have always puzzled me, because the reported object was to put them to work teaching Japanese to North Korean spies. Now, in those days there was no shortage of Japanese communists and socialists who were openly sympathetic to the North Korean regime. Why not recruit teachers from among those people? More than a few of them were, in fact, schoolteachers. But maybe they drew the line at living under communism themselves.
I read the bit about Slavic black humor to my wife and best friend - both Bulgarians. They cheered.
"The Kim Il-Sung of the future won’t need an army of peasants expecting tile roofs if he has an army of killer robots, and ChatGPT is much cheaper than a full-time propaganda minister. Depending on how good AI gets, it will sharply reduce the number of people required to run an effective regime."
There was an ultraparanoid but relatively clearthinking guy on twitter not long ago who thought that this is exactly the elite plan for humanity. Combine with a global drone killchain and it's lights out for free men.
Seems like the CCP’s plan. And they’re already exporting their surveillance tech to other authoritarian regimes.
Outstanding article!
Not sure if you are crazy, a genius, or both. Subscribed.
Seriously, this is a strong argument for libertarian populism. Briefly, if the government takes my money, maybe the government will give me a good bus service, maybe not. If the government leaves me my money... I will find someone who will take me from A to B for my money. For sure. NKs do it even when it is fully illegal. Imagine just making this legal.
This is a strong argument for libertarianism, full stop. What does "populism" have to do with it?
Right, because unregulated, exclusively profit-motivated entities will always do what's best for the people.
The beauty of markets is that, in aggregate, this is actually pretty close to true.
There is an interesting bias in a lot of libertarian economics in that it nearly always focuses on analyzing somewhere between 1-2 centuries of human history, but only a few select examples within that.
In the short term this is definitely true, but in the long term you have to find a way to prevent capital accumulation and a new state structure in which those who got rich are essentially promoting their own progeny's future wealth and status. So far no society has figured this out unless it was just a bunch of villages, or better yet, a single tribe.
There are lots of "short term" examples of libertarianism working, but none that didn't eventually stop working. It's hard to believe that "liburlz" were the cause of failure in Rome, China, Mesopotamia, Egypt (it had a moment or two), the Arab world, etc., etc., and yet that there's some path to prevent this that somehow if you just believe hard enough (but have no laws to make sure it happens, because laws are government and who needs government) it will come together.
In the absence of government, capital — but also a dozen other strands of power and influence — will create government, given the chance to grow large enough. One could argue that this is how we got civilization in the first place.
LVT would lessen land accumulation by unproductive rentiers. Though your model of civilization's rise is true sometimes, usually it involved initial violent conquest, which markets deter by allowing more positive-sum interactions. In terms of accumulating tangible wealth, people who allocate capital badly lose it to people who allocate it better over time. Unless they can prevent that through regulatory capture, to which the best solution is law and convention keeping regulation minimal and using civil torts for that purpose.
LVT would work more or less but only to the extent it was implemented well and held to. I do think it's a good idea generally, but no solution is better than the commitment or lack thereof of those who create it. Also it doesn't really prevent the amassing of power / wealth by a minority over time. Productive or not.
The "people who allocate capital better over time" end up empowering those who they support in power, eventually, regardless of how virtuous their profitability is. This puts them in a tempting space for corruption, regulatory capture, etc. Eventually either you end up in a neofeudal system, or there's some sort of popular uprising and you get a new sort of economic system lead by the middle class (the working class virtually never lead any revolution, and typically only join once revolution is well underway).
I think the best choice is to just have something that works "for a while" but every system doesn't work for someone, and eventually that "someone" will have enough power or a loud enough voice to start making changes.
Again, most of what you say is based off studying the last 150 years of American history specifically, and to a lesser extent studying counterfactuals in Europe and Japan over the last 100-ish years. It's all nice and neat on paper, but my whole point is that it's a system only as strong as the commitment to it, and doesn't address things like natural monopolies (who's going to build a competing railroad network?), economies of scale (any random nobody can't start up a new microchip company at this point), network effects (should Meta really be able to own every company they are capable of buying, in the social media space?), or externalities that the courts under pressure from the capital-holding class decides aren't that important (see: Dark Waters, or for a rather dramatic example you can see from Google Maps, the Berkeley Pit — especially a fun question if the entity that did destruction to a whole system just folds and the assets go elsewhere: who do you tort?).
If you have a laissez-faire economy and a centralized government, then the only corrective is when diseconomies of scale are rather notable (a lot of service industries are like this, but most capital intensive industries increasingly are not) and the main behemoths in the industry begin to get sclerotic. If you have a democratic government eventually the people will start to vote to control some of the externalities of the system that the courts don't take seriously or the structure simply isn't built to handle.
The government has to actually be quite proactive in maintaining a "free market" economy, if maximizing competition is their ultimate goal. Actually China is pretty good at this, they keep their business class from getting too powerful, but also have a very highly decentralized economic system. Not saying they are an ideal country, only that they have an exceptionally dynamic economy due to this (real estate sector not withstanding, there's a reason they became the world's factory so fast).
Read up on Joseph Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies) and Mancur Olson (The Rise and Decline of Nations). Peter Turchin's work is also instructive on how political and economic systems become unstable over time, but the former describe not instability but the collapse of dynamism. Libertarian purism simply doesn't account for these realities well, except to wish them away by throwing it all in a "government" bucket, and then right clicking to "delete government". But it doesn't address the ways in which corporations, or anyway those who own resources and infrastructure and so forth, become governments over time automatically, whether called such or not.
So in short, if libertarian absolutism is to work, it has to have a rigid structure to zap any emergent "government-like" or power-amassing systems, any economic or regulatory capture by special interest groups, any creeping complexity that makes competition less likely, and, ultimately, has to decide at that point that whoever lives and dies, suffers or succeeds, was simply chosen by God to do so.
Given that a pure capitalist system has never existed, your statement can only be read as ideological. In fact, nearly all complex economic theories are based on a particular form of idealism that can be applied only under certain conditions and for a limited period of time. If the right conditions align as the system is being established, it will succeed for a time. Ultimately, however, all successful systems eventually create prosperity, which inevitably breeds corruption.
There's is no perfect economic philosophy that will universally succeed. To believe any system will be self-correcting in the long term is purely ideological.
Fair enough. Though there's one pretty close one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth
In the middle ages? Isn't this only slightly more relevant than citing, say, Lord of the Rings?