One of the simplest lenses to look at an industrial society is whether it’s run by financiers or capitalists.
Socrates famously noted that some people live to eat and others eat to live.
Capitalists need money so they can do things. Financiers do things so they can get money. To a financier it doesn’t matter how money is made, so long as they won’t go to prison. All that matters is rate of return.
A capitalist has something they want to do: Ford wanted to build cars. Edison wanted to invent. The Wright Brothers wanted to fly. They need money so they can do whatever it is that turns their crank.
Capitalists create great societies. Financiers destroy them.
As soon as rate of return becomes the only consideration, a society becomes less interested in doing new things or doing old things well and starts searching for “unfair advantages.” They offshore and outsource jobs to lower cost domiciles: either for labor or for environmental regulations. They seek a monopoly or oligopoly positions in businesses where people have to buy: healthcare is the gold standard. They buy functioning businesses and load them up with debt. The business dies, but they are richer than they would have been had they run it.
Systematically they run the economy down. They become rich, but the society suffers.
This isn’t to say that finance isn’t necessary. As the saying runs “financiers make good servants and terrible masters.” But when finance becomes the primary driver of any economy: when it becomes a better way to get rich than being a capitalist, they ruin societies.
You can see this clearly in the West, especially in America and Britain. Sixty percent of people now can’t afford a decent lifestyle in the US, but America has the richest rich who ever lived.
This may seem like a victory for financiers, but it’s a Pyrric on. Yes, the America’s rich in 1950 or 1980 or even 2000 were not nearly as rich as America’s rich today, BUT America was the most powerful nation in the world, with the strongest economy. Now American elites are filthy rich, but rule of the second strongest economy, and China is pulling away from them: the difference is accelerating.
Do you want to be king shit of turd mountain? That’s the choice that America’s elites made. “Our country will suck ass and no longer be dominant but we will be rich, rich, rich!”
Ask Britain’s elites how that worked out. Would you rather be a British industrialist in 1870 or today, even if today you’re richer?
And as financialization destroys a country, that money matters less and less. In time, American elites will have to buy the best from China: cars, planes, electronics, etc, etc… Most of what they really want, America won’t make, because America will be backwards.
All this before losing the joys of being a super power.
Financialization is the destruction of countries, and the elites who pursue it lose more than they gain. Better to be a millionaire in 1955’s America, than a billionaire in America today, because wealth is always trumped by power.