#economic development

I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO THIS FRIDAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.

Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile things, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.

Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites" after watching the richest man on Earth cavorting with Trump while promising to give all of their jobs to AI and robots.

This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has – provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.

But Trump's incontinent belligerence, his bullying, and his cognitive decline mean that he's conjuring a new anti-Trump coalition into existence: groups of people who don't agree on much, but do agree on fighting Trumpismo and its leader. This is very visible in US domestic politics, where "Never-Trumper" conservatives find themselves on the same side as Democratic Socialists, at least on this narrow issue. The anti-Trump mass mobilizations – the Women's March, the anti-ICE demonstrations, the No Kings rallies – are visibly, palpably coalitional, made up of people carrying signs and banners for groups that are often at odds with one another…except when it comes to Trump.

Countries ranked by overall development according to Legatum Prosperity Index

Nature is the Solution, Not the Problem

Canadians support faster environmental reviews. We need businesses to receive prompt decisions on industrial proposals.

But as The Guardian reports, the federal government plans to accelerate its reviews not by increasing its own efficiencies, but by lowering public standards.

Its plans would create new “Federal Economic Zones” where established nature protections would not apply, and they would empower Ministers to license businesses to wipe out endangered species.

Nature is not an impediment to economic development; environmental assessment is the “credit check” before we write the loan. It is due diligence, fiduciary responsibility, and the only way to build prosperity that endures.

We can not build our economy by laying waste to our country.

From here.

Non-Western Modernities and Alternative Globalizations: Sociological Perspectives, by Mikhail Maslovskiy, Russian Sociological Review, 24 no. 4, 2025.

This article examines globalization through the theoretical lens of multiple modernities, emphasizing the limitations of “reductionist” approaches (particularly world-systems theory) and advancing a multidimensional understanding of global processes. Building on critiques by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Johann Arnason, the author argues that globalization cannot be reduced to economic dynamics alone but must be understood as an interaction of economic, political, cultural, and civilizational dimensions, each with its own logic and temporalities. Arnason’s rejection of rigid “system” models in favour of globalizing processes highlights the plurality and irreducibility of sociocultural spheres.

The article reviews dominant perspectives on the temporalities of globalization, distinguishing between long-term (500-year), medium-term (250-year), and recent (50-year) frameworks. It situates these within the multiple modernities approach, drawing especially on Göran Therborn’s analysis of successive waves of globalization and de-globalization. From this perspective, contemporary trends—marked by crises since 2008 and renewed geopolitical conflict—suggest a shift toward de-globalization and the growing importance of global politics rather than economic integration alone. Globalization is taken to be a spread of a certain type of modernity (roughly, neoliberalism) which has now come into crisis, leading to “multiple globalizations.”

A central contribution of the article is its discussion of Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet mode of globalization. Arnason conceptualizes communism as an alternative modernity with global reach, shaped by revolutionary ideology, imperial legacies, and civilizational patterns. He emphasizes the multidimensional character of Soviet globalization, encompassing political expansion, ideological diffusion, and civilizational rivalry with Western liberal modernity. While the Soviet project achieved significant geopolitical influence, it ultimately failed to construct a viable alternative world economy or a sustainable civilizational model. The Sino-Soviet split further weakened the global communist project, revealing deep civilizational and cultural fractures within communist modernity itself. Arnason interprets the collapse of the Soviet model as the result of intertwined economic, political, and cultural factors, resisting monocausal explanations.

The article also highlights the influence of Arnason’s framework on historical sociology and post-communist studies, particularly in analyses of Russia’s post-Soviet transformations. The multiple modernities perspective is shown to be useful for understanding Russia’s oscillation between openness to Western models and later conservative, civilizationally framed rejections of Western modernity.

In its second major empirical focus, the article applies the multiple modernities framework to China’s rise. It argues that contemporary China represents a distinct configuration combining capitalist economy, Marxist-Leninist political structures, and selective revival of civilizational and imperial legacies, notably Confucianism. Drawing on Arnason, Therborn, and others, the article critiques simplistic notions of China as a monolithic “civilizational state,” stressing instead the recombination of old and new elements and the enduring influence of imperial trajectories. Initiatives such as the Belt and Road are interpreted as potential expressions of an emerging alternative mode of globalization shaped by China’s historical experience.

The conclusion argues that the multiple modernities approach is compatible with, and enriching for, globalization studies. It allows for the analysis of multiple globalizations associated with different forms of modernity and overcomes the limitations of economically reductionist theories. The Soviet Union is interpreted as a failed alternative globalization, while China is presented as a more ambiguous and evolving case whose global role may represent a new, historically grounded form of alternative globalization.

What it means for radicals: It’s not clear how much the Russian state influences the output of this journal or its authors, but the argument made fits well with its aspirations. The driver for denying that modernity is an effect of western power or of a single developmental model may well be the Russian state’s attempts to both modernize (or defend its modernity) and to assert its difference from the west. Maslovskiy seems to be advocating what decolonial theorists call “dewesternization,” i.e. a continuation of modern civilization and capitalism but with a cultural superstructure different from that of the west. This allows emerging powers to position themselves as anti-colonial while continuing colonial legacies.

In part due to their supposed intellectual descent from Adam Smith and the other classical economists, contemporary economists are pretty uniformly hostile to mercantilism, seeing it as a wrong-headed political economy that held back human progress until it was replaced by that best of all ideas: capitalism.

As a student of economic history and the history of political economy, I find that economists generally have a pretty poor understanding of what mercantilists actually believed and what economic policies they actually supported. In reality, a lot of the things that economists see as key advances in the creation of capitalism - the invention of the joint-stock company, the creation of financial markets, etc. - were all accomplishments of mercantiism.

Rather than the crude stereotype of mercantilists as a bunch of monetary weirdos who thought the secret to prosperity was the hoarding of precious metals, mercantilists were actually lazer-focused on economic development. The whole business about trying to achieve a positive balance of trade and financial liquidity and restraining wages was all a means to an end of economic development. Trade surpluses could be invested in manufacturing and shipping, gold reserves played an important role in deepening capital pools and thus increasing levels of investment at lower interest rates that could support larger-scale and more capital intensive enterprises, and so forth.

Indeed, the arch-sin of mercantilism in the eyes of classical and contemporary economists, their interference in free trade through tariffs, monopolies, and other interventions, was all directed at the overriding economic goal of climbing the value-added ladder.

Thus, England (and later Britain) put a tariff on foreign textiles and an export tax on raw wool and forbade the emigration of skilled workers (while supporting the immigration of skilled workers to England) and other mercantilist policies to move up from being exporters of raw wool (which meant that most of the profits from the higher value-added part of the industry went to Burgundy) to being exporters of cheap wool cloth to being exporters of more advanced textiles. Hell, even Adam Smith saw the logic of the Navigation Acts!

And this is what brings me to the most devastating critique of the standard economist narrative about mercantilism: the majority of the countries that successfully industrialized did so using mercantilist principles rather than laissez-faire principles:

When England became the first industrial economy, it did so under strict protectionist policies and only converted to free trade once it had gained enough of a technological and economic advantage over its competitors that it didn't need protectionism any more.

When the United States industrialized in the 19th century and transformed itself into the largest economy in the world, it did so from behind high tariff walls.

When Germany made itself the leading industrial power on the Continent, it did so by rejecting English free trade economics and having the state invest heavily in coal, steel, and railroads. Free trade was only for within the Zollverein, not with the outside world.