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Notes -
So the argument is that, as the aristocracy moves to extracting wealth from human capital, the propaganda naturally moves towards methods designed to protect that human capital (and the related heavy infrastructure)?
That seems plausible on the face of it. I guess, does anyone know if we see more glorification of war in official propaganda from resource-extraction based economies (e.g. petro-states, countries that make most of their money on diamonds, etc)?
Even if so, that seems to conflict with the recent rise in pro-war messaging we've seen over the Ukraine issue, though. The left has been pretty gung-ho on it, as well as being the political side that generally benefits from higher quality human capital.
More or less. Wealth (for the peasants like you and I, and the lords and aristocrats at the top) isn't generated the same way it was in, say, 1500 AD. Then (oversimplifying here) you generated wealth by having a bunch of land on which you had a bunch of peasants growing crops, and you generally had a shortage of land. So killing the other guys and stealing their land was a good move; even a terrible war didn't usually make the land unusable. Now, the wealth is in factories and skilled workers. Even a resource-extraction economy has more sensitive infrastructure than preindustrial farmland.
As for Ukraine...this is basically the West trying to discourage Russia from going for ye olde pillage and loot strategy. The Russians now own an awful lot of smoking rubble and figuring out how to make money off that will be a pretty tough thing to do...
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