This political aphorism* seems to explain a number of today’s geopolitical paradoxes.
• Above all… Putin’s Russia. Putin’s war on Ukraine. How can either of these disasters keep going? Because there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. There’s an astonishing capacity for a country to keep muddling through, no matter how irrational the leadership gets. As we watch this train wreck, many of us keep waiting for karma to kick in. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t!
• And at the risk of stretching the metaphor too far: when other global actors make decisions that look like breathtaking self-sabotage (see: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Brexiteers, et al.), many of us – even on this very message board – are sure they will get their deserved comeuppance. But the evidence suggests otherwise!
What do you think?
* During the American Revolution, when the British suffered a major military defeat at Saratoga, a friend of Scottish economist Adam Smith expressed his fear that Britain was surely “ruined.”
"Be assured… that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” replied Smith.
I’m thinking that those expectations are wildly naïve.
What Smith meant is that a nation has a vast capacity to perform suboptimally, to be wasteful and stupid and all the rest. And just as the nation is that way, so is each citizen in the privacy of their own lives. And each company. Everything everywhere is always significantly suboptimal, so any incremental suboptimality is (mostly) just lost in the sauce. And definitely is in the near term.
Any given citizen, company, or nation can in fact become overwhelmed and die, declare bankruptcy, or suffer regime change or invasion and absorption.
But by and large the mess will muddle along a bit differently messy than before, but not greatly harmed by the latest cause celebre breathless catastrophizing. In a pithy nutshell, it’s SSDD each and every day.
It is true that any unsustainable trend will come to an end. But they don’t usually end abruptly; instead they peter out into a new configuration of different crises.
I guess you’re saying that it is just a truism? But an awful lot of political commentary, including here on the SDMB, is premised on a contrary notion: that poorly run states are doomed.
Well, to use a specific example, I think Russia is ultimately doomed through a combination of corruption that has undermined what industry remained after the fall of the Soviet Union, and demographic collapse amplified by the ‘brain drain’ of people seeking to leave after the calamitous invasion of Ukraine. But Russia has been wheezing on since the early 20th century and I don’t think any collapse is going to happen in time for relief for Ukraine, and perhaps not in time to prevent a strategic conflict between Russia and NATO. Nor is Putin likely to ever pay for the crimes he has ordered and overseen.
In a more historical example, the (Western) Roman Empire managed to hobble on for a couple of centuries past its peak just on the basis of military dominance and sheer size, and survived numerous really terrible emperors who did their level best to trash Roman achievements. Once your empire gets large enough you can get away with an enormous amount of mismanagement, malfeasance, and shit-fuckery and still keep grinding along indefinitely.
Less than that even. If there is no objective point at which the circumstances of a country can be so straitened as to be considered “ruined” what does it even mean?
The quote just means that nations are big, complex, and resilient, and can withstand a lot of foolishness before the damage starts to become apparent.
A corollary to that is that there is a lot of hysteresis in a country. This manifests as a large delay between decisions and outcomes. Interest rate changes can take six months to a year to show up in the macro numbers. ‘Stimulus’ spending can take years to be spent, and years more before the full outcome is known. So bad choices can take a long time to become apparent, and by then attributing the bad outcome to the bad decision is very difficult.
Let’s say 50 or 100 years from now Russia has slowly devolved into a giant cold Somalia, complete with random warlords, starving peasants, and craptacular everything else. Meanwhile all the bordering nations recognize that the best move for them is to simply guard their existing borders against banditry and migrants while leaving the Russian mess to fester instead of opportunistically invading to take and hold new land and more peasants as was the fashion during / before the 19th Century.
Has “Russia” failed? Is it ruined? It still exists in name, in language, in culture, and as some lines drawn on maps and painted on the ground.
Ruination of a person often results in death. Ruination of a country can live on for generations. Benighted stunted largely-wasted generations, but plenty of them.
The quote is specifically about how hard it is to ruin a nation. The exchange supposedly occurred in correspondence between Adam Smith and Sir John Sinclair. The exchange (talking about war spending and setbacks):
John Sinclair: “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined!”
Adam Smith: “Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”
He’s basically saying that nations have huge reserves of capacity, redundancy, and resiliancy, and one disaster or a war or a really bad economic policy is unlikely to ‘ruin’ it.
What Smith was basically describing was that countries are complex adaptive economic, social and political systems, and such systems are antifragile and fault tolerant. It takes huge effort to actually completely wreck them because they are so good at adapting to change.
It’s also why authoritaarian, centrally managed countries can be so fragile. Adaptation from the bottom up is not allowed, so one central mistake can have terrible effects. See: China’s one child policy or the Great Leap Forward.