I promised to respond to Sperry’s longread On the Utility of Dictators, and finally, I’ve gotten around to it.

Sperry’s task was to show, using the example of Asian tigers such as Japan and Korea, that the cause of the rise of their capital-intensive industries was direct, prolonged, and shameless state intervention in the economy, rather than the free market. The free market, in comparison with monstrous corporations fused with states, is a poverty-stricken market, and it gets the industries that are not as demanding of capital. I believe that he fully accomplished his task.

Indeed, the state is an institution that is very good at concentrating efforts, and as for exactly which sphere the state will concentrate its efforts in—that is a question of politics. Thanks to this concentration of efforts, a mega-army, a mega-fleet, or a mega-corporation can be created, pyramids in the desert and in the jungle, mega-statues of gods and leaders, bridges with mega-traffic and bridges to nowhere; people can fly into space and burn in gas chambers—there is no end to the applications of state efforts.

And, nevertheless, Sperry’s article is titled “On the Utility of Dictators,” and not, for example, on their grandeur. So who are they useful to, those dictators he examined in his review of the Asian electronics market? The answer is obvious: they are useful to the consumer. The Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, or American state takes money from its citizens, borrows from gullible investors, simply prints it—and plows it into the construction of an industry that will provide the simple consumer from godforsaken Montenegro or Costa Rica (where dictators are too pathetic and unable to concentrate such insane resources) with cheap and high-quality gadgets.

Thus, dictators can be considered conditionally useful if they spend the looted funds on the production of consumer goods, conditionally useless if they spend the looted funds on the production of cultural mega-monuments, and conditionally harmful if they spend the looted funds on the extermination of neighbors. How did it happen that useful dictators appeared at all, as a class? What forced the proud descendants of robbers and religious fanatics to switch to trade wars in the spirit of “open your market to our goods, or we will close our market to your goods”? There is a simple and boring answer to this: the Industrial Revolution. The previous revolution, the agrarian one, allowed for the concentration of resources to create giant armies, using armies to seize new lands and concentrate even more resources. The industrial one, however, provided a country with a very modest army dominance throughout the world through production and the merchant fleet. It was the industrial revolution that led to the emergence of a new type of war: for the opening of markets. Not for the right to loot this or that colony, but for the right to trade and invest. The Opium Wars, Commodore Perry, all that stuff.

It remains to understand: these useful dictators, leading national markets to prosperity with an iron fist—are they necessary or optional? Fortunately, we have at hand an example of an Asian tiger that did without useful dictators—Hong Kong. The number one country for economic freedom achieved significant prosperity. This means that even in Asia, one can get by without development dictatorships. On the other hand, it’s exactly microelectronics that Hong Kong is not particularly famous for. It turns out that the free market in Asia somehow bypassed this sphere, preferring the organic growth of many small companies over the super-concentration of resources in a few chaebols. Had there been no dictators, the global economy today would be different. We can only guess which industries would have flourished if they hadn’t been crushed in the pursuit of primacy in the chip race. But it seems that without dictators there would be no AI bubble, thanks to which I easily draw pretty little pictures for my posts and do other cool things that I hope to tell you about soon.