Comment by kewrkewm53 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kewrkewm53 | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, history shows that revolutions which consist killing or expelling all the educated, well-off citizen typically end up having pretty bad results for everybody. Even if you successfully capture their wealth, the future will be poor when there's nobody competent enough left to manage administration, education, farms, industry, infrastructure and so on. And once things go downhill like that, it's not easy to turn things around.

I also think there's a cultural factor at play. In addition to wealth and education, more well-off families may also have cultural capital which encourages things like entrepreneurship, long-term thinking and higher self-esteem. Even if these are secondary to wealth, they may still have an impact. I think the impact of culture in general is underestimated as it very much influences human behaviour and outcomes, not just politics, geography etc.

This happens in revolutions where race is not an immediate factor such as Venezuela. All the experts leave (including native experts) so the infrastructure which propped up the country slowly deteriorates without anyone being able to fix and maintain things properly and productivity and output go down…

It's fairly easy to take the racial pieces out of this and talk about it in abstract.

What you're losing when you kill / expel the wealthy (whomever they are) and expropriate / redistribute property is cultural investment in institutions.

In that people may feel the previous system was unjust, but they nevertheless believed in it. That belief (aka trust) takes generations to build.

Revolutions which violently dislocate institutions don't replace them with alternatives: they start from zero.

This has profound growth consequences when, for example, it takes four+ decades for people to trust the legal system again. Or banking. Or anything.

another point I remember being made on the aftermath of successful revolutions was how revolutions tend to select leaders which are ill-suited to rebuild the institutions after they have won

To some degree, revolutions feel like the primary / general election distinction.

In that the things you have to say and positions you have to hold to inspire people to revolution, are ill suited to post-revolution rebuilding.

Which is probably why it's rare: you'd need someone who's self-aware enough to hold both views, talented enough to have both skillsets, and politically astute enough to navigate that pivot with their colleagues and constituents.

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