The U.S. is really good at destroying things

If a country is really good at X, and along comes social change Y, you ought to figure there is a pretty good chance Y will feed into X.

So for instance the United States is really good at retail.  So along comes Wokeism, and, lo and behold, Wokeism slots wonderfully into retail, whether you like that fact or not.  The Woke is marketed all the time, and so you can find “green” versions of so many products, even if organic food costs more energy, etc.  Or if you invent a new app, with anti-corporate purposes in mind, don’t be surprised if you wake up one day and the app has been co-opted by retail corporations.  And so on.

What we are now observing is that the recent innovation of “The Woke’ has been co-opted for the purposes of destroying things, in this case the economy and possibly the society and polity of Russia.  The lining up of European allies, the mobilization of sentiment on Twitter, the inducement of Visa and Mastercard to pull out, and you could go on and on and on.  The Woke campaign against Russia has turned out to be extremely powerful, well beyond what I had been expecting to happen.  Energy purchases might be next to go.

To be clear, sometimes we are good at producing or threatening destruction in very beneficial ways (WWII, 1973 airlift to Israel, ending the post-Yugoslavia wars, stopping Saddam from taking Saudi oil, etc.), and sometimes we are good at destruction in very harmful ways (you can supply your own list, but it is extensive).  In this post I am not going to try to assess the net expected value from the ongoing destruction of Russia, only to say that the final outcome is uncertain.

Nuclear power, airplanes, computers, GPS and much more all have been co-opted into destroying things, again noting these effects may be net positives on the whole.  They have been co-opted into retail purposes as well, nuclear power excepted.

Make no mistake about it, many of the most important “contributions” of Wokeism are to feed into, and enhance, those capabilities that America already is good at.

Which include retail and yes, destruction as well.

The Coase theorem, combined with the force of increasing returns to what a country is really good at, will see to this.

The same feeder tendencies may well be true for other innovations you might have in mind, be they practical or intellectual in nature.  Whether you like it or not, they will contribute to both American retail and to the American capacity to destroy.

Some people observe these trends and think the Woke is transcendent and all-powerful.  But under another reading, it is actually the Woke that is somewhat being pwned.