Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

+1 for asking the correct questions! Of course leaders of companies understand the current economic downturn and they to some degree can predict future economic problems better than the average citizen.

While hiking yesterday I was talking with a friend about history, and how all great empires turn to “looting” as their influence wanes. There is plenty of data for this point of view: USA, England, France, Middle Ages powers, Romans, etc.

Just as elites in a declining power will naturally “loot” as much as they can to ensure the long term economic well being of their family, doesn’t it make sense that corporate leaders will cut staff, and generally extract as much profit as they can short term?

View on HN

At least in the case of the Roman empire, it was founded on looting. One of the main purposes of Julius Caesar's military adventures at the beginning of the empire was to capture people from neighboring nations and sell them into human trafficking. The US is arguably the same: human trafficking profits created the foundational wealth that everything else was built on (along with looting the lands held by the continent's original inhabitants).

Careful what you say, you're making yourself an enemy of fox news. The natives were savages and we should be grateful to our lord and savior Andrew Jackson for trying to kill them all, and also buy gold because central banks are bad bad bad!!!

See these other videos by PragerU /s

Corporate America doesn't seem to be collapsing. It's just a mild recession and we haven't had one recently.

Also it's hard to make the same kind of analogy with 'corporate leaders' as they are typically employees rather than owners. Employees already loot a much as possible!

> all great empires turn to “looting” as their influence wanes. There is plenty of data for this point of view

What's the data? Be interested to read about this correlation.

I may have been in error on my opinion. I just did manual web search, and asked ChatGPT+Web and Bing+ChatGPT and could not find much to support my opinion. I will keep looking.

Anyway, thanks for challenging my opinion - I am likely changing my mind on this.

No worries. I am not a great student of history, but I have found a recent surprisingly strong wave of people appearing who are entirely cynical about the history of the West, and will believe any negative statement about it. Obviously some of the negative statements are true, but it's always worth a little prod to see :)

Imperialism, Colonialism, the Gilded Age, etc.

None of those is looting as an empire declines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com