But why couldn't they, e.g. buy other people's thing in exchange for their gold? IOW, why is the relevant fact that _Spain_ didn't have much more wealth despite having more gold? Other people in other countries valued (and still value) gold too.
Think of difference between buying bunch of cars from someone making cars. Instead of buying the factory making cars.
Or maybe currently RAM. You found pile of money somewhere. You buy big amount of RAM. RAM prices go up, you do not care you have money. In a few years DDR6 comes out. The RAM you bought is not that expensive anymore. You do not really have either money or something currently expensive.
Wealth is owning the land, the machines, the buildings, the knowledge(more so now). Being rich is owning lot of what can buy those things. But if you keep spending liquid wealth, eventually it is gone and you are not wealthy anymore.
You can, but then those people have more money, and you have less. The money supply is much smaller than the supply of goods and services, because the same money circulates repeatedly. So simply doubling your money can tilt things a little more your way, but does not make the situation completely lopsided, because you can only spend the extra money once.
Also, to quote Jastram [0], "In spite of the romanticism of the Spanish Main and treasure ships, the supply of gold from the New World was just a trickle by later standards. Less than 1% of what was to be 1930 world production was produced in each of the years from 1500 to 1520." Over the next 80 years, it never got much above 1.3%.
[0] Roy W. Jastram, The Golden Constant (1977), pg. 41.
They could and they did. That meant that Spain ended up importing more and exporting less, which would have been bad for Spanish businesses.
There’s a lot more to “wealth” than just having a bunch of stuff. Especially in the long term, since most “stuff” will wear out or otherwise decay over time.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?
Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.
China's middle class is already larger than the entire US population, and growing fast. It won't be rich in the sense that say Switzerland or Norway are rich. But it seems safe to say they won't be barely scraping by.
IMO, India likely won't make this transition. It's population is still growing but it's birth rate is sinking fast (like most everywhere else).
Forgetting LLMs and coding agents for a second, what OP describes is like watching a Youtube video on how to make a small repair around the house. You can watch that and "know" what needs to be done afterwards. But it is a very different thing to do it yourself.
Ultimately it comes to whether gaining the know how through experience is worth it or not.
> Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
There's a general loss of decorum, and it has such immense negative impact. There's so often someone acting like an animal on public transit, which is why many avoid it entirely.
I would not be surprised to see the UK enact something like the Ottoman millet system, and grant semi-autonomy to its various ethnic and religious communities to run their own internal affairs. I don't think this would be a good move, but doesn't seem too unlikely at this stage.
The UK's three biggest ethnic minorities do have some autonomy in their territories - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The idea of giving minorities that do not have a well defined territory is a complete non-started, and there is no demand for it.
There is some extent to which religious groups can (as anyone one can) use arbitration for some disputes (but that is ultimately subject to secular law) as some Jewish and Muslim groups do or have procedures to decide matters for purely religious purposes as Catholic and Anglican canon law tribunals do (e.g. annulments and internal decisions).
I have no idea why you think anything more is even remotely likely.
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