Afterward, everyone with a stake in the country's direction realizes that having a technocrat who shares your views and has personal access to the administration is a great way to influence policy. The money spigot opens, and pretty soon having the 'right' opinion is far better for your career than independence. Survivor bias eventually ensures that the technocracy is dominated by people with the 'right' opinion.
And that's when you'll know that your country has achieved parity with the United States.
Just like the New Deal only worked once and now every scam just claims it's the New, New Deal.
Sure, the populace might have a memory of a generation but the technocrats have a longer memory and after first success, the next effort is dogged by the realization, "look what I'm going to get, look who I get to be..." (as the gp said, it's the careers of the technocrats one has to look at).
I say this looking at the horrible, awful fail of the current president, a fail of what could have been the renewal of the country but by this very mechanism was fore-ordained to be a lurid catastrophe. Roosevelt sold out a lot to Wall Street too, btw, he just had a clean enough start to make his approach work.
The New Deal never worked but oddly enough, it's trying to happen again. Bad deals happen over and over. The ones that work, the ones that require effort only happen once.
More accurately, some of the New Deal (deposit insurance, fiscal & monetary expansion, leaving the gold standard) worked, but some of it hurt. The fact that many countries suffered for just as long and worse, if not longer, without analogous policies makes me wary of the authors' modeling.
> Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.
That wouldn't have been around 1939-45 or so, would it?
Afterward, everyone with a stake in the country's direction realizes that having a technocrat who shares your views and has personal access to the administration is a great way to influence policy. The money spigot opens, and pretty soon having the 'right' opinion is far better for your career than independence. Survivor bias eventually ensures that the technocracy is dominated by people with the 'right' opinion.
And that's when you'll know that your country has achieved parity with the United States.