The Chinese Spengler

And I thought I was alarmist. "Metaphysical evil" being what it is, moralistic religion-verging rhetoric from street-corner preachers is part of the scenery. Now that Jiang has erupted into social media, he has been swept up into the madness. I'm not sure myself whether he's a Chinese asset or on the lam from the CCP. I do feel like I'm being replaced. I only wish he'd get into prescriptions like how to reconstitute civilization by investing part of the social surplus in things like clean energy. Like China is doing, or putting on a damn good show.

I'm curtailing the urge to cuss out the voting public to retreat to my intellectual pulpit using the high sun of scorn and derision. It's how I stay sane.

Summary: Per Professor Jiang, the problem isn’t whether a state “guides” the economy. Every state guides something. The issue is what it guides, who it empowers, and how fast the whole contraption melts down when the wrong people get their hands on the controls.

Operational Notes: According to Jiang, regimes love to slap a “civilization” label on whatever they’re doing. It’s a handy way to turn a policy dispute into a holy war. Once they do that, they’re locked in. No reverse gear. No brakes. Just a lot of patriotic shouting and a long drop.

When it comes to state planning (dirigisme), Jiang doesn’t waste time with French terminology. He calls it what it is: bureaucrats improvising with other people’s futures. Sometimes it works. Usually it doesn’t. The failure mode is always the same: the planners start believing their own press releases.

Elite incentives: I should replace "incentives" with "critiques". Jiang’s prime directive: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the catastrophe.” If the elite can profit from decay, decay is what you get. If the elite can profit from growth, you might get a miracle. But don’t count on miracles. They’re not in the budget.

Strategic overreach: When a state starts calling itself a “civilization,” Jiang says it’s already in the red zone. That’s the moment the leadership decides they’re too important to fail — and therefore too important to think. Expect bold proclamations, bad logistics, and a lot of maps with arrows pointing in the wrong direction.

Jiang’s verdict:  Every major power practices dirigisme. Most of them just lie about it. The competent ones build things. The incompetent ones build excuses. The terminal ones build mythologies.

Actionable Conclusion: If you want to know whether a country’s “state guidance” is working, don’t read the doctrine. Don’t listen to the speeches. Just walk into a factory and see if anything is being made besides slogans.

If the only thing coming off the assembly line is ideology, the place is already on fire — they just haven’t noticed the smoke.

His framework is structural, not doctrinal. Jiang’s analyses focus on:

- elite incentive structures  

- geopolitical chokepoints  

- systemic decay  

- the self‑preserving logic of entrenched power blocs  

This is a diagnostic mode, not a policy‑model mode. He doesn’t categorize systems using classical economic labels (dirigisme, neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, etc.). His interest is in how power behaves, not in typologizing economic regimes.

He analyzes China’s state‑market dynamics, but not through the dirigiste lens. He frequently discusses:

- China’s bureaucratic incentives  

- the CCP’s managerial class  

- the contradictions of China’s hybrid market‑state system  

But he frames these as elite‑incentive problems, not as a coherent “state‑led development model.”  He avoids the normative language of “state guidance” and instead focuses on institutional decay and incentive traps. Like Veblen, he drifts into anthropology. It can get rather dark in anthropology. American High Society won't wear bones in their noses and shake juju rattles. The West has its own toolkit.

Jiang will speak in allegories the way Veblen and Galbraith did. The objects of his analyses got guns. His geopolitical analyses treat state economic control as a *symptom*, not a model. When he talks about:

- Iran  

- the U.S. military‑industrial complex  

- global financial elites  

- energy chokepoints  

he treats state intervention as a strategic behavior within a crisis system, not as a formal economic doctrine. Dirigisme is a model. Jiang is interested in mechanisms. Nuthin' personal; strictly academic.

It's businessmen and Zionists who deserve the Stephen King treatment. Jiang just writes the report like an efficiency expert inspecting Bedlam.

This is where Galbraith gets wonderfully sly.

He never uses the French word dirigisme, but he absolutely describes the United States as practicing a de facto, often incompetent, and usually unacknowledged form of it. In Galbraith’s vocabulary, the U.S. doesn’t have “state-led development”; it has state-enabled private predation masquerading as markets.

Let me lay out the pattern in a way that fits his my own worldview. After whupping the Indians, the Federal government reared back and let private enterprise pass a miracle.

Galbraith’s core claim: the U.S. already has dirigisme — just the wrong kind. He repeatedly argued that:

- the U.S. government creates the conditions for entire industries  

- the state absorbs risk, funds R&D, builds infrastructure, and guarantees markets  

- private actors then extract rents from this publicly created foundation  

In other words: The U.S. has a massive state-guided economy, but the guidance serves financiers, not producers. This is inverted dirigisme — the state leads, but toward decay.

His favorite example: the postwar industrial base. Galbraith often pointed out that:

- the interstate highway system  

- the aerospace sector  

- the nuclear program  

- the agricultural revolution  

- the semiconductor industry  

were all state-built megaprojects.

But instead of calling this “industrial policy,” he framed it as engineering necessity. The U.S. didn’t choose dirigisme; it stumbled into it because the scale of the projects demanded it.

Where it went wrong: financialization captured the dirigiste apparatus. Galbraith's critique is sharp:

- The state still spends enormous sums.  

- But the spending no longer builds productive capacity.  

- It props up asset prices, subsidizes inefficiency, and rewards speculation.

This is why his son calls modern finance “the parasitic superstructure” and insists the industrial base must be rebuilt before the financial system can be realigned.

In his terms: The U.S. practices dirigisme without the discipline of engineering.

My Lexus example is the clearest counterexample. I’ve cited this before: the idea that currency is validated by clever, productive use, and Japan proved this with the Lexus.

That argument only makes sense if you believe:

- the state can and should guide industrial outcomes  

- national competence is a public project  

- productive excellence is a sovereign function  

That’s dirigisme in all but name.

Why they avoid the word “dirigisme”. They're more like engineers diagnosing a broken operating system.

John Kenneth Galbraith and James K. Galbraith both work squarely in the American institutionalist tradition (Veblenism), with strong lines running through Keynesian macroeconomics, the German historical school, and the post‑Keynesian critique of neoclassical orthodoxy. Their analyses reject abstract equilibrium models and instead focus on power, institutions, corporations, and the political economy of the modern state.

The deepest root is the American institutionalist tradition, which:

studies the economy as an evolving institutional system

emphasizes power, organization, and historical development

rejects the idea of the firm as a rational, profit‑maximizing “black box”

draws heavily from the German historical school rather than Walras or Marshall

This is explicitly noted in the analysis of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘐𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦: Galbraith’s theory of the corporation “is in the American institutionalist tradition… under the influence of German historical‑school methodology.” 

This is the tradition of:

Thorstein Veblen

John R. Commons

Adolf Berle & Gardiner Means

Clarence Ayres

Galbraith modernized it for the age of the technostructure (deceased)

James K. Galbraith, the son, is even more explicitly post‑Keynesian, working alongside:

Hyman Minsky

Wynne Godley

the Levy Institute tradition

He extends his father’s institutionalism into modern macro‑financial analysis.

To him:

- Dirigisme is a French intellectual label.  

- Industrial policy is a Beltway buzzword.  

- Functional finance is a macroeconomic tool.  

But the reconstruction of the industrial base — is a civilizational engineering project. He’s not interested in doctrines; he’s interested in what works.

He has hinted that the U.S. used dirigisme, but he framed it as:

- unintentional 

- misdirected  

- captured by elites

- divorced from engineering reality  

In his worldview, the tragedy is not that the U.S. lacks dirigisme. It’s that it has the worst possible version of it.

Galbraith père et fils belong to the American institutionalist + Keynesian/post‑Keynesian lineage:

corporations as planning institutions

technostructure as a quasi‑public coordinating body

state guidance as a tool for public purpose

macroeconomic stabilization as a civic responsibility

Jiang belongs to a completely different lineage:

systems theory

geopolitical realism

elite‑incentive analysis

civilizational diagnostics

narrative power and myth‑making as structural forces

Galbraith is a reformer.

Jiang is a diagnostician.

Galbraith wants to fix the machine. Jiang wants to explain why the machine cannot be fixed under current incentive structures.

Galbraith runs the numbers and writes a memo on how to fix the system. Jiang walks in, reads the memo, and says the system won’t let you fix it because the people in charge profit from the malfunction. Like Spengler, Jiang writes autopsies. This is why he thinks "civilization" is an empty rhetorical device; he is limited to examining the civic husk. Elites become trapped in self‑preserving incentive loops.

Jiang’s entire framework rests on the idea that:

elites form around incentive structures

those structures decay

the elites become self‑preserving and parasitic

collapse clears them out

new elites emerge from the periphery

This is elite circulation, but not in the classical sense.

For Jiang, it’s not a “law of history.” It’s a mechanical consequence of incentive failure.

He’s closer to:

Turchin (elite overproduction → instability)

Olson (entrenched interests → sclerosis)

Khaldun (group solidarity → decay → replacement)

Khaldun says the ruling class goes soft and gets replaced by a tougher outfit. Jiang says the ruling class rigs the system, lies to itself, and drives the whole operation into the ground — and the replacement crew shows up only because the wreckage finally clears the runway.

Psst. I know a Mad Arab who wants to sell you some ʿ𝘢𝘴𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘺𝘺𝘢𝘩.