It's not clear to me that the vestiges of colonial privilege are of any great advantage. (One indication is that Germany has no such economic heritage.)

Flippant counters aside, Germany has been benefiting from first the British and then the American imperial order, because they were inside it but big and strong enough (and had enough white people) that they were not reduced to a colony.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

But I don' see much recognition of the level of change that would be needed to compensate for all that going away.

or indeed the recognition of the effects of all the cheap immigrant labour taking these right wing goons seriously and all going home...

to my semi-educated view, it seems factual that many of the great concentrations of wealth in europe, be it in the royal houses, banking giants like rotschilds, uber-industrialists like the krupps etc were all aided enormously by the conquest and occupation of the third world, be it for resources, and then captive markets, (the english/indian cotton, for example).

the influx of gold from the iberian colonies in central.south america may have had disequilibrating, inflationary effects on european economies, but the wealth was arriving, and fortunes were made, then invested wisely on the hubbert upswing to create the fiction that 20% returns were the norm for cautious investors. if fiction perseveres long enough it becomes as near to fact as makes no difference.

it becomes an axiom, and only those with long term historical memories can see the pattern of past bubble/busts, and thus through the illusion.

capitalism did spread a lot of wealth downwards to a burgeoning, and increasingly well-educated middle class, forming a new elite of the cunning, rather than the blue-blooded. this is the base for randian celebrations of the driving force behind the growth of the last two centuries of industrial economies.

but now the elite has formed itself above the clouds of toil and care again, and once again is believing in its own myth of divine selection and rights. onceagain it is stealing not just from the poor, (the middle class is totally cool with that), but from the middle class itself. blind greed has taken over...

the poor have few tools to organise and affect macro events, but it's a different story with and educated, disaffected middle class who have put up with a lot of feeling inferior to their 'masters' anyway, and now feel betrayed by the unwritten pact between the two rich classes, that they would do the upper class 1% shitwork, (the kind that you do from a desk, an HQ, a parliament, civil service position), in return for being able to look down on the dalits who really do the shitwork of going down mines, working sweatshops, infantrypersons in wars with no honour and the like.

europe was a metaphorical middle class between the fabled riches of the american empire in flush, and the wretched hordes of foxconn asia, and now as the orient's wealth waxes, and america's wanes, we still want that gig, understandably.

the only possible hope for us to deserve, let alone retain that semi-privileged position would be to power up the alternative energy tech, (in which we are already world leaders, and ramp that sucker all the way up, a thousand or more times what it is now, while we still can).

it's a faint, but hitherto undying hope, indeed it is a very thin thread to find our way out of a very dark labyrinth. of course there will be much buggy whip collateral damage, but whichever course is taken that'll be the case, the faster we come to grips with this reality the brighter our future will be.

the alternative might be the horse and cart for us, in which case the buggy whip makers will thrive likely as well as bureaucrats and bankers...

The power of knowledge is in mortal combat with the knowledge of power. It really is that simple... That's the Edenic apple we are all munching on.