Abstract
After describing who the oligarchs are and how they expand and consolidate their power and influence, this chapter studies how the oligarchy in the West stifles innovation, undermines democratic processes, hinders responses to climate change, and contributes to militarization and conflict. This chapter identifies powerful oligarchies in the oil industry (Big Oil), in finance (The Bankers), in industrial agriculture (The Food Barons), tech industry (The Technofeudalists), and mainstream media (The Media Moguls). It discusses the role of oligarchs in the 2008 financial crisis, the increasingly fragile global food system, and the digital economy. This prepares the reader for a deeper analysis of the role of oligarchs in the oil industry (Big Oil) and in the military and defence industry (The Gun Merchants), which follows in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
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- 2.
A cotton gin is a tool that separates the seeds from cotton fibres. It is often states that this was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793/94 and subsequently revolutionized the cotton industry in the US—and contributed to the expansion of slavery in the South (McMichael, 1991; Oakes, 2016). Lakwete (2003) however argues that Whitney did not invent the cotton gin, but that it was invented centuries before in Asia and Africa.
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- 5.
Permissionless innovation “means that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later” (Thierer, 2016: 3).
- 6.
Baily (2003: 6) summarized and discussed the findings of an OECD research project into the sources of economic growth in the OECD, pointing out that “R&D activities by the business sector had high social returns, and hence contributed to growth, but there was no evidence in this analysis of positive effects from government R&D.” Similarly, Sveikauskas (2007: 1) reported that “the overall rate of return to R&D is very large, perhaps 25 percent as a private return and a total of 65 percent for social returns. However, these returns apply only to privately financed R&D in industry. Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero.”
- 7.
There is a growing literature dealing with the question whether government R&D crowds in, or crowds-out, private R&D—see, for example, Becker (2015) and Görg and Strobl (2007). The literature is largely inconclusive, and neglects the question whether, even where crowding-in may occur, as in the defense industry, whether this crowding-in is distortive.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Zombie firms are old firms with “persistent problems meeting their interest payments, on the edge of exiting but remaining in business” (McGowan et al., 2017: 3).
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Naudé, W. (2025). Oligarchs. In: The Economic Decline of the West. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82299-5_3
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