Extractive economy and extractive politics
In an article about the effects of the large fall in recent years of the price of mineral oil has had on Venezuelan politics I found:
Even the naturalness in which things that everyone says like “we have to get out of rentierism” get incorporated into political discourse. It’s a sort of obligatory cliché, but it doesn’t have any repercussions. Nothing comes out of it, no concrete proposals. For example: in both the opposition and Chavismo’s electoral program for the 2012 and 2013 elections (due to the death of Chávez), there was nothing, nothing at all in common, except for one thing: They both pledged to bring oil production from 3 million barrels per day to 6 million by 2019 according to this logic that we are a rich country and the state is going to have a lot of money. The truth is this is not called into question.
A cynical note here is that when someone who participates in the benefits of an extractive economy says "we have to get out of rentierism" what they usually mean is "you have to get out of rentierism".
An extractive activity is based on income that does not depend entirely on human effort to achieve. The extreme example is a gatherer "garden of Eden" economy, in which people can feed themselves for the minimal effort of walking up to a wild tree and eating its fruits: the tree and the fruits just grow and ripen "spontaneously", without any human effort, year after year. The apparent productivity of an extractive activity is very high because a large part of the work is done by the efforts of "nature" instead of those of humans; for example when extracting honey from apiaries, the work of producing the honey has been done by the bees.
Thus it is no surprise that there is a strong political incentive to run an extractive economy. Also the incentive is stronger when the asset being extracted is a common asset: because any slower extraction rate increases the share left for others, like future generations.
This leads to a wider point: that extractive economies lead naturally, even if not inevitably, to extractive economic systems like feudalism in one form or another, because:
An extractive economy enables extractive politics, because running an extractive economy requires little more than the powert to force someone to work in it; whether it is the slaves of the Laurum silver mines of classical Athens, or the serfs on farms in medieval Europe.
An extractive economy encourages extractive politics, because it provides a prize that is usually large enough and simple enough to acquire through force.
Conversely, industrial economies are far more fragile than extractive ones, because their productivity depends very much on more complex production processes that rely critically on human skill to function well, and thus do not support extractive politics quite as well.
