Pedro Lérias 😷 https://t.me/COVIDzeroPortugal

It’s downstream from culture. Contemporary Western culture. China 🇨🇳 is not devastating the West. The West is devastating itself. Western business schools have spent decades teaching generations of executives that the purpose of a company is to maximise short-term shareholder value and wealth extraction, largely because that also maximises their own compensation. It is the triumph of tactical spreadsheetism over strategy. The more that MBA mindset fills executive suites, the more predictable the outcome becomes. Long-term capital investment, in-house manufacturing, engineering capability, apprenticeships, resilience, even a modest degree of strategic redundancy – all are treated as costs to be cut rather than assets to be cultivated. If an investment won’t improve next quarter’s numbers, it struggles to survive the boardroom. Complex industrial systems carry decades of accumulated capital: factories, skills, supplier networks, institutional knowledge, and productive capacity. They also carry a great deal of inertia. For a while, consuming that accumulated capital looks like genius. Margins improve, return on invested capital rises, analysts applaud, executives collect bonuses. Then the inertia runs out. The fat is gone, yet the incentives remain. The acroparasites, having exhausted the surplus built by previous generations, move on to muscle and bone. They continue doing the only thing they have ever been taught: extracting rather than building. Meanwhile China spent those same decades methodically investing in factories, supply chains, technical know-how, engineering capability, and industrial scale. And our elites call them the devastators. What we’re seeing in Germany – and, in truth, across much of the West – is not simply a failure of industrial policy. It is the logical outcome of a managerial culture that long ago confused financial engineering with economic production. Just one more observable suggesting that something is deeply rotten in the West.