Coercion Formula of Human Development

Description

Will Ruddick:

"From outright slavery to modern wage coercion, societies have repeatedly optimized for surplus extraction by binding people into work they cannot freely refuse. The formula behind this is simple:

The Coercion Formula: Elites maximize their gains when the profits they extract are larger than the costs of enforcing control.

Whenever the costs of maintaining guards, laws, or surveillance are lower than the wealth squeezed from people and ecosystems, coercion becomes “rational.” But this rationality comes at a devastating cost: degraded ecologies, broken communities, and generational trauma. What is efficient in the short term corrodes the long-term capacity of societies to regenerate.

Under coercion, surplus flows upward, while the costs (poverty, ecological loss, cultural erosion) spread outward.

Socially, this manifests as alienation, mistrust, and cycles of domination.

Ecologically, forests are cut, soils exhausted, waters poisoned, because ecosystems cannot resist when laborers themselves are captive.

Spiritually, humans lose relational memory: the sense that “I am because we are” (Ubuntu).

Coercion appears efficient, but it is brittle. Like overharvested land, it collapses under its own logic."

(https://willruddick.substack.com/p/coercion-vs-pooling-formulas)