Executive Director and Chief Economist @Sakeliga | Christus Victor
The Cape
Joined June 2011
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Why does the South African state systematically attack businesses?
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The state mounts incessant waves of destabilising general and race-targeted attacks on the productive economy. It does this to sustain its commitment to at least three core imperatives and paradigms.
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Russell Lamberti retweeted
@RussLamberti and Dr James Myburgh (@Politicsweb) discuss:
🔹 Where “Kill the Boer” comes from
🔹 The ANC’s revolutionary struggle
🔹 The data on farm attacks and home invasions
🔹 The collapse of policing and how farmers have responded
youtu.be/k3QrlGMyIwo
Russell Lamberti retweeted
Probably the most important video you can watch today.
I interviewed Dr. James Myburgh of the Bremmen Centre for Democratic Research and @Politicsweb about the history and politics of farm attacks, and what the data and evidence shows about the scale, severity, and origin of the problem.
No one better on this subject than James. ⬇️
I interviewed Dr. James Myburgh of the Bremmen Centre for Democratic Research and @Politicsweb about the history and politics of farm attacks, and what the data and evidence shows about the scale, severity, and origin of the problem.
No one better on this subject than James. ⬇️
The Truth About Farm Murders in South Africa | Dr James Myburgh
youtu.be/k3QrlGMyIwo?si=mAlg…
Piet le Roux and I discuss the rapid reconstitution of South Africa and how it must be shaped.
@pietleroux @Sakeliga
youtube.com/watch?v=WVhKIjT7…
Russell Lamberti retweeted
The South African government implements race-targeted domestic sanctions, by which it restricts the economic activity of white people (Afrikaners and English), and at times other minorities.
In response, the US government has announced policy-targeted international sanctions, by which it restricts access to the US for those that implement the race-targeted domestic sanctions.
This is constructive differentiation in foreign policy. And it is promising.
As @POTUS has made clear, the South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority. The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations.
Today, I’m announcing a new visa restriction policy targeting foreign nationals who enact or enable policies that promote race-based discrimination, incite violence, or enable land confiscation without compensation in South Africa. Those responsible for these injustices have no place in the United States. state.gov/releases/office-of…
Russell Lamberti retweeted
Business owners: how do you fight Employment Equity?
Russell Lamberti of Sakeliga unpacks the NEASA approach: maximum appropriate, realistic, and ethical non-compliance — protecting your business, your people, and your right to appoint the best person for the job.
Russell Lamberti retweeted
Die ou Natal provinsie het sy naam gekry van die Portugese seevaarder Vasco de Gama, wat op Kersdag in 1497 aan die kus van die hedendaagse Durban geland het.
Hy het dit Terra Natal genoem, wat Kersfeesland beteken.
Jan van Riebeeck het in sy dagboek na die gebied oos van Tafelbaai as "Terri di Natal" verwys.
Tarentale, wat nie in Europa voorkom nie en dus onbekend was, het bekend gestaan as "Terra-Natal vogels" of "Ternataalse hoenders", wat later verander het in Tarentaal.
It is sad to hear of RW Johnson's passing.
His analysis was often of tremendous value and his perspectives were distinctive, forthright, realist, highly perceptive, and at times genuinely novel. He provided a cogent vocabulary for describing the country's decline, and applied it with merciless intellectual force in his 2015 reboot of "How Long Will South Africa Survive?".
The audacity of the question alone says a lot about the man.
We forget how hard it was to criticise the state and its totalising and race-obsessed mismanagement just 10-15 years ago. Firstly, because of the electric fences placed around liberal and conservative critics in the first 20 years after 1994, but secondly because when decline became undeniable in the hangover after 2010 aspirational highs, it wasn't easy for many to perceive in the moment just how bad things actually were. Was this a bug problem or a feature problem?
RW Johnson was colossal in tearing down those electric fences and creating a schema for understanding the problem's true scale and a useful lexicon that gave the ideas popular purchase among dissidents.
It's not a stretch to say that Johnson's reemergence to prominence at that bewildering time inspired, emboldened, and gave a better framework to a host of writers, thinkers, podcasters, and analysts over the intervening years. He was an intellectual father to many and leaves enormously big boots to fill.
You didn't have to agree with it all to derive immense value from Bill's work, even if it was helping you clarify precisely how and why you disagreed with him. He was a worthy representative of a rigorous liberal realism - it was a relief to read someone who got to his target without the tedious rhetorical hedging of many modern thinkers and writers.
His contribution to contemporary South African history will be missed, though, of course, it all remains to be read and re-read for the gems it contains. I suspect with the passage of time much of his insight will prove uncomfortably prescient, but also constructively so.
RW Johnson was a national treasure.
R.I.P.
Piet le Roux and I lay out Sakeliga’s proposed AGOA reform plan submitted to the US Trade Representative in May.
financialmail.businessday.co…
Healthcare nationalisation efforts have another bad day. Great result for @solidariteit.
So far ⬇️
🔵 State currently barred from implementing NHI.
🔵 State at risk of having to redo slow, costly legislative procedures.
🔵 State's plan to tell doctors where they can practice - a pillar of NHI - declared unconstitutional.
🔵 Major substantive cases lined up against NHI (incl Sakeliga and Solidarity) if the state gets past current hurdles.
Plus...
Sakeliga is preparing opposition to:
- the state's plans to racialise healthcare supply chains and licensing.
- healthcare price controls.
- healthcare overregulation.
Healthcare nationalisation must be crushed.
Russell Lamberti retweeted
Important essay to understand impact of AI on labor market.
While the author focuses on artisanal services, another category will be even more important: high-trust communities, networks, and institutions.
Building these may be the biggest opportunity of the coming age.
New essay on the economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work.
1. Almost any question about the impact of advanced AI on the economy needs to start at the same place: what is still scarce? Answer that, and the analysis becomes pretty straightforward. This essay explores what becomes scarce if AI really can replicate most of what humans do in production, and what this mean for the future of jobs.
2. My conjecture, working through the economics: labor reallocates across sectors, and the sector it reallocates to has properties that keep labor a meaningful share of the economy. Ultimately this is about the structure of demand itself. For this, we have to go back to Girard, Augustine and Rousseau: once people's base needs are met, their preferences shift to comparative motives (e.g., status, exclusivity, social desirability). This motive is inherently non-satiated.
4. The key paper is Comin, Lashkari, and Mestieri (Econometrica 2021). As people get richer, they don't buy proportionally more of everything. They shift spending toward sectors with higher income elasticity. They estimate income effects account for 75%+ of observed structural change.
5. The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs.
6. So the question is: which sectors have high income elasticity in a post-AGI world? I argue it's what I call the relational sector. Categories where the human isn't just an input into production, it is part of the value.
7. Why does the relational sector have high income elasticity? Because human desire has a mimetic, relational dimension. We don't just want things for their intrinsic properties. We want what others want, and we want it more when others can't have it. Girard, Rousseau, Augustine, and Hobbes all saw this.
8. In work with Kristóf Madarász, we showed this experimentally: WTP roughly doubles when a random subset of others is excluded from the good. And in new work with Graelin Mandel, AI involvement kills the premium. Human-made art gains 44% from exclusivity; AI-made art only 21%.
9. This all comes together for the core argument. The sector that absorbs spending as AI makes commodity production cheap is one where human provenance is part of the value, and demand for it grows faster than income. Exactly the profile that keeps labor meaningful.
10. To be clear about the claim: I'm NOT saying aggregate labor share must rise. It may fall. The claim is about sectoral composition, i.e., where expenditure and employment go once commodities get cheap, and the fact that the sector that will absorb reallocated labor maps to a substantial component of human preferences and desire.
11. If you're interested in the formal model, a linked companion technical note works out all the economics.
Read the essay here: aleximas.substack.com/p/what…
Business owners: If you've been raided and harassed by the Labour department as recently happened at Normandien Farms, add your voice here. ⬇️
EMPLOYERS,
Following an unlawful inspection at Normandien Farms involving inspectors of the @deptoflabour, members of the Portfolio Committee on Employment and Labour, Department of @HomeAffairsSA, @_cosatu and armed members of the @SAPoliceService, NEASA urges you to complete a survey to determine how often this occurs.
Follow this link to learn more and share your experience:
tinyurl.com/yre9pxbt
3. Value-flow (not value-creation) paradigm
In this paradigm, value is not created and exchanged for mutual benefit and problem solving (growth). Rather, it is a fixed quantity changing hands (flowing) between those who ‘control’ or ‘access’ it (not create it).
‘Doing business’ means some form of favoured access to ‘intercept’ or capture ‘access’ to these value 'flows' by contract, confiscation, regulatory control, or crime.
Aside from a failure in ethics, this view also results from economic ignorance and business naivety, reinforced by the self-fulfilling conditions of persistent stagnation in South Africa created by imperatives 1 and 2 (political resource allocation).
Conversely, the thinking that there is 'only so much economy to go around' (fixed pie) compels even more central economic gate-keeping (1) and rationing according to a racial hierarchy (2), resulting in a destructive feedback loop.
These three imperatives and paradigms are deeply ingrained at the level of state power and vital political interest.
They energise and fuel constant and escalating attacks by the state against productive, independent, and distributed communities and spheres of society.
In South Africa, these attacks are carried out in a web of regulatory, legislative, and executive manoeuvres and purportedly legitimate process.
This makes it difficult for many, both locally and abroad, to properly diagnose that this indeed constitutes both systematic general as well as race-targeted economic attacks designed to lay claim to value by striking at the vital economic and social interests of business owners, employees, and the families and communities they sustain and serve.
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Sakeliga's mission is to meet, neutralise, and reverse these attacks at scale.