While a lot of that is true, there is also a recent sharp uptick in better visibility on the problem. A bit like improving disease detection makes the rates shoot up.
In particular the Madlanga commission mentioned in the article has been uncovering eyewatering levels of incompetence and corruption in law enforcement so there is suddenly a lot of talk around that
That's not to dispute that the situation is bad and the trajectory is negative...but think the economist could have highlighted that context a bit better.
I also don't think it's a mafia state like, say, Russia is. It's just devolved into being a typical African country. Many years ago a South African friend of mine said "South Africa will end up like Zimbabwe, only it'll take a lot longer because it's got a lot further to fall". I haven't seen any sign of that not being the case.
It's also probably the first country ever to regress from first world back to more-or-less third world. Just look at things like SAA and Eskom for examples of what two decades of corruption and nepotism and theft can do to a formerly outstanding enterprise, and then spread that out across everything else.
I grew up in South Africa, and there was this classic newspaper cartoon back in the day: a kid goes to his dad and says "Dad, I want to become a criminal!" and the dad asks, "Government or private sector?"
And then you realize that, ironically, LLMs and archive.today, both actual bots, can scrape the site just fine. The latter also serving you the content with no paywalls, ads, JavaScript, permalinks that 404 after a year, and all the other anti-features. It's almost as if news websites looked at the pains one has to go through to legally play a video game in 2026 and all unanimously went "I want this!".
And then a few years later when the site shuts down because nobody was willing to pay for the content that it would still be around if you and others had just ponied up the cost of one morning latte each month.
The linked site shows me two subscription options, $289/year or $29 every 4 weeks. Expensive latte.
The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.
That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.
United States of America are at risk of becoming mafia state. Very obvious and very significant, with fewer and fewer possibilities of reversal remaining each day.
Americans and Western Europeans have no idea what it means to come from a country where the government can’t maintain a monopoly on violence, and when you say stuff like this it comes across as complaining about “first world problems.”
What’s happening in South Africa is a phenomenon that happens around the third world. And it’s an enormous tax on half of the human population, even in relatively affluent countries like Mexico. Even in many of the countries that don’t suffer from internal destabilization by non-state actors, the solution has been dictators like Saddam Hussain in Iraq or El-Sisi in Egypt. It’s a subject that warrants thoughtful analysis and problem solving by people in the first world. We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help.
The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.
> The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich.
This is incorrect, bordering on flat-earthism. It's also impossible if you think about it for more than two seconds. If the "third world" had possessed "obscene amounts of wealth" to begin with, the first world never would have been able to "extract" it.
Even a cursory search will find you literature from respected economists on this subject. There may be debate on how much wealth transfer or the actual impact of it, but there's wide consensus on the fact that there was. Comparing these ideas with flat-earthism is quite extremist, I'm curious if you've reached this conclusion on your own or have been led to it by some sources?
As someone who was born in Russia and lived there in 1990s, I have quite a good idea of this arrangement. This was not mafia state yet. The mafia state is the modern Russia, where former organized crime groups became fully integrated into the government. Technically, the state retains the monopoly on violence. Practically, violence comes from influence of competing groups within the state. And yes, US is moving towards the same regime type. This is clearly visible to me, from my Russian experience, but I don't understand how to convey this to Americans.
What you’re describing is feudalism, which Russia has never been able to shake. Russia remained stubbornly feudalist while other European countries were developing modern states, and it remains that way. But feudalism, where the government relies on feudal lords to maintain power is distinct from what we’re talking about with organized crime. The argument that the U.S. is heading towards a feudalist state is still wrong, but a much more plausible argument than your original comparison to south africa.
I think Russia is more of a dictatorship than a feudal state.
What you describe as feudalism- a czar/emperor/king/absolute ruler at the top with some people under him to carry on orders - applies to any dictatorship.
Feudalism includes (among other things) complete lack of population movement: serfs were not allowed to leave their villages. In Russia today people can (still) leave the country.
the US is absolutely moving towards feudalism, and the ones pushing it are big on techno-feudalism a la Yarvin and his adherents -- Peter Thiel and Musk, etc.
Yes, most liberal or libertarian white people can’t look at a place like say Egypt and understand why a dictator like El-Sisi is genuinely popular. They don’t have the mental structures to even understand what they’re seeing in a society that’s so different from their own.
the Yakuza isn't running local or national governments
in Italy, there are deep ties to governments, esp. in the south, and they've had their fingers all the way into national leadership before; see also: bunga bunga
> We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help
We have studied this problem ad nauseum. The West knew the answer until about a century ago.
Europe became orderly through shame culture, executing criminals and destruction of clan culture.
El Salvador is a modern example.
The remedy is violent, unkind, and not communist so we get indefinite unbounded suffering instead.
El salvador has a dictator whose dragnet policy has locked up plenty of innocent people in a torture chamber without trial, or seemingly any chance of release. There's also plenty of evidence about there being effectively an alliance with the gangs/cartels that got their leaders to stop activities (and probably get freedom as well)
> El salvador has a dictator whose dragnet policy has locked up plenty of innocent people in a torture chamber without trial, or seemingly any chance of release
That also describes European monarchs during the period when modern states were forming. So maybe crushing competitors to the state’s monopoly on violence is just a necessary milestone on the path to liberal democracy?
We have a vigilant free press reporting on scandals and a court system which holds the govt fully accountable.
I see far more corruption evident in the US right now with Trump and his family and their crypto investments and dodgy govt deals - perhaps the Economist should do an article.
This is quite an inflammatory comment that warrants more justification. Many countries have struggled with organized crime infiltration of government and have no connection to colonialism, and many colonies also had organized crime. You are implying at one that colonialism prevented this organized crime problem and would eliminate it and the harms of colonialism are lower than organized crime. Those might be defensible positions but you neither articulate them nor defend them.
While a lot of that is true, there is also a recent sharp uptick in better visibility on the problem. A bit like improving disease detection makes the rates shoot up.
In particular the Madlanga commission mentioned in the article has been uncovering eyewatering levels of incompetence and corruption in law enforcement so there is suddenly a lot of talk around that
That's not to dispute that the situation is bad and the trajectory is negative...but think the economist could have highlighted that context a bit better.
I also don't think it's a mafia state like, say, Russia is. It's just devolved into being a typical African country. Many years ago a South African friend of mine said "South Africa will end up like Zimbabwe, only it'll take a lot longer because it's got a lot further to fall". I haven't seen any sign of that not being the case.
It's also probably the first country ever to regress from first world back to more-or-less third world. Just look at things like SAA and Eskom for examples of what two decades of corruption and nepotism and theft can do to a formerly outstanding enterprise, and then spread that out across everything else.
https://archive.ph/1U5wB
The government itself is the biggest criminal enterprise. I guess they are worried about being eclipsed.
I grew up in South Africa, and there was this classic newspaper cartoon back in the day: a kid goes to his dad and says "Dad, I want to become a criminal!" and the dad asks, "Government or private sector?"
> The government itself is the biggest criminal enterprise
This is true for all of the western world, eastern Europe and maybe true for some other countries.
> We detected unusual activity from your device or network.
> Reasons may include:
> Rapid taps or clicks
> JavaScript disabled or not working
> Automated (bot) activity on your network (IP X.X.X.X)
> Use of developer or inspection tools
I mean, I guess. I'm using Firefox, I have an adblocker, and I have tampermonkey installed? And turning off Javascript isn't a bad idea, either.
And then you realize that, ironically, LLMs and archive.today, both actual bots, can scrape the site just fine. The latter also serving you the content with no paywalls, ads, JavaScript, permalinks that 404 after a year, and all the other anti-features. It's almost as if news websites looked at the pains one has to go through to legally play a video game in 2026 and all unanimously went "I want this!".
And then a few years later when the site shuts down because nobody was willing to pay for the content that it would still be around if you and others had just ponied up the cost of one morning latte each month.
The linked site shows me two subscription options, $289/year or $29 every 4 weeks. Expensive latte.
The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.
That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.
The economist can shut down and it will be a vast improvement to the world. Far left rag.
Far left? Most economists consider it center-right, and it has been like that for more than 100 years.
Well, sorry! Make the payment process and the website at least half as frictionless and private, and I'll be happy to pay!
I mean, I don't even have the option to pay - I can't access the site at all.
And there is nothing anyone can say to talk me out of adblockers - ad networks are a delivery system for malware and fraud.
You got further than I did:
>Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker
I got that, then updated 'Bypass Paywalls Clean'. Now if I click the HN link I get that but if I reload I get the article.
Also https://archive.ph/I82C0 works
United States of America are at risk of becoming mafia state. Very obvious and very significant, with fewer and fewer possibilities of reversal remaining each day.
Americans and Western Europeans have no idea what it means to come from a country where the government can’t maintain a monopoly on violence, and when you say stuff like this it comes across as complaining about “first world problems.”
What’s happening in South Africa is a phenomenon that happens around the third world. And it’s an enormous tax on half of the human population, even in relatively affluent countries like Mexico. Even in many of the countries that don’t suffer from internal destabilization by non-state actors, the solution has been dictators like Saddam Hussain in Iraq or El-Sisi in Egypt. It’s a subject that warrants thoughtful analysis and problem solving by people in the first world. We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help.
The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.
> The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich.
This is incorrect, bordering on flat-earthism. It's also impossible if you think about it for more than two seconds. If the "third world" had possessed "obscene amounts of wealth" to begin with, the first world never would have been able to "extract" it.
Even a cursory search will find you literature from respected economists on this subject. There may be debate on how much wealth transfer or the actual impact of it, but there's wide consensus on the fact that there was. Comparing these ideas with flat-earthism is quite extremist, I'm curious if you've reached this conclusion on your own or have been led to it by some sources?
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-colonialism
[2] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/r...
[3] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-drain-of-wealth/
[4] https://wid.world/document/unequal-exchange-and-north-south-...
[5] https://ideas.repec.org/p/gnv/wpaper/unige144406.html
As someone who was born in Russia and lived there in 1990s, I have quite a good idea of this arrangement. This was not mafia state yet. The mafia state is the modern Russia, where former organized crime groups became fully integrated into the government. Technically, the state retains the monopoly on violence. Practically, violence comes from influence of competing groups within the state. And yes, US is moving towards the same regime type. This is clearly visible to me, from my Russian experience, but I don't understand how to convey this to Americans.
What you’re describing is feudalism, which Russia has never been able to shake. Russia remained stubbornly feudalist while other European countries were developing modern states, and it remains that way. But feudalism, where the government relies on feudal lords to maintain power is distinct from what we’re talking about with organized crime. The argument that the U.S. is heading towards a feudalist state is still wrong, but a much more plausible argument than your original comparison to south africa.
I think Russia is more of a dictatorship than a feudal state.
What you describe as feudalism- a czar/emperor/king/absolute ruler at the top with some people under him to carry on orders - applies to any dictatorship.
Feudalism includes (among other things) complete lack of population movement: serfs were not allowed to leave their villages. In Russia today people can (still) leave the country.
the US is absolutely moving towards feudalism, and the ones pushing it are big on techno-feudalism a la Yarvin and his adherents -- Peter Thiel and Musk, etc.
This is not feudalism. Feudalism requires people to exploit and land domains to control. "Tech feudalism" requires neither.
Oh please, have you never heard of the "Semibankirshchina"?
Isn't that where Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz comes from? Semibankirshchina powiat Łękołody?
> Practically, violence comes from influence of competing groups within the state. And yes, US is moving towards the same regime type
The ideological and demographic makeup of certain internet communities makes them incapable of understanding what you mean by this.
Yes, most liberal or libertarian white people can’t look at a place like say Egypt and understand why a dictator like El-Sisi is genuinely popular. They don’t have the mental structures to even understand what they’re seeing in a society that’s so different from their own.
He said "mafia state". Italy was/is a non controversial example of that. Firmly in Western Europe.
Was that ever true of Italy as a whole? Or was it like the Yakuza, which exists but doesn’t affect your average person, at least in recent memory.
the Yakuza isn't running local or national governments
in Italy, there are deep ties to governments, esp. in the south, and they've had their fingers all the way into national leadership before; see also: bunga bunga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due
[dead]
> Americans and Western Europeans have no idea what it means to come from a country where the government can’t maintain a monopoly on violence
I’ve seen enough white Christian men shoot up schools and mosques in my lifetime to roll my eyes at this statement.
Americans are still getting lynched.
[dead]
> We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help
We have studied this problem ad nauseum. The West knew the answer until about a century ago. Europe became orderly through shame culture, executing criminals and destruction of clan culture.
El Salvador is a modern example.
The remedy is violent, unkind, and not communist so we get indefinite unbounded suffering instead.
El salvador has a dictator whose dragnet policy has locked up plenty of innocent people in a torture chamber without trial, or seemingly any chance of release. There's also plenty of evidence about there being effectively an alliance with the gangs/cartels that got their leaders to stop activities (and probably get freedom as well)
> El salvador has a dictator whose dragnet policy has locked up plenty of innocent people in a torture chamber without trial, or seemingly any chance of release
That also describes European monarchs during the period when modern states were forming. So maybe crushing competitors to the state’s monopoly on violence is just a necessary milestone on the path to liberal democracy?
> trust me bro
[dead]
Did you reply to the wrong post?
We have a vigilant free press reporting on scandals and a court system which holds the govt fully accountable.
I see far more corruption evident in the US right now with Trump and his family and their crypto investments and dodgy govt deals - perhaps the Economist should do an article.
People being pardoned by paying for it.
So like US or Ukraine ?
[dead]
[flagged]
This is quite an inflammatory comment that warrants more justification. Many countries have struggled with organized crime infiltration of government and have no connection to colonialism, and many colonies also had organized crime. You are implying at one that colonialism prevented this organized crime problem and would eliminate it and the harms of colonialism are lower than organized crime. Those might be defensible positions but you neither articulate them nor defend them.
[flagged]
For the 2024 tax year SARS expects about 9.2 million individual returns in total.
https://www.sars.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2025taxstats/2025...
"Burning spaceship falling into sun has clogged toilet"
I'm not sure that particularly matters at this point?