Astral Codex Ten

Shah

4 min read

Shah

Article

Shah is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 08, 2022 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “granting the Shah entry to the U.S”; “when the Shah used oil money to buy a helicopter factory from the United States”. It most often appears alongside 1980, Chicago, France.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 08, 2022
  • Last seen: May 19, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
The origins of the Iran hostage crisis go back all the way to 1951, when the CIA led a coup in Iran to prevent the democratically-elected government from nationalizing their oil industry. As is usually the case with people who seize power in coups, the new, US-backed leader, the Shah, is a bit of a despot. (He infamously has gourmet lunches flown in from France on the Concorde.) By 1979, The Iranian people have had enough, and the Shah himself is overthrown by a group of fundamentalist Islamic clerics, who still control Iran to this day. In conclusion, we totally nailed the situation and none of our decisions backfired in any way. Go America!
Shortly after his escape from Iran to exile in Egypt, the Shah is diagnosed with cancer, and since he’s been a consistent American ally, lots of influential people think we should let him come to the U.S. where he can benefit from our best-in-class treatment. Carter is against the idea at first (in fact, he directly predicts that granting the Shah entry to the U.S. could lead to Americans in Iran getting taken hostage), but eventually he’s worn down by his advisors and gives in. Less than two weeks after the Shah arrives, Carter’s prediction come true: the American embassy in Iran is overrun and 52 citizens are taken hostage. Ironically, even the Shah ends up worse off, as he ultimately dies not from his cancer but from a series of avoidable medical errors made by his American doctors.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
An oversized transplant force creates a transplant economy: a place that depends on industries that it did not generate itself. Getting a transplanted factory is always tempting for the governments of poor regions. But while the new jobs do alleviate poverty, transplants almost never lead to durable economic development (with rare exceptions, such as Taiwan). Jacobs has multiple examples, but the one I like most is Iran just before the revolution, when the Shah used oil money to buy a helicopter factory from the United States — thereby spurring a lot of development in the United States, where many companies got involved in building the factory, and almost none in Iran.
The third transaction of decline is heavy trade between advanced and backward cities, especially on credit. Selling a helicopter factory to the Shah of Iran is fine if the Shah pays for it with oil, but if Iran buys the factory on a loan and fails to pay it back (as poor regions often do, and as Iran did due to the revolution), then that’s also wealth that is drained away from cities. Nor does this kind of trade help backward economies develop. You can’t replace imports from an economy that’s much more advanced than you are: the gulf is too great.