Compradorization: How AI Labs May Become Agents of Foreign Influence

# Compradorization
By Benquo
Published: 2026-03-16
Previously: [Is GDP a Kind of Factory?](https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/solow-convergence-land-capital/)

There is a word, "convergence," which economists use when they want to say that poor countries are becoming less poor relative to rich ones. There is a phrase, "the resource curse," for the tendency of countries with valuable natural resources to stay poor despite their resources. There is a phrase, "Dutch disease," for the way that selling one commodity too profitably can destroy the ability to sell other things.

When an economist says "Dutch disease," they are choosing not to say "Chinese industrial policy combined with structural adjustment conditionality." When they say "the resource curse," they are choosing not to say "extraction concessions negotiated under debt pressure, with domestic officials whose personal interests had already been oriented toward the extraction rather than toward their own population, in conditions created by international creditors who collectively benefited from those terms." When they say "convergence," they are choosing not to say "a temporary windfall from China's industrial buildout, recorded in a measure that cannot distinguish liquidation from accumulation, in countries whose productive capacity was simultaneously being eroded by the same process that temporarily raised their GDP."

These words name phenomena while drawing attention away from mechanisms, interests, and human agency. Each describes an outcome - a currency distortion, an institutional failure, a pattern of growth - without asking who benefits from the gap between what states are supposed to do and how societies are constituted to behave. The vocabulary is chosen so as not to ask that question.


# Dutch Disease

Consider "Dutch disease" first, since it is the most innocent-sounding. It sounds like it must be nobody's fault, a natural phenomenon like the pox.

The name comes from the Netherlands in the 1960s, when natural gas revenues strengthened the guilder and made Dutch manufacturing exports less competitive. In the Netherlands, this was experienced as a political inconvenience: a polity with functioning institutions and high internal trust - at least by the standards of the time - managed it as a collective problem, allocated adjustment support to affected workers, and conducted the policy debate in public. It was a tradeoff, managed by a cohesive political community with the institutional capacity to manage it.

When economists apply the same term to commodity-exporting countries in Africa and Latin America, they are using one word for two entirely different situations. The mechanism, a currency appreciation that disadvantages other exports, is superficially the same. The political substrate is not. The Netherlands had the internal trust to absorb the cost collectively. In Nigeria, those harmed by the mechanism were manufacturers and traders whose livelihoods were being destroyed whil

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