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Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. It's a shame that this also means that they can do evil things very efficiently, given no one can

Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. It's a shame that this also means that they can do evil things very efficiently, given no one can stop them.

kstenerud 6y ago
Autocracies are only short-term efficient. Once their initial aims are met, they become terribly inefficient, then corruption sets in, and then they must be forcibly removed. It's good for other nations who can benefit from their trailblazing, but bad for the nation itself because they're basically fucked in the future when the bill comes due. Centralization is long-term the worst kind of governance, inevitably becoming as self-serving as kingdoms and monopolies. The bigger it is, the worse it gets and the sooner it gets there.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  I absolutely agree! I am just really struggling to put a time estimate on when the bill will come due for china. I think they can be in an upward trend for some more years as a technological follower. What I mean by that is that they use simple metrics of current technology (Ghz, GB, battery life, screen colors, electric car range and so in) and just “mandate” to get better in them. But all these things will eventually commoditise and if china wants to grow beyond that they have to come up with qualitative innovation. At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china. I think that is the point where their system (of this extreme obedient school system etc.) might start to struggle. I think the upper bound for that point would be a per capita gdp like south korea has (but probably much lower). After that point (which might be in lets say 10-20 years) there can still be a veeery long downward slope (the soviet union lasted for 69 years). I would be very interested in what other people think about this (and these timelines)
  - tomp 6y ago
    > At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china This argument never sounded very true and intellectually honest to me. I mean, I want to believe in it, but when I scrutinize it precisely, I wonder - how can you measure the ability to innovate of someone who doesn't want (or need) to innovate? At present time, China's competitive advantage is cheap specialized labour, and they're taking full advantage of that - as they should. That's the whole point of being behind in technology and racing to catc up! It might very well be that when they switch their focus, from copying to innovating, they'd be very good at that as well (or very bad! we literally have very little data to tell)
    - AYBABTME 6y ago
      If you look at Japan and Korea who took the same approach of "cheap specialized labour", they both pivoted to high quality, and more innovative once they caught up. I have no doubt China will do the same, but at much larger scale. There's already a lot of innovative consumer products coming online, which I'd attribute to the vibe of rapid and efficient hardware products iteration in Shenzen.
      - kstenerud 6y ago
        Japan and Korea are collective societies, not autocratic ones. China's goal under Xi is a return to the golden age of the Kingdom of Heaven, where all Chinese people exemplify the ideals and morals of the most civilized society on Earth. That goal is only tangentially related to the technical innovations they're making, and will eventually stifle them as the definition of "good citizen" and "proper pursuits" becomes more hardened and inward-looking (much like it did during the Middle Kingdom).
        AYBABTME 6y ago
        Maybe or maybe not. Given that they're basically picking a very similar recipe from the economical development playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if they arrive at a similar outcome. And South Korea was ran by violent dictarors until its recent democratic history. I don't think the same will happen to China, but I wouldn't dismiss the ability of its citizens to innovate based only on the autocratic nature of their government. It's not like if the Chinese people are deprived of imagination. They have it, and they have the ability to act on it, and they do. The autocratic environment might not be most amenable to free thinking and innovation, but then I'm not convinced that being free from autocracy is truly necessary for innovation to occur. Plenty of innovation occurred when Europe was ruled by Kings, or in 1900 Russia. Even within autocratic corporations, plenty of innovation occur. Anyways, I don't wish for autocratic governments, but I'm not willing to dismiss China's ability to be innovative based on that.
  - blueblisters 6y ago
    How do you measure qualitative innovation? If research is a good measure of innovation, China is only second to the US in AI research, for example. If innovation is measured by consumer adoption of new technology, TikTok is the first major AI-first consumer application. In other markets too, China has made major innovations in the consumer space that have not caught up in the West yet - ecommerce, fintech, consumer goods and more. None of these are top-down CCP mandated innovations.
  - gehwartzen 6y ago
    If China is smart, and they are, they will simply outsource the innovation. If you have enough money you just poach innovators out of US/Europe; have them work remote if they don't want to come to China. It will basically flip the "system" we have now.
- rakoo 6y ago
  Call me cynical but climate change, the biggest threat to mankind right is right in front of us. We will also face the biggest threat to what made our civilization and our democracy possible, which is cheap quasi-unlimited access to energy (petrol in our case). Combine both and I don't see democracies as being able to efficiently navigate us out of this combined nightmare to come. As you said, autocracies are efficient for hard problems, and we're going to face the hardest very soon
  - eecc 6y ago
    Not necessarily. Autocracies don’t self-correct when it’s needed: dissent is not tolerated and dissenters are automatically out-group and dealt with accordingly.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      I can see a very bad version of the trolley problem in our future. Do we let go of capitalism and democracy for a while in order to save the species or do we hang on to them and possibly lose it all? Autocracy can always be gotten rid of at some point, at least, you'd hope. With present day tech it might be a ratchet that once it clicks will not get reversed.
  - ctdonath 6y ago
    1°C rise per century. 1 foot ocean rise per century. Threat?
    - MagnumOpus 6y ago
      Unmitigated, the forecasts are around 5°C in this century. Unimitigated, the forecasts are around 3-7 feet sea level rise this century. Both of these massively increase the probability of non linear disasters including the release of methane from permafrost and ocean floors, or the disruption of the Gulf stream which would disrupt global agriculture even worse than a 5 degree temperature rise.
    - mcv 6y ago
      Could be a meter this century. And if temperature keeps rising, glaciers will only melt faster. But that's just the sea level; there's also changing weather patterns, disrupted ecological systems, more powerful hurricanes. It's absolutely a bigger threat than the terrorism that everybody was so eager to throw away their freedom for 19 years ago.
- bluetomcat 6y ago
  > Autocracies are only short-term efficient. Once their initial aims are met, they become terribly inefficient, then corruption sets in, and then they must be forcibly removed. From the point of view of Western individualism, yes. However, a strong autocracy relies on building a strong collective identity through education and the cultural institutions. That identity isolates the individual from his personal beliefs and justifies his suffering, for the purpose of collectively achieving "macro" goals. A major mistake is to judge non-Western socio-economic systems through the lens of the Western intellectual tradition.
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    You're conflating autocracy with collectivism. Collectivism exists in a very healthy fashion in democracies / free markets (for example Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Hong Kong before the clampdown). Eastern collectivism doesn't need a rod of iron to enforce it.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - kybernetikos 6y ago
    > strong collective identity This makes a society weaker - it's effectively a monoculture that restricts the data available to the decision makers. It also reduces a societies ability to innovate in art, culture and eventually technology and science - innovation requires the ability to take an outside view, to be self-critical, and a society that is too busy forging a 'strong collective identity' will make it harder for individuals to do that. It even poisons a societies own understanding of itself and its history, since we have so far failed to come up with good ways of building a 'strong collective identity' without accepting and promoting lies about history.
    - bluetomcat 6y ago
      The Western urge for constantly rethinking and reevaluating history and traditions, for innovations in art and science, does not lead to an inherently stable society in the long run that spans across centuries. The changes themselves introduce new kinds of problems requiring new solutions, and that affects the societal structure in unpredictable ways. Japan and South Korea are western only in a superficial sense, in that they have copied the basic institutional structure of the industrialised West. However, the main forces acting on that structure are rather different, and the main actor is certainly not the "egoistic, cold, self-interested, autonomous individual".
- vincentmarle 6y ago
  As opposed to... what? Democracy? You think that democracies are long-term efficient? Democracies don’t have corruption? Democracies don’t become self-serving? I mean, I prefer to live in a democracy because of individual freedoms but it’s not terribly well-organized.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > Democracies don’t have corruption? They sure do, but the distributed leadership means there's hopefully someone pushing against corruption, even if it's inconvenient for other goals of the government. Even if they don't succeed, at least they keep shining some light on it. (I'm looking at your Aussie government blocking the anti-corruption group) > Democracies don’t become self-serving? Same. There's always going to be some inefficiency, but the closer we are to actual democracy and the less biased it is, the better it seems at ejecting the self-serving members of the government.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  Even in the ideal case, where your central planners are competent and moral indefinitely, centralization is a swingy strategy, for countries or companies. Every investment is ultimately a bet, that you have correctly predicted the future needs of your citizens or customers. Centralized control, of states through an autocrat or central committee, or of markets by monopolies or megacorps, ultimately amounts to placing fewer, larger bets. When the bets are good, it is very very good; when the bets are bad, it is ruinous. Decentralized decision making is ultimately conservative, risk adverse: it is never great -- a lot of people will be wrong, so things will never go as good as they might. But it is seldom terrible: even when context shifts and the underlying conditions everyone was betting on change, the wide diversity of bets means that at least some people won't have been completely wrong, maybe for stupid reasons, but it can prevent a complete catastrophe. (The difficulty, of course, lies in socializing the losses and gains, so that you can benefit from decentralized decision making without it ultimately reverting to a de facto central committee through successive rounds of winnowing those who guess wrong, until the small number of people who had so far guessed right can begin guessing wrong at scale.)
- slothtrop 6y ago
  I think they're only as good as their autocrats, and not just in terms of good intentions. Singapore fared better than others, but it wasn't entirely centralized either. The cogs in our governance (everyone else) are pretty rusty, though.
- refurb 6y ago
  Indeed. Autocracies work great when they make the right decisions, but work horribly when they make the wrong decisions. It’s basically the govt picking winners and losers rather than letting the market select for them.
- ajmadesc 6y ago
  Only short term efficient so far. All systems eventually suffer from rot, but efficient authoritarianism lasting more than one lifetime isn't impossible. Perhaps their political system there's more power in skimming growth than extracting rents. The history of democracy as we know it is very very short. Don't believe the cold war propaganda. What system has lifted the most people out of poverty? It ain't American.
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axiolite 6y ago
> Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance Efficient in achieving a particular goal, sure, but the wisdom of crowds (and the market) is a thing, too. When the autocracy decides X will be the next big thing, and it isn't, all that efficiency from the previous correct bets gets wiped away by the inefficiency of one wrong dictate from the top.
swarnie_ 6y ago
"Democracies" are perfectly capable of doing evil things very efficiently as well. Lets not pretend the last 70 years have been all sunshine and roses with democracy being spread by force around the world.
- petra 6y ago
  Maybe evil to people who don't vote, that's true. But being evil towards voters rarely makes sense in a democracy.
  - morlockabove 6y ago
    It does, you just have to dress it up correctly. You have incentives to want people to be personally weak and historically ignorant, but still able to shuffle papers and make new widgets to make gdp line go up. It's in your best interests for the country to despise you, and the other half to despise your counterpart- so that both halves despise each other and can't coordinate toward their common interests. You want the subgroups motivated to vote for your side by problems they face to keep voting for your side next time around, so you're incentivized to make a big show of trying to fix their problems, but not actually fix them and blame the failure on the other side. And when the day is done, you and the opposition leader can have a drink in your mansion. This is all evil in a molochian sense, and it all makes sense.
BillyTheKing 6y ago
Efficiency is the opposite of robustness. Autocracies always appear stable until suddenly they don't anymore and break apart or fail in some other way. While democracies seem inefficient and at times quite volatile, they are significantly more robust and can adapt better to changes down the road. Modern China, so far, has only really experienced a fairly homogeneous historical phase, which is one primarily driven by economic growth. They haven't been forced to deal with major societal issues, in my opinion it's simply too early to judge just how robust that government and state is going to be in the long-run.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I'm not sure that modern democracies exist for sufficiently long to make strong claims about their stability, and premodern democracies weren't particularly stable (as far as I know, I'm not too good at history).
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    That's a fair criticism, on geological timescales everything we have done that moved us ahead is on the order of an eyeblink and all of the past is the very long and extremely dark time before it. Democracy may not be a strong enough thing to be able to resist our technological progress, which then can result in falling back to a previous stage or some kind of lock-in effect for an undesirable future. It would be naive to expect things to continue as they are indefinitely.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Only in short term. A single autocrat can be efficient and purpose-driven and can move mountains, but the next one has decent chances to be just a useless bloke, and the system doesn't have a feedback loop from citizens to correct the course via elections. So eventually all autocracies deteriorate. Putin's autocracy deterioration has happened even during his lifetime.
m463 6y ago
> Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. I've wondered about this. Is there a way that democracy could compete, possibly by reflecting "the will of the people" quickly and accurately? Or would that always fundamentally be a popularity contest? Or will democracy require something akin to "martial law" to quickly decide and act on urgent matters?
- tomp 6y ago
  > Or will democracy require something akin to "martial law" to quickly decide and act on urgent matters? After the pandemic hit the West - Europe started locking down mid-March, Trump banned EU flights on 12th - Germany (a democracy of 80 million people) passed a financial aid package on 23rd of March; US (a democracy of 300 million people) followed on the 25th. So it's quite clear that democracies can react quickly, provided there's broad consensus of what the problem is and how to solve it; of course, things slow down when there's no consensus and conflicting views, but arguably that's a feature, not a bug.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    If anything I think the pandemic shows that the 'free West' sucks at responding to such threats. We've done miserably compared to Singapore, China and Vietnam.
    - petra 6y ago
      That's true even if you leave the US out ?
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        US has a lower death rate than the UK, Italy, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, and several other European states.
    - kybernetikos 6y ago
      It's mixed. There are a (admittedly small) number of countries in the 'free West' that have had 0 or even negative excess mortality so far. It's also difficult to compare because autocracies are less likely to release data that makes them look bad (they're too busy building a 'strong collective identity').
dfgdghdf 6y ago
Efficient to what end? The whole purpose of representative democracy is that we disagree on what we are trying to achieve, but still need to have a somewhat coherent plan. Autocracies are "efficient" only in the sense that they skip a bulk of the work.
- petra 6y ago
  That's the theory. But at least in the economic sphere, it seems that democracy doesn't have that much power, capitalism seems to call most of the shots. At least with autocracy, there's more unity, so there's somewhat bigger chance to restrain capitalism.
  - cookieswumchorr 6y ago
    to restrain capitalism in favour of what/whom? if you leave out democracy, the government no longer works for you, it becomes a power acting in its own interest just like the capitalists.
eecc 6y ago
Well no, because an autocracy can just decide to go full in with the most outrageously stupid ideas and no one can stop it from happening. Just look at the great famines in USSR, China and North Korea. Or the fuckups with nuclear reactor designs and operations in the USSR. Now mind you, autocracy doesn’t necessarily mean despotic dictatorship. Self serving unbounded capitalism can be one as well.
kybernetikos 6y ago
I'm not convinced that this is borne out by history at all. Anyway, the argument against the effectiveness of autocracy is essentially the same as the argument of planned production vs markets for price discovery. The more you concentrate decision making on complex topics, the less the body making the decision has access to all the nuance and detail that are needed to make the correct decision. This usually gets even worse when the people bringing the (potentially upsetting) detail and nuance need also to maintain good relationships with the autocrat or face serious consequences. You saw this relationship between Trump and Fauci recently - if you're trying to say something that the person in charge doesn't like, then you are sidelined to the detriment of society. That's classic autocratic behaviour. But in this case the consequences for Fauci were constrained by the fact that it was happening in a mainly free society, and the society was able to correct itself after 4 years without having to murder a huge proportion of its population. The ability to do that is a massive benefit for a free society. There have been horrible famines killing many millions of people because the (smart, well-educated) person in charge thought they knew what was best. That is not efficient. Needing to build consensus is something that generally has to happen in a free society can slow you down, but it also exposes you to other views, and allows your mistakes and prejudices to be challenged. This allows you to make better, more effective decisions.
mcv 6y ago
Autocracies are efficient only as long as they are correct. It certainly helps if they're lead by scientists and engineers, at least for some issues. But when an autocratic government is wrong, it's nearly impossible to correct it. And every government is wrong sometimes. As much as I like China stimulating electric cars, there are a lot of issues they're handling poorly or are being downright evil about (Uyghurs, for example).
- free_rms 6y ago
  Huge buried assumption in this comment that democracy in general or America's system in particular is more likely to produce 'correct' decisions than China's 100 million party members and their hierarchical politics. It's interesting to compare/contrast the incentives created in each system but in light of the last 20 years of decision making, it's hard to claim America aced it.
  - mcv 6y ago
    I think a well-functioning democracy with an educated electorate will do better than China, but I wouldn't argue that the US meets those criteria. A better comparison might be the Nordic countries. If that's too much cherry-picking for you, consider that China is probably also the best-functioning autocracy in the world; plenty of autocracies are terrible.
    - free_rms 6y ago
      Very well put re: the cherry picking. I wasn't so much arguing for autocracy as arguing against buying our own agitprop.
olau 6y ago
I can recommend "Seeing like a State" for more information about this. I don't think they are. But I also don't think you can make sweeping generalizations about these things - they are statistical phenomenons, governed by a myriad of interactions. You'll find some things work better in a system that statistically would predict a worse outcome. Unless you close your eyes for ideological reasons and pretend they don't exist. :)
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TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
Concentration of political power eventually leads to concentration of economic power ... this ultimately leads to monopolies in the commanding heights of the economy ... efficiency and innovation decreases with lack of competition in the market. This is why centralized socialist states and autocracies don't produce world champion companies in the long run.
bproven 6y ago
dictatorships are the best - as long as your dictator is benevolent...
BurningFrog 6y ago
The average autocracy is deeply inefficient at anything but serving the autocrats every need. China is an extreme outlier in that respect. What they've done the last 40 years is unparallelled and very hard to explain.
- lebuffon 6y ago
  My explanation is that they abandoned the "buckets" that people put countries into when they talk about governance. It's not communism. It's also not democracy. They picked dictatorial government and matched it with unbridled capitalism which distills to two rules IMHO: 1. Make as much money as you want. 2. NEVER speak bad about the government/system. It's working so far. Their next big challenge is in the making now; de-population due to the one child policy of the past. They will require massive immigration which will be de-stabilizing. Interesting times indeed ...

Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. It's a shame that this also means that they can do evil things very efficiently, given no one can stop them.

kstenerud 6y ago

Autocracies are only short-term efficient. Once their initial aims are met, they become terribly inefficient, then corruption sets in, and then they must be forcibly removed. It's good for other nations who can benefit from their trailblazing, but bad for the nation itself because they're basically fucked in the future when the bill comes due. Centralization is long-term the worst kind of governance, inevitably becoming as self-serving as kingdoms and monopolies. The bigger it is, the worse it gets and the sooner it gets there.

WanderPanda 6y ago
I absolutely agree! I am just really struggling to put a time estimate on when the bill will come due for china. I think they can be in an upward trend for some more years as a technological follower. What I mean by that is that they use simple metrics of current technology (Ghz, GB, battery life, screen colors, electric car range and so in) and just “mandate” to get better in them. But all these things will eventually commoditise and if china wants to grow beyond that they have to come up with qualitative innovation. At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china. I think that is the point where their system (of this extreme obedient school system etc.) might start to struggle. I think the upper bound for that point would be a per capita gdp like south korea has (but probably much lower). After that point (which might be in lets say 10-20 years) there can still be a veeery long downward slope (the soviet union lasted for 69 years). I would be very interested in what other people think about this (and these timelines)
- tomp 6y ago
  > At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china This argument never sounded very true and intellectually honest to me. I mean, I want to believe in it, but when I scrutinize it precisely, I wonder - how can you measure the ability to innovate of someone who doesn't want (or need) to innovate? At present time, China's competitive advantage is cheap specialized labour, and they're taking full advantage of that - as they should. That's the whole point of being behind in technology and racing to catc up! It might very well be that when they switch their focus, from copying to innovating, they'd be very good at that as well (or very bad! we literally have very little data to tell)
  - AYBABTME 6y ago
    If you look at Japan and Korea who took the same approach of "cheap specialized labour", they both pivoted to high quality, and more innovative once they caught up. I have no doubt China will do the same, but at much larger scale. There's already a lot of innovative consumer products coming online, which I'd attribute to the vibe of rapid and efficient hardware products iteration in Shenzen.
    - kstenerud 6y ago
      Japan and Korea are collective societies, not autocratic ones. China's goal under Xi is a return to the golden age of the Kingdom of Heaven, where all Chinese people exemplify the ideals and morals of the most civilized society on Earth. That goal is only tangentially related to the technical innovations they're making, and will eventually stifle them as the definition of "good citizen" and "proper pursuits" becomes more hardened and inward-looking (much like it did during the Middle Kingdom).
      - AYBABTME 6y ago
        Maybe or maybe not. Given that they're basically picking a very similar recipe from the economical development playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if they arrive at a similar outcome. And South Korea was ran by violent dictarors until its recent democratic history. I don't think the same will happen to China, but I wouldn't dismiss the ability of its citizens to innovate based only on the autocratic nature of their government. It's not like if the Chinese people are deprived of imagination. They have it, and they have the ability to act on it, and they do. The autocratic environment might not be most amenable to free thinking and innovation, but then I'm not convinced that being free from autocracy is truly necessary for innovation to occur. Plenty of innovation occurred when Europe was ruled by Kings, or in 1900 Russia. Even within autocratic corporations, plenty of innovation occur. Anyways, I don't wish for autocratic governments, but I'm not willing to dismiss China's ability to be innovative based on that.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  How do you measure qualitative innovation? If research is a good measure of innovation, China is only second to the US in AI research, for example. If innovation is measured by consumer adoption of new technology, TikTok is the first major AI-first consumer application. In other markets too, China has made major innovations in the consumer space that have not caught up in the West yet - ecommerce, fintech, consumer goods and more. None of these are top-down CCP mandated innovations.
- gehwartzen 6y ago
  If China is smart, and they are, they will simply outsource the innovation. If you have enough money you just poach innovators out of US/Europe; have them work remote if they don't want to come to China. It will basically flip the "system" we have now.
rakoo 6y ago
Call me cynical but climate change, the biggest threat to mankind right is right in front of us. We will also face the biggest threat to what made our civilization and our democracy possible, which is cheap quasi-unlimited access to energy (petrol in our case). Combine both and I don't see democracies as being able to efficiently navigate us out of this combined nightmare to come. As you said, autocracies are efficient for hard problems, and we're going to face the hardest very soon
- eecc 6y ago
  Not necessarily. Autocracies don’t self-correct when it’s needed: dissent is not tolerated and dissenters are automatically out-group and dealt with accordingly.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    I can see a very bad version of the trolley problem in our future. Do we let go of capitalism and democracy for a while in order to save the species or do we hang on to them and possibly lose it all? Autocracy can always be gotten rid of at some point, at least, you'd hope. With present day tech it might be a ratchet that once it clicks will not get reversed.
- ctdonath 6y ago
  1°C rise per century. 1 foot ocean rise per century. Threat?
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    Unmitigated, the forecasts are around 5°C in this century. Unimitigated, the forecasts are around 3-7 feet sea level rise this century. Both of these massively increase the probability of non linear disasters including the release of methane from permafrost and ocean floors, or the disruption of the Gulf stream which would disrupt global agriculture even worse than a 5 degree temperature rise.
  - mcv 6y ago
    Could be a meter this century. And if temperature keeps rising, glaciers will only melt faster. But that's just the sea level; there's also changing weather patterns, disrupted ecological systems, more powerful hurricanes. It's absolutely a bigger threat than the terrorism that everybody was so eager to throw away their freedom for 19 years ago.
bluetomcat 6y ago
> Autocracies are only short-term efficient. Once their initial aims are met, they become terribly inefficient, then corruption sets in, and then they must be forcibly removed. From the point of view of Western individualism, yes. However, a strong autocracy relies on building a strong collective identity through education and the cultural institutions. That identity isolates the individual from his personal beliefs and justifies his suffering, for the purpose of collectively achieving "macro" goals. A major mistake is to judge non-Western socio-economic systems through the lens of the Western intellectual tradition.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  You're conflating autocracy with collectivism. Collectivism exists in a very healthy fashion in democracies / free markets (for example Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Hong Kong before the clampdown). Eastern collectivism doesn't need a rod of iron to enforce it.
- deleted 6y ago
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- kybernetikos 6y ago
  > strong collective identity This makes a society weaker - it's effectively a monoculture that restricts the data available to the decision makers. It also reduces a societies ability to innovate in art, culture and eventually technology and science - innovation requires the ability to take an outside view, to be self-critical, and a society that is too busy forging a 'strong collective identity' will make it harder for individuals to do that. It even poisons a societies own understanding of itself and its history, since we have so far failed to come up with good ways of building a 'strong collective identity' without accepting and promoting lies about history.
  - bluetomcat 6y ago
    The Western urge for constantly rethinking and reevaluating history and traditions, for innovations in art and science, does not lead to an inherently stable society in the long run that spans across centuries. The changes themselves introduce new kinds of problems requiring new solutions, and that affects the societal structure in unpredictable ways. Japan and South Korea are western only in a superficial sense, in that they have copied the basic institutional structure of the industrialised West. However, the main forces acting on that structure are rather different, and the main actor is certainly not the "egoistic, cold, self-interested, autonomous individual".
vincentmarle 6y ago
As opposed to... what? Democracy? You think that democracies are long-term efficient? Democracies don’t have corruption? Democracies don’t become self-serving? I mean, I prefer to live in a democracy because of individual freedoms but it’s not terribly well-organized.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Democracies don’t have corruption? They sure do, but the distributed leadership means there's hopefully someone pushing against corruption, even if it's inconvenient for other goals of the government. Even if they don't succeed, at least they keep shining some light on it. (I'm looking at your Aussie government blocking the anti-corruption group) > Democracies don’t become self-serving? Same. There's always going to be some inefficiency, but the closer we are to actual democracy and the less biased it is, the better it seems at ejecting the self-serving members of the government.
saalweachter 6y ago
Even in the ideal case, where your central planners are competent and moral indefinitely, centralization is a swingy strategy, for countries or companies. Every investment is ultimately a bet, that you have correctly predicted the future needs of your citizens or customers. Centralized control, of states through an autocrat or central committee, or of markets by monopolies or megacorps, ultimately amounts to placing fewer, larger bets. When the bets are good, it is very very good; when the bets are bad, it is ruinous. Decentralized decision making is ultimately conservative, risk adverse: it is never great -- a lot of people will be wrong, so things will never go as good as they might. But it is seldom terrible: even when context shifts and the underlying conditions everyone was betting on change, the wide diversity of bets means that at least some people won't have been completely wrong, maybe for stupid reasons, but it can prevent a complete catastrophe. (The difficulty, of course, lies in socializing the losses and gains, so that you can benefit from decentralized decision making without it ultimately reverting to a de facto central committee through successive rounds of winnowing those who guess wrong, until the small number of people who had so far guessed right can begin guessing wrong at scale.)
slothtrop 6y ago
I think they're only as good as their autocrats, and not just in terms of good intentions. Singapore fared better than others, but it wasn't entirely centralized either. The cogs in our governance (everyone else) are pretty rusty, though.
refurb 6y ago
Indeed. Autocracies work great when they make the right decisions, but work horribly when they make the wrong decisions. It’s basically the govt picking winners and losers rather than letting the market select for them.
ajmadesc 6y ago
Only short term efficient so far. All systems eventually suffer from rot, but efficient authoritarianism lasting more than one lifetime isn't impossible. Perhaps their political system there's more power in skimming growth than extracting rents. The history of democracy as we know it is very very short. Don't believe the cold war propaganda. What system has lifted the most people out of poverty? It ain't American.

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axiolite 6y ago

> Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance Efficient in achieving a particular goal, sure, but the wisdom of crowds (and the market) is a thing, too. When the autocracy decides X will be the next big thing, and it isn't, all that efficiency from the previous correct bets gets wiped away by the inefficiency of one wrong dictate from the top.

swarnie_ 6y ago

"Democracies" are perfectly capable of doing evil things very efficiently as well. Lets not pretend the last 70 years have been all sunshine and roses with democracy being spread by force around the world.

petra 6y ago
Maybe evil to people who don't vote, that's true. But being evil towards voters rarely makes sense in a democracy.
- morlockabove 6y ago
  It does, you just have to dress it up correctly. You have incentives to want people to be personally weak and historically ignorant, but still able to shuffle papers and make new widgets to make gdp line go up. It's in your best interests for the country to despise you, and the other half to despise your counterpart- so that both halves despise each other and can't coordinate toward their common interests. You want the subgroups motivated to vote for your side by problems they face to keep voting for your side next time around, so you're incentivized to make a big show of trying to fix their problems, but not actually fix them and blame the failure on the other side. And when the day is done, you and the opposition leader can have a drink in your mansion. This is all evil in a molochian sense, and it all makes sense.

BillyTheKing 6y ago

Efficiency is the opposite of robustness. Autocracies always appear stable until suddenly they don't anymore and break apart or fail in some other way. While democracies seem inefficient and at times quite volatile, they are significantly more robust and can adapt better to changes down the road. Modern China, so far, has only really experienced a fairly homogeneous historical phase, which is one primarily driven by economic growth. They haven't been forced to deal with major societal issues, in my opinion it's simply too early to judge just how robust that government and state is going to be in the long-run.

adrianN 6y ago
I'm not sure that modern democracies exist for sufficiently long to make strong claims about their stability, and premodern democracies weren't particularly stable (as far as I know, I'm not too good at history).
- jacquesm 6y ago
  That's a fair criticism, on geological timescales everything we have done that moved us ahead is on the order of an eyeblink and all of the past is the very long and extremely dark time before it. Democracy may not be a strong enough thing to be able to resist our technological progress, which then can result in falling back to a previous stage or some kind of lock-in effect for an undesirable future. It would be naive to expect things to continue as they are indefinitely.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Only in short term. A single autocrat can be efficient and purpose-driven and can move mountains, but the next one has decent chances to be just a useless bloke, and the system doesn't have a feedback loop from citizens to correct the course via elections. So eventually all autocracies deteriorate. Putin's autocracy deterioration has happened even during his lifetime.

m463 6y ago

> Autocracies seem to be the most efficient form of governance. I've wondered about this. Is there a way that democracy could compete, possibly by reflecting "the will of the people" quickly and accurately? Or would that always fundamentally be a popularity contest? Or will democracy require something akin to "martial law" to quickly decide and act on urgent matters?

tomp 6y ago
> Or will democracy require something akin to "martial law" to quickly decide and act on urgent matters? After the pandemic hit the West - Europe started locking down mid-March, Trump banned EU flights on 12th - Germany (a democracy of 80 million people) passed a financial aid package on 23rd of March; US (a democracy of 300 million people) followed on the 25th. So it's quite clear that democracies can react quickly, provided there's broad consensus of what the problem is and how to solve it; of course, things slow down when there's no consensus and conflicting views, but arguably that's a feature, not a bug.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  If anything I think the pandemic shows that the 'free West' sucks at responding to such threats. We've done miserably compared to Singapore, China and Vietnam.
  - petra 6y ago
    That's true even if you leave the US out ?
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      US has a lower death rate than the UK, Italy, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, and several other European states.
  - kybernetikos 6y ago
    It's mixed. There are a (admittedly small) number of countries in the 'free West' that have had 0 or even negative excess mortality so far. It's also difficult to compare because autocracies are less likely to release data that makes them look bad (they're too busy building a 'strong collective identity').

dfgdghdf 6y ago

Efficient to what end? The whole purpose of representative democracy is that we disagree on what we are trying to achieve, but still need to have a somewhat coherent plan. Autocracies are "efficient" only in the sense that they skip a bulk of the work.

petra 6y ago
That's the theory. But at least in the economic sphere, it seems that democracy doesn't have that much power, capitalism seems to call most of the shots. At least with autocracy, there's more unity, so there's somewhat bigger chance to restrain capitalism.
- cookieswumchorr 6y ago
  to restrain capitalism in favour of what/whom? if you leave out democracy, the government no longer works for you, it becomes a power acting in its own interest just like the capitalists.

eecc 6y ago

Well no, because an autocracy can just decide to go full in with the most outrageously stupid ideas and no one can stop it from happening. Just look at the great famines in USSR, China and North Korea. Or the fuckups with nuclear reactor designs and operations in the USSR. Now mind you, autocracy doesn’t necessarily mean despotic dictatorship. Self serving unbounded capitalism can be one as well.

kybernetikos 6y ago

I'm not convinced that this is borne out by history at all. Anyway, the argument against the effectiveness of autocracy is essentially the same as the argument of planned production vs markets for price discovery. The more you concentrate decision making on complex topics, the less the body making the decision has access to all the nuance and detail that are needed to make the correct decision. This usually gets even worse when the people bringing the (potentially upsetting) detail and nuance need also to maintain good relationships with the autocrat or face serious consequences. You saw this relationship between Trump and Fauci recently - if you're trying to say something that the person in charge doesn't like, then you are sidelined to the detriment of society. That's classic autocratic behaviour. But in this case the consequences for Fauci were constrained by the fact that it was happening in a mainly free society, and the society was able to correct itself after 4 years without having to murder a huge proportion of its population. The ability to do that is a massive benefit for a free society. There have been horrible famines killing many millions of people because the (smart, well-educated) person in charge thought they knew what was best. That is not efficient. Needing to build consensus is something that generally has to happen in a free society can slow you down, but it also exposes you to other views, and allows your mistakes and prejudices to be challenged. This allows you to make better, more effective decisions.

mcv 6y ago

Autocracies are efficient only as long as they are correct. It certainly helps if they're lead by scientists and engineers, at least for some issues. But when an autocratic government is wrong, it's nearly impossible to correct it. And every government is wrong sometimes. As much as I like China stimulating electric cars, there are a lot of issues they're handling poorly or are being downright evil about (Uyghurs, for example).

free_rms 6y ago
Huge buried assumption in this comment that democracy in general or America's system in particular is more likely to produce 'correct' decisions than China's 100 million party members and their hierarchical politics. It's interesting to compare/contrast the incentives created in each system but in light of the last 20 years of decision making, it's hard to claim America aced it.
- mcv 6y ago
  I think a well-functioning democracy with an educated electorate will do better than China, but I wouldn't argue that the US meets those criteria. A better comparison might be the Nordic countries. If that's too much cherry-picking for you, consider that China is probably also the best-functioning autocracy in the world; plenty of autocracies are terrible.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    Very well put re: the cherry picking. I wasn't so much arguing for autocracy as arguing against buying our own agitprop.

olau 6y ago

I can recommend "Seeing like a State" for more information about this. I don't think they are. But I also don't think you can make sweeping generalizations about these things - they are statistical phenomenons, governed by a myriad of interactions. You'll find some things work better in a system that statistically would predict a worse outcome. Unless you close your eyes for ideological reasons and pretend they don't exist. :)

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TheMagicHorsey 6y ago

Concentration of political power eventually leads to concentration of economic power ... this ultimately leads to monopolies in the commanding heights of the economy ... efficiency and innovation decreases with lack of competition in the market. This is why centralized socialist states and autocracies don't produce world champion companies in the long run.

bproven 6y ago

dictatorships are the best - as long as your dictator is benevolent...

BurningFrog 6y ago

The average autocracy is deeply inefficient at anything but serving the autocrats every need. China is an extreme outlier in that respect. What they've done the last 40 years is unparallelled and very hard to explain.

lebuffon 6y ago
My explanation is that they abandoned the "buckets" that people put countries into when they talk about governance. It's not communism. It's also not democracy. They picked dictatorial government and matched it with unbridled capitalism which distills to two rules IMHO: 1. Make as much money as you want. 2. NEVER speak bad about the government/system. It's working so far. Their next big challenge is in the making now; de-population due to the one child policy of the past. They will require massive immigration which will be de-stabilizing. Interesting times indeed ...