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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 for

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.
        rubinelli 6y ago
- 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
  [deleted]
- 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.

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.
      - rubinelli 6y ago
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
[deleted]
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.