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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 de
by 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 agoI'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 agoThat'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.