8 ms·

Francis Fukuyama’s Defense of Liberalism

41 points by jseliger 5y ago

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
Fukuyama: Liberal societies are more innovative, wealthier. Reality: It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. In evaluating that assertion its important to note that absent production of desirable goods & services no country can maintain its wealth. Fukuyama: Neoliberalism = hostility to the state. Reality: Neoliberals lack faith in the individuals who makeup the state. They (I) mistrust their motivations, even if they first entered state service for the greater good. Careerism, self-dealing, cronyism & ideological bias runs rampant in the state. Smaller is safer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- karaterobot 5y ago
  > It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. The hard thing about it is agreeing on terms and providing data, but I don't think that's what you mean.
- haroldp 5y ago
  Is China innovative? Or is Chinese labor inexpensive? The US is still the second largest manufacturer in the world and broke it's own record in adjusted dollars for production in 2018. Pandemic aside, the US has never been more productive. Your sentence about hostility to government is spot on, I think, and brings to mind that old Bastiat quote asking if government officials are, "made of finer clay."
  - didibus 5y ago
    I don't really know what "smaller is safer" means? The US government is massive in terms of number of people it employs, so do we mean just less taxes and to leave more to the private sector? Like private energy, water, sewage, garbage, shorelines, parks, hospitals, military, schools, etc. ? Or do we mean overall we need less institutions with less people employed, less judges, less senators, less mayors, less military personnel, less civil servants, representatives, police, firefighters, etc. ? For me personally, I wouldn't say "smaller is safer", I'd say that each employed individual should have restrictions on its term length and responsibility/authority and better accountability.
    - haroldp 5y ago
      > I don't really know what "smaller is safer" means? It means the less there is, the less can be exploited. > Like private energy, water, sewage, garbage, shorelines, parks, hospitals, military, schools, etc. Many of those things are already private, for most people. > I wouldn't say "smaller is safer" Most people wouldn't.
- woopwoop 5y ago
  It's very easy to argue that the United States is wealthier than it was in the past and wealthier than China is today, because these things are unambiguously true.
- bob229 5y ago
  China is not wealthy it is simply large
- didibus 5y ago
  > It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be How so? The US GDP has grown year over year every year since the 1960s, how is that not a sign of wealth? The number of patents per year has also grown year over year since the 2000. That would indicate a good amount of innovation. I think you'd need to back up your assertions with some data, or explain what your measures and metrics are that you're basing your assertions on.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  > Reality: It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. In evaluating that assertion its important to note that absent production of desirable goods & services no country can maintain its wealth. Really? Mean US wealth per capita and net wealth per capita is still growing fast YoY, and China will eventually hit the top of the S-curve, at the same time they run into a huge demographic problem with an inverted demographic pyramid. And how do you define innovation? China does a lot of incremental improvement on disruptive innovation that occurred elsewhere, but no major disruptive innovations that have launched entirely new fields of study or industry sectors have arisen out of China in the last decades as far as I'm aware. Let me give some examples: The PC, the GUI/DTP Mac Era, the Smartphone, The Web, Cryptocurrency, Deep Learning, FDM 3D Printing, Tesla-like EVs, SpaceX-like reusable rockets/NewSpace/etc These are all areas where China produces very compelling products, but the spark that kicked off these huge product categories didn't come from China. I love DJI drones for example, but they aren't the company that got everyone excited about drones, Parrot AR was. 3D printing has been around for ages, but it was Makerbot RepRap/University of Bath which kicked off the huge consumer 3D printing race. And cryptocurrency has been slowly developing since the 90s, as an anti-statist measure by crypto-anarchist libertarians, obviously not a field of study the CCP would look kindly on. Again, most of the math and developments, did not originate from the Mainland. Which is ironic, because you'd expect if you live under a lot of statist restrictions, wouldn't circumvention technology be an area of hot underground research? Yet most of the tools, onion routing, VPNs, distributed hash table file sharing, anonymous remailers, crypto tools like PGP, all came from the West and people looking to avoid liberal democratic government restrictions and copyright regimes. China is also deploying AI surveillance like crazy, but did the explosion of interest and investment in DNNs/CNNs/etc arise from a Chinese breakthrough, or was it the result of years of work in the academic and commercial sector in the West, culminating in easy to use tools like Torch and Tensorflow, and off the shelf components to glue together, which made those rapid deployments in China possible? Another example I hear: China is ahead in Quantum Computing. Well, no, they've managed to extend distance records on quantum cryptography/computation, and qubits, but who invented quantum computing? Peter Shor was the first to develop a practical quantum algorithm, and that's one of the big drivers that triggered a renewed flood of interest. That's disruptive innovation, because it changes the world -- one day people are doing X, the next day, a big chunk of people drop what they've doing, and all rush in to do Y. And you can usually feel this innovation when it happens. All of us old timers had 'smartphones' before 2007, iPAQs, PalmPhones, Nokia Communicator 9000, etc On January 9th, 2007 after you saw the iPhone presentation, you knew the world had changed. It doesn't happen often, and you are lucky to witness it. I wish China was producing their own Steve Jobs, they've got 1.4 billion people, and the world would be better off if more disruptive innovation happening, but Jack Ma and Lei Jun are no Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Fundamentally, liberal arts and sciences are about criticism. Self criticism. The ability to critique society, the government, the establishment, to rebel against it, to agitate for change is crucial for artistic and scientific revolution. And I just don't feel the CCP is conducive to creating an environment like that, when you can be jailed for writing a movie review of the latest state sponsored epic War Movie and give it a bad rating. (recently a movie critic was jailed for calling "The Battle at Lake Changjin" a "potboiler" in his review)
famil 5y ago
Dominico Lorsudo's Liberalism: A Counter History https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9670246-liberalism https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9670246-liberalism is a a must read for the history of liberalism.
- famil 5y ago
  A discussion between Li and Fujiyama: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0yIMs2qqb4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0yIMs2qqb4
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Societies with large research budgets funding scientists to work together are more innovative.
- pantulis 5y ago
  All my Master of Orion games lost playing with the psylons beg to differ.
medo-bear 5y ago
sadly, his "end of history" thesis is turning out to be a replay of history that is the situation that preceded WWI, at an even more global scale. hopefully it doesn't replay the great war too
- pyuser583 5y ago
  He’s done a lot of really good work since then. I recommend “Origins of Political Order.” He really has some fascinating ideas.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    But has he done an explicit post-mortem of his "end of history" idea which obviously went belly up? I agree that liberalism is a good thing, the only problem it's not me you need to convince, but Putin, Erdogan and Xi, and they obviously don't want to give their power like it would imply. What' even more concerning ia that nobody else seem to want it. It's not like people are lining to replace Putin, Xi or even Trump.
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      He’s done a number of post-mortems. Most recently, and probably most extensively, he addressed the topic in “After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama”. His post-mortem analysis has changed over time - understandably so. A postmortem done in 2009 should be very different from one done in 2021.
    - medo-bear 5y ago
      > I agree that liberalism is a good thing, the only problem it's not me you need to convince, but Putin, Erdogan and Xi, and they obviously don't want to give their power like it would imply i think this line of reasoning is very wrong and in some sense insulting. i am sure you don't mean it like that, but i would say that if you need to convince someone of something like that, it is the people of those countries that you need to convince. also rejection of liberalism doesn't only happen in russia, china, and turkey. it is pervasive in central and eastern europe, in middle east, as well as in some huge populations like indonesia, and probably in a lot of other places too. pretty much it is possible that most of the world's population thinks it is not a good idea
shimonabi 5y ago
Some argue that Europe prospered after 1945 because it was forcibly un-mixed after the war, not because of some abstract idea of "liberalism".
- thriftwy 5y ago
  People seem to parrot that diversity is their strength, but I've never seen a compelling proof that it is so, and all research seem to prove otherwise. Yes there are societies which are tolerant and diverse, but societies which have the same amount of freedoms with lower amount of diversity will perform even better. I'm mostly talking about cultural & religious, but economical diversity as well.
  - shimonabi 5y ago
    Yes, countries run into trouble when people start voting tribally, not on the issues. Diversity has some benefits, but it also has downsides. I'm suspicious of people who deny either.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
Why the heck would this submission be flagged? For what?
- bob229 5y ago
  Snowflakes
- clairity 5y ago
  somewhat ironic, since this is the kind of political topic (political philopsophy) that a curious mind should gravitate toward rather than the popularity contests and tribal rhetoric we're otherwise awash in. with that said, i do see liberalism as having 'jumped the shark' so to speak, and become too much of a virtue totem, rather than a sociopolitical model worth examining and critiquing.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    Dare I say that flagging the submission is ... illiberal?
    - pfalafel 5y ago
      This is disappointing and it changes how I think of HN.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Don't know. But did flag right now also. Because Mounk. There.

41 points by jseliger 5y ago

Fukuyama: Liberal societies are more innovative, wealthier. Reality: It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. In evaluating that assertion its important to note that absent production of desirable goods & services no country can maintain its wealth. Fukuyama: Neoliberalism = hostility to the state. Reality: Neoliberals lack faith in the individuals who makeup the state. They (I) mistrust their motivations, even if they first entered state service for the greater good. Careerism, self-dealing, cronyism & ideological bias runs rampant in the state. Smaller is safer.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
karaterobot 5y ago
> It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. The hard thing about it is agreeing on terms and providing data, but I don't think that's what you mean.
haroldp 5y ago
Is China innovative? Or is Chinese labor inexpensive? The US is still the second largest manufacturer in the world and broke it's own record in adjusted dollars for production in 2018. Pandemic aside, the US has never been more productive. Your sentence about hostility to government is spot on, I think, and brings to mind that old Bastiat quote asking if government officials are, "made of finer clay."
- didibus 5y ago
  I don't really know what "smaller is safer" means? The US government is massive in terms of number of people it employs, so do we mean just less taxes and to leave more to the private sector? Like private energy, water, sewage, garbage, shorelines, parks, hospitals, military, schools, etc. ? Or do we mean overall we need less institutions with less people employed, less judges, less senators, less mayors, less military personnel, less civil servants, representatives, police, firefighters, etc. ? For me personally, I wouldn't say "smaller is safer", I'd say that each employed individual should have restrictions on its term length and responsibility/authority and better accountability.
  - haroldp 5y ago
    > I don't really know what "smaller is safer" means? It means the less there is, the less can be exploited. > Like private energy, water, sewage, garbage, shorelines, parks, hospitals, military, schools, etc. Many of those things are already private, for most people. > I wouldn't say "smaller is safer" Most people wouldn't.
woopwoop 5y ago
It's very easy to argue that the United States is wealthier than it was in the past and wealthier than China is today, because these things are unambiguously true.
bob229 5y ago
China is not wealthy it is simply large
didibus 5y ago
> It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be How so? The US GDP has grown year over year every year since the 1960s, how is that not a sign of wealth? The number of patents per year has also grown year over year since the 2000. That would indicate a good amount of innovation. I think you'd need to back up your assertions with some data, or explain what your measures and metrics are that you're basing your assertions on.
cromwellian 5y ago
> Reality: It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. In evaluating that assertion its important to note that absent production of desirable goods & services no country can maintain its wealth. Really? Mean US wealth per capita and net wealth per capita is still growing fast YoY, and China will eventually hit the top of the S-curve, at the same time they run into a huge demographic problem with an inverted demographic pyramid. And how do you define innovation? China does a lot of incremental improvement on disruptive innovation that occurred elsewhere, but no major disruptive innovations that have launched entirely new fields of study or industry sectors have arisen out of China in the last decades as far as I'm aware. Let me give some examples: The PC, the GUI/DTP Mac Era, the Smartphone, The Web, Cryptocurrency, Deep Learning, FDM 3D Printing, Tesla-like EVs, SpaceX-like reusable rockets/NewSpace/etc These are all areas where China produces very compelling products, but the spark that kicked off these huge product categories didn't come from China. I love DJI drones for example, but they aren't the company that got everyone excited about drones, Parrot AR was. 3D printing has been around for ages, but it was Makerbot RepRap/University of Bath which kicked off the huge consumer 3D printing race. And cryptocurrency has been slowly developing since the 90s, as an anti-statist measure by crypto-anarchist libertarians, obviously not a field of study the CCP would look kindly on. Again, most of the math and developments, did not originate from the Mainland. Which is ironic, because you'd expect if you live under a lot of statist restrictions, wouldn't circumvention technology be an area of hot underground research? Yet most of the tools, onion routing, VPNs, distributed hash table file sharing, anonymous remailers, crypto tools like PGP, all came from the West and people looking to avoid liberal democratic government restrictions and copyright regimes. China is also deploying AI surveillance like crazy, but did the explosion of interest and investment in DNNs/CNNs/etc arise from a Chinese breakthrough, or was it the result of years of work in the academic and commercial sector in the West, culminating in easy to use tools like Torch and Tensorflow, and off the shelf components to glue together, which made those rapid deployments in China possible? Another example I hear: China is ahead in Quantum Computing. Well, no, they've managed to extend distance records on quantum cryptography/computation, and qubits, but who invented quantum computing? Peter Shor was the first to develop a practical quantum algorithm, and that's one of the big drivers that triggered a renewed flood of interest. That's disruptive innovation, because it changes the world -- one day people are doing X, the next day, a big chunk of people drop what they've doing, and all rush in to do Y. And you can usually feel this innovation when it happens. All of us old timers had 'smartphones' before 2007, iPAQs, PalmPhones, Nokia Communicator 9000, etc On January 9th, 2007 after you saw the iPhone presentation, you knew the world had changed. It doesn't happen often, and you are lucky to witness it. I wish China was producing their own Steve Jobs, they've got 1.4 billion people, and the world would be better off if more disruptive innovation happening, but Jack Ma and Lei Jun are no Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Fundamentally, liberal arts and sciences are about criticism. Self criticism. The ability to critique society, the government, the establishment, to rebel against it, to agitate for change is crucial for artistic and scientific revolution. And I just don't feel the CCP is conducive to creating an environment like that, when you can be jailed for writing a movie review of the latest state sponsored epic War Movie and give it a bad rating. (recently a movie critic was jailed for calling "The Battle at Lake Changjin" a "potboiler" in his review)

famil 5y ago

Dominico Lorsudo's Liberalism: A Counter History https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9670246-liberalism https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9670246-liberalism is a a must read for the history of liberalism.

famil 5y ago
A discussion between Li and Fujiyama: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0yIMs2qqb4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0yIMs2qqb4

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Societies with large research budgets funding scientists to work together are more innovative.

pantulis 5y ago
All my Master of Orion games lost playing with the psylons beg to differ.

medo-bear 5y ago

sadly, his "end of history" thesis is turning out to be a replay of history that is the situation that preceded WWI, at an even more global scale. hopefully it doesn't replay the great war too

pyuser583 5y ago
He’s done a lot of really good work since then. I recommend “Origins of Political Order.” He really has some fascinating ideas.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  But has he done an explicit post-mortem of his "end of history" idea which obviously went belly up? I agree that liberalism is a good thing, the only problem it's not me you need to convince, but Putin, Erdogan and Xi, and they obviously don't want to give their power like it would imply. What' even more concerning ia that nobody else seem to want it. It's not like people are lining to replace Putin, Xi or even Trump.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    He’s done a number of post-mortems. Most recently, and probably most extensively, he addressed the topic in “After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama”. His post-mortem analysis has changed over time - understandably so. A postmortem done in 2009 should be very different from one done in 2021.
  - medo-bear 5y ago
    > I agree that liberalism is a good thing, the only problem it's not me you need to convince, but Putin, Erdogan and Xi, and they obviously don't want to give their power like it would imply i think this line of reasoning is very wrong and in some sense insulting. i am sure you don't mean it like that, but i would say that if you need to convince someone of something like that, it is the people of those countries that you need to convince. also rejection of liberalism doesn't only happen in russia, china, and turkey. it is pervasive in central and eastern europe, in middle east, as well as in some huge populations like indonesia, and probably in a lot of other places too. pretty much it is possible that most of the world's population thinks it is not a good idea

shimonabi 5y ago

Some argue that Europe prospered after 1945 because it was forcibly un-mixed after the war, not because of some abstract idea of "liberalism".

thriftwy 5y ago
People seem to parrot that diversity is their strength, but I've never seen a compelling proof that it is so, and all research seem to prove otherwise. Yes there are societies which are tolerant and diverse, but societies which have the same amount of freedoms with lower amount of diversity will perform even better. I'm mostly talking about cultural & religious, but economical diversity as well.
- shimonabi 5y ago
  Yes, countries run into trouble when people start voting tribally, not on the issues. Diversity has some benefits, but it also has downsides. I'm suspicious of people who deny either.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

Why the heck would this submission be flagged? For what?

bob229 5y ago
Snowflakes
clairity 5y ago
somewhat ironic, since this is the kind of political topic (political philopsophy) that a curious mind should gravitate toward rather than the popularity contests and tribal rhetoric we're otherwise awash in. with that said, i do see liberalism as having 'jumped the shark' so to speak, and become too much of a virtue totem, rather than a sociopolitical model worth examining and critiquing.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  Dare I say that flagging the submission is ... illiberal?
  - pfalafel 5y ago
    This is disappointing and it changes how I think of HN.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Don't know. But did flag right now also. Because Mounk. There.