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Shouldn’t be too surprising; we’ve seen it in almost every economically successful dictatorship. Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to
by warning26 4y ago
Shouldn’t be too surprising; we’ve seen it in almost every economically successful dictatorship. Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to go great, until the overly-centralized authority starts caring only about perpetuating its own power.
The only way to get past that phase is to force out the dictator (see: South Korea).
- wolverine876 4y ago> Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to go great That buys into the authoritarian megalomania - that some central person can do better than the independent thinking and labor of millions. Imagine some US president - or anyone - centrally controlling the IT industry for the last few decades. Lol. The problem isn't their corruption - though that is a problem. The problem is that central control can't possibly work. You can't be CEO of everything; you don't want the government's civil service running business. Nobody can compete with millions of people. And you also lose out on creative destruction of the ideas that fail, and the recyling of those resources for a new idea.
- warning26 4y agoI largely agree with you, but I’d push back on the idea that central control is totally useless for innovation. Consider the most successful research initiatives; many of them (ARPAnet, the Manhattan Project) emerged from top-down directives.
- wolverine876 4y agoThat's not central control of private sector research, that's the government (or an agency of the government) acting as an independent research and development organization. I agree that can work very well - also think of all the public universities.