It’s not a coincidence that autocratic leaders underperform, it’s baked into the cake. If you can’t replace a leader who performs poorly, then you're going to p

It’s not a coincidence that autocratic leaders underperform, it’s baked into the cake. If you can’t replace a leader who performs poorly, then you're going to perform badly across various measures. A few autocrats can buck this trend in the short term but very few can maintain it for the long term, even if leaders are replaced with younger leaders cut from the same cloth. The fact that most first-world nations are liberal democracies might be a wild coincidence, but it’s much more likely that the system works better than the alternative. In some sense that’s comforting, since autocracy is self-correcting. In the other hand, the USSR maintained power for over seven decades. Self-correction can be too slow to help most people.