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As a cynical idealist, I once tried to find 1 country of decent size that could escape the poverty/mis-governance trap while being a democracy. I found zero su

• kovezd 3y ago
  Interesting, you should publish your results. And it does makes sense, in a way it would be similar to letting children (developing persons) make their own decisions. The interesting question would be what is then, the best form of government for developing nations. Or even better, what are the required skill-set for leaders to bring development?
• roenxi 3y ago
  The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy - I only have a loose understanding of the history but France seemed to have an outsized role in the US becoming what it is today. The failures (USSR, Republic of China for example) where democracy doesn't take on a wide scale are probably also interesting studies. The key problem in setting up a democracy is that people are, on average, pretty dense. Doing things by vote doesn't cause stupid people to make good decisions. There is a real cultural element where the people involved have to be strongly against solving domestic problems with force, for evolution over revolution and also big believers in general liberty (otherwise you just get two factions fighting to use the big stick of government against the other).
  • sib 3y ago
    >> The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy - I only have a loose understanding of the history but France seemed to have an outsized role in the US becoming what it is today. I'm not sure that you could say that France was a democracy in the late 18th century (1770's, 1780's) - the critical time for the creation of the US and its form of government.
  • bluish29 3y ago
    > The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy The more interesting one is how often a democracy can survive against democratic superpower wishes. I.e, during the cold war era, the US helped taking down more democratic governments than the USSR itself. That is a bit of ironic remark. People tend to forget that the US didn't like democracies outside its sphere of influence in the last century. I am sure this legacy gets blind eye when people usually talk about democracy and why many people doesn't like it. The scars are still alive til this day (Iran is the prime example here).
    • philwelch 3y ago
      Iran had already ceased to be a democracy by the time the coup happened. That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup, which had a ton of popular support at the time. Mossadegh was essentially a dictator ruling by means of emergency powers at the time he was overthrown, and even before that point, he had also interfered with the 1952 parliamentary election by stopping the counting of votes once the minimum quorum of MP’s had been elected.
      • bluish29 3y ago
        > That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup Are you suggesting that the CIA was worried about democracy in Iran so they ousted him to give the absolute power to the king?
        • SinjonSuarez 3y ago
          They just happened to ignore the fact that mossadegh nationalized oil right before the us and uk led the coup
        • philwelch 3y ago
          No, and if you hadn’t disingenuously quoted me out of context, that would have been obvious. The complete sentence you should have quoted was: “That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup, which had a ton of popular support at the time.” By which I meant popular support within Iran. It turns out that Iranians have agency of their own and don’t just do whatever the CIA tells them to do. In fact the role of the CIA in the 1953 coup has been deliberately overstated by multiple sides, including the CIA itself: https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2014-06-16/what-really-happened-iran https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei... But even if you still want to blame the CIA, they still needed enough supporters inside of Iran who were angry at Mossadegh, and one of the reasons they were angry at Mossadegh is because he had turned himself into a dictator.
  • kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
    ROC is a democracy today (although it was a one party state with the KMT for a long time), do you mean the PRC or am I misunderstanding your comment?
  • bitcurious 3y ago
    Re: France and the United States, you have the timeline mixed up a bit. France & the French intellectuals of course played a large role in the American revolution, but it was America that became a democracy first. Lafayette, one of the key players in the French Revolution, served under Washington and lead troops in the US before coming back to France and playing a key role in the founding of the First Republic.
    • philwelch 3y ago
      I don’t think France successfully became a democracy at all during the Revolution; the First Republic quickly fell into the mass murdering reign of terror under Robespierre, who was ousted by the Directory, who remained in power for four years until Napoleon’s coup. Lafayette himself was basically driven out of France by the radicals. On the other hand, Britain itself was already fairly democratic by 1776, and the thirteen colonies had their own representative government institutions. The point of complaint was that the British were simply ignoring those institutions and flagrantly violating the traditional rights that Englishmen were entitled to. And a lot of the British were sympathetic to this viewpoint so there wasn’t the political capital to crack down on the rebellion as harshly as Britain would do in various other colonies at other points in time. And aside from Lafayette, the French monarchy—the same absolute monarchy the Revolution sought to overthrow—was the regime that supported American independence, mostly out of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” considerations.
      • eszed 3y ago
        Just to go further down the historical-nuance rabbit hole: France had been an absolute monarchy, under Louis XVI's grandfather. Both Louis XV and Louis XVI were reformers (which arguably created the conditions for revolutionary sentiment to coalesce), and XVI accepted (more or less willingly, depending on your point of view) a role as a constitutional monarch modeled on the British crown. That whole governmental model / regime fell apart, of course, and cue the reign of terror, but the First Republic was an attempt by most of the power bases in France at something more enduring.
  • sfmike 3y ago
    you forgot the word People's
• nemo44x 3y ago
  You need a monarch to breed an aristocracy that takes care of its home by virtue of having skin in the game. A fake democracy immediately dissolves into an oligarchy which is self interested and will take whatever it can for itself up until the point a strong king rises up and smashes it. In this case Bukele.
• GaggiX 3y ago
  I would think of the Third Polish Republic.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  I think democracy needs a “Deep State” to succeed. This can be imposed by a time of autocracy gradually evolving into democracy - see the UK, imposed during colonialism and then taken over after independence - see the Indian Civil Service, Courts, etc, or imposed by an occupying force - see Germany. Without that “Deep State” it will degenerate in alternating bouts of violence until people cry out for autocracy - See Roman Republic.
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    My general working thesis is that 99.9% of the time when people refer to the “deep state,” they just mean “the state.” Aren’t you just referring to regular government institutions or is there something I’m missing from your comment?
    • macintux 3y ago
      Can’t speak to the original comment, but I think part of a “deep state” is institutional inertia/tradition. A state without that deep-rooted sense of continuity is much more fragile. Having a civil service without political allegiance seems to be critical to preservation of a democratic system.
      • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        Why are you under the impression that the bureaucracy class does not have a political leaning/allegiance? We know it does, 95% of DC votes for the people that want larger government.
        • macintux 3y ago
          Allegiance is not the same thing as a tendency. And the fact that one party uses smaller government as part of its sales pitch may not last forever. In the U.S. I would say that Trump’s takeover of the GOP has generally de-emphasized smaller government as a plank of the party. He certainly doesn’t care about it. Whether the bureaucrats lean towards one party or the other doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t compelled out of fear for their jobs to break the law at the president’s command.
• throwme_123 3y ago
  it works in civilization (the game) too switch to democracy for a long time and it's a mess
• ks2048 3y ago
  What are your top examples of autocratic success stories?
  • nordsieck 3y ago
    I assume they're counting South Korea. Singapore is probably also up there, although I don't know enough about the country to know just how democratic it's democracy really is today.
  • nemo44x 3y ago
    FDR. Packed the courts and ignored congress by way of emergency powers. Created countless agencies to perpetuate power in democratically and in perpetuity by virtue of the managerial state. Completely changed how America is run. Not saying it was bad either. Just that he was an autocrat and extremely successful. The moment they could congress weakened the executive branch to the point of near uselessness as we see today.
• nextos 3y ago
  Iceland and Ireland went from being poor to wealthy and stable, both as small democracies, and during the 20th century.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Iceland is also the oldest democracy in the world, so it's less they went from "incredibly crappy existence" and more "they were always stable, and just became more wealthy". I'm taking the OP as talking more about "you can't democracy your way out of being Haiti" kind of things.
• bitcurious 3y ago
  The US became absurdly wealthy during the 20th century. Canada did well too. Poland, Czechia, Estonia and a few other recently independent democracies are thriving as well.
  • philwelch 3y ago
    The US became absurdly wealthy during the 19th century as well, particularly after the Civil War.
  • coldtea 3y ago
    >The US became absurdly wealthy during the 20th century. Yes, but it was bootstrapped by the biggest land takeover in history, along with all of its natural resources. It also benefitted from all the western big players of the 19th/early 20th century being exhausted after 2 wars that never touched continental US soil. Neither is easily replicated without a rich in natural resources continent full of easy targets, or massive remote wars.
  • thisislife2 3y ago
    Can you really disregard its imperialistic history here - the foundation of the American economy was built on slave labour and colonisation (even if it was a late player), and you wish to completely ignore the role of the early western settlers in America.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      > the foundation of the American economy was built on slave labour and colonisation (even if it was a late player) I thought the slave states were significantly poorer than the free states, a major advantage of the North in the Civil War? I'm sure it's been examined, but would the South have been better off with paid labor of free people? Countries using that model do far better. Imagine someone trying to compete with slave labor against a modern enterprise. For colonization, that seems to have played a minor role in the US economy? My understanding of the pre-industrial or non-industrial US economy is that it's most powerful engine was the Mississippi River basin, which is something like the largest continguous amount of farmland in the world with navigable waterway access to the sea (and thus a way to get goods to market, as overland transport was much too expensive - compare a barge to a horse, or even a train).
• numeri 3y ago
  I believe this was one of Machiavelli's big arguments in The Prince – that sometimes a country in crisis needs a single strong leader/monarch/dictator, using cruelty if necessary to keep control and bring stability.
• Gimpei 3y ago
  This is not true. Japan and South Korea both experienced the majority of their growth as democracies. Eastern Europe only took off after the fall of the USSR. Chile experienced most of its growth after Pinochet. India is the largest Democracy on earth and it is growing at a very fast clip. That being said, there simply aren’t very many countries and even less ones that made the successful leap to rich world status regardless of the political regime. There’s a huge small sample problem here. And then of course there’s also a huge endogeneity problem. The literature in general has found a weak positive association between democratization and growth. And that’s about the most we can say. Stop worrying about the data not being on your side; it isn’t on anyone’s side.
  • greenavocado 3y ago
    That's not quite accurate. The dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for most of the post-war period has led to critiques regarding the vibrancy of political competition and the effective functioning of democracy. The chaebols, those massive family-run conglomerates, have essentially been the architects behind South Korea's economic renaissance since the '60s. Think Samsung, Hyundai, LG - these giants spearheaded the transformation from a post-war economy to an industrial powerhouse, under the guidance of policies favoring heavy industrialization and export-led growth. It's fascinating to see how the government played matchmaker here, doling out financial support and monopolistic privileges like candy at a parade. This strategic play birthed the "Miracle on the Han River," flipping the script from poverty to prosperity. But, as with all tales of meteoric rise, there's a darker subplot. The symbiosis between the chaebols and political elites isn't all roses. Issues of corruption, nepotism, and economic dominance cloud this success story, leading to a wave of calls for corporate governance reform and efforts to dilute their power. On a different note, South Korea's journey to democracy is a saga of its own. Decades of authoritarian rule gave way in the late '80s, thanks to the collective might of students, intellectuals, and labor activists. The June Democratic Uprising in '87 was a game-changer, forcing the military regime's hand to pave the way for democratic reforms and the country's first free presidential election later that year.
    • thisislife2 3y ago
• greenavocado 3y ago
  > It's similar to how commitees have never built successful startups. At the early phases, you need a decisive and singular leader. And then in the late phases you stagnate and get overthrown. Am I right?
• hayst4ck 3y ago
  CGP grey did a great video on The Dictators Handbook: https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/rules-for-rulers https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/rules-for-rulers It is well worth a watch. Anyone with an interest in democracy (or corporate politics or dominance hierarchies) definitely should watch it. I feel that his discussion of the making of the video was even more interesting (although long winded): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo The interesting conclusion that he draws in the discussion of the video is that all systems of governance are dependent upon responsible people getting into positions of power and then choosing to act responsibly rather than selfishly. The key insight is that getting into the position of power is corruptive and you have to make personal sacrifices to not be corrupted.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  There are endless success stories: Brazil, India, much of China's economic boom came from liberalizing and moving toward democracy (a process reversed by Xi), Eastern Europe, Japan, much of Taiwan's and S Korea's boom's. Singapore was mostly (but not sufficiently) democratic. In fact, there is no other form of government that is remotely close. All the wealthiest, most free countries in the world are democracies. Also, we have become so steeped in nationalism that we miss the true goal and point of it all: The freedom and prosperity of individuals. Raising aggregate wealth is not the goal - as we have seen recently, that means nothing to the people it doesn't benefit. Dictators and their syncophants say, 'only we can just ignore human rights, property rights, etc. and do X'. That doesn't help their victims. Democracy ensures that everyone has a seat at the table (imperfectly, and we can do it better - and we will do it faster if you'll help).
• imtringued 3y ago
  The thing is, naive democracies believe that the IMF is giving them advice in their best interest, but in reality most countries that sent from developing to developed status had to break most of the IMF rules. I'm talking about countries like Japan.