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Comment by VladimirGolovin | Hacker News Reader

Our government has no incentive to retain them. Their main source of money is not small / medium / innovative business taxation - it's oil and other natural resources. And you don't need higher education and talent to extract oil. Actually, you don't need any population at all.

As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate.

Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education.

BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

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Many dictatorships eventually failed due to a lack of brains. The Third Reich is a prime example of this.

What? The German war machine was extremely efficient compared to its counterparts, especially if you compare the asymmetric casual count. Many technologies such as radar or jet aircraft were first used by the Germans. I'm pretty sure Germany lost because several countries united, and took heavy casualities fighting rather than a failure of the education aystem.

The 'lack of brains' argument holds if you're looking at the Third Reich leadership rather than Germany as a nation. Aside from the poor choice of trying to take on both the USSR and the USA, near the end of the war, the Third Reich made a number of awful military tactics and logistics decisions that accelerated their loss.

What? Albert Speer pulled off a "armaments miracle" where production increased despite allied bombings. [1]

Hitler got extremely far in the war against the USSR, and probably lost (in his words [2]) because the USSR rapidly moved production beyond Nazi reach. Also the USSR had a resolve to send millions of people in near suicide waves, something the French refused. Also the unwillingness of the Japanese to attack the USSR [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge

Most of the brilliant scientists and engineers behind that technology were trained before the Nazis came to power.

This is necessarily true because the Nazi's were in power for less than 15 years. Nevertheless, many scientists, specifically those whose work was directly applicable to war effort received significant support. For example, Wernher von Braun, a large part of those thesis was classified.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

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