Comment by tessierashpool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tessierashpool | Hacker News Reader

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> Authoritarian dictatorships are bad for many reasons. Ineffeciency when compared with more collaborative decision making processes is often not one of them.

this is one of those things which many people believe but which isn't actually true. authoritarian dictatorships are very often total chaotic shitshows.

the old line about Mussolini making the trains run on time is a great example. Mussolini used propaganda to claim that he made the trains run on time, and he did drive a few improvements to high-profile train lines in Northern Italy that were used mostly by elites and tourists, but trains in Mussolini's Italy were not efficient, not well-maintained (and therefore not safe), and they didn't run on time.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-sayi...

there's even an academic term for it: "the myth of fascist efficiency." Hitler's regime was also pure chaos, and he was largely regarded as a clown for most of his political career. authoritarian dictatorships lack legitimacy, so they're run by people who don't care if they're perceived as legitimate or not, which basically means fanatics and grifters. fanatics are too disconnected from reality to be highly effective, and grifters have a vested interest in chaos, since it makes their grift harder to detect.

Have you considered that Mussolini didn't care about the trains which weren't high-profile trains for elites? The person you're responding to said dictators do what they want efficiently, but don't care about what others want. Was Mussolini even trying to genuinely improve the lower class trains?

In Italy to this day the line about trains running on time is spoken with reference to lower class trains. So no matter what the fascist regime wanted to improve, the propaganda was about _all_ trains.

Mussolini would have said he cared about lower-class trains running on time whether or not he did.

Intuitively, a state with a dictator should be more chaotic than a democracy, because the decisiveness mentioned in the grandparent comment would result in a loss of coherence in policy, since all the interest groups in the government would not have been brought on board in time. At best, this would lead to miscommunication, at worst, revolt.

I'm not sure that decisiveness is a natural characteristic of dictatorship, though. Most dictators sit at the pinnacle of large networks of clients and rely implicitly on their network of relationships to maintain legitimacy. This would imply they would have to be more 'softly-softly' than an equivalent democracy, because they can't rely on all the systems democracies have to legitimize contentious decisions (elections, etc).

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24377232

dictators don't do what they want efficiently. nor do they do anything else efficiently.

if you were to read the links I posted in the comment you're replying to, you would discover that an expert who was there at the time reported that all of the trains were typically late during Mussolini's regime. this includes both the trains which were favored by elites, and the trains favored by the working class.

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