Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I think there is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that if the starting point is some society and it changes to be more free, the outcome is more wealth and comfort. I'd rather live in a free society.

That being said, the greatest improvement in the greatest number of people at the fastest rate is almost certainly a title held by the totalitarian government in China. Short-term but nevertheless evidence-based thinkers would struggle to see what the problem is with totalitarianism.

Also; reminder of my favourite thing-I-picked-up-from-a-bit-of-history, the other big advantage of democracies is they tend to be pretty reliable at winning wars. Voters are remarkably good at making armies work.

View on HN

> That being said, the greatest improvement in the greatest number of people at the fastest rate is almost certainly a title held by the totalitarian government in China.

If you're talking about the recent two decades, then specifically it's a totalitarian government adopting market reforms (i.e. freedoms) which imitate successful liberal democracies on their borders.

I'd also note that prior to the "Chinese miracle" was the "South Korean miracle" and before that the "Japanese miracle". China was the slowest and last, just the biggest population.

Also worth noting that Taiwan has a far higher GDP per capita. Admittedly, not a perfect comparison with China since they received decades of Japanese infra development.

Did the Japanese infra development come from a more free market Japan? I would think there is a chain involved somewhere along there.

The Japanese infra came from imperial Japan prior to the conclusion of WWII so I’m not sure how “free” market I would consider that since it was more of a totalitarian command economy.

South Korea's industrialization is under-appreciated. 8% a year for 20 years is pretty bonkers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Korea#Rapid_g...

Like China, authoritarian and protectionist. Though Park eventually drove the country in a democratic direction. He's seen like a combination of George Washington and Paul Bunyan in South Korea; wish there was a good bio of him in English.

I'm pretty extreme; I see all forms of government 'help' as the precursors for disaster. So I totally accept the argument that they are doing the correct thing by backing away from totalitarianism.

But unfortunately, the twin arguments that 'they aren't pure in their beliefs' and 'they are copying good ideas from elsewhere' and both devastatingly weak arguments if someone challenges them.

I would call on Western governments to copy what China has done that worked, except I don't trust them to identify it. I think they'd just import the surveillance state and ignore the "what about letting the capitalists capitalise?" idea.

I think it might be more like "fragile efficiency".

It is more efficient to take the best potato strain, grow it everywhere and feed everyone more efficiently. But then the whole population becomes very very dependent on one healthy potato.

Yeah, it's difference between efficient vs robust. Totalitarism might be more efficient short term but long term it will be set back much more. It just places too much responsibility/power on too few. You might get lucky or might not.

Problem with democracy is that it's susceptible to neocolonialism(bribery, power and economic diff, dissinformation, non-competive local market), that's why I guess all Asian economic miracles happened with good faith authoritarian government and with good geopolitical location that allowed them to close market without wars.

This would suggest that having big country nearby powerful neighbours is not a good place to be, which brings India to my mind. Wonder how it will turn out. On the other hand Canada and Mexico are doing quite fine. I expect big changes on governance when most of the world catches up od when we get fusion.

The point was more about narrowly describing the conditions under which they have succeeded, limiting how much you can conclude about the reasons.

Playing catch-up is always easier and faster. Growth requires risk-taking. but if you already know what "risks" to take by looking over the border at what the other country built, it's more just formulaic, which works great for a top-down approach. But once they stat getting into uncharted territory the top-down approach can switch from being the best to the worst as they inefficiently dump resources into the wrong directions.

> the totalitarian government in China

Yes, except that it started to work out when China stopped to try to be a fully planned economy (that killed millions) and started to work towards a more free market economy where people had more choices on where, and how to work.

It's to be seen how the young Chinese, more educated and more ambitious than the previous generation is going to work with the still totalitarian part of their government.

You're conflating market freedom and individual rights.

There are plenty of places (e.g. Singapore) where you had (still true today btw) very much of the first and precious little of the second and that can bee by many metrics regarded as great "social" successes.

It didn’t work out so well for the Athenians...

My naive guess (as someone who is not at all a historian) would be that democratic states historically tended to have more functional economies and thus won wars more often.

On the other hand, democracies can be particularly susceptible to demagoguery during wartime. This is what caused the collapse of the Athenian empire (at least if we’re to trust Thucydides’ account).

Democracy in the modern sense (universal suffrage, very large polities) is too recent an experiment to have strong data on that — the vast majority of the democratic experiment has been conducted under a US hegemony. I’m not sure the (also very limited) Ancient Greek example bears enough resemblance to the modern idea to be a useful comparison (I suggest also as a non-historian).

> I think there is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that if the starting point is some society and it changes to be more free, the outcome is more wealth and comfort.

On issues of political economy, I always like to reverse the arrow of causality to see if that could also be an explanation.

Is it increased wealth, or economic power, that leads to more freedom? I think there's a line of thinking that the US civil rights movement was caused by blacks becoming more economically important, thought I'm not familiar with the evidence. Likewise you could argue that UK industrial growth preceded women's right to vote, and various other freedom related things that happened.

Of course it could also be a virtuous circle, they both cause each other, and sometimes one or the other is ignited by some other thing.

> reminder of my favourite thing-I-picked-up-from-a-bit-of-history, the other big advantage of democracies is they tend to be pretty reliable at winning wars. Voters are remarkably good at making armies work.

Are they really? WWII was won by alliance of democracy and dictatorship. Same for WWI. Vietnam War does not seem to be clearly won by democracy either.

> Short-term but nevertheless evidence-based thinkers would struggle to see what the problem is with totalitarianism.

Their growth was due to copying the strategies and technologies developed in the free world, not due to totalitarianism. If anything, totalitarianism only slowed them down, just see the results of the cultural revolution.

I would argue that authoritarian government helped, as it's hard to bootstrap economy with open markets and democracy (bribery).

Democracy would work better if peoole would be paid better but also put to jail more. It's unfortunate dynamic od if not me then another one (will take bribe) is a weakness. Authoritarian govs require bigger foes (nation state) - see Irak, Libia etc.

It makes me think that USA legal bribes might be a genius move. At least there's way to fight malicious actors in legal way.

The modernisation of the Soviet Union under Stalin was also very impressive. They went from a feudal society with serfs, like Europe in the Middle Ages, to the first man in space rather quickly.

Of course, in both cases, China and the Soviet Union, ideas were being imported from elsewhere, though in the case of the Soviet Union, a lot of the space technology came from Nazi Germany ...

Probably best not to try to infer simple rules from history.

Serfs were emancipated in 1861, well before the 1917 Communist revolution.

China is totalitarian, but that might not be the reason why its economy is booming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com