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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Autocracies are only short-term efficient. Once their initial aims are met, they become terribly inefficient, then corruption sets in, and then they must be forcibly removed.

It's good for other nations who can benefit from their trailblazing, but bad for the nation itself because they're basically fucked in the future when the bill comes due.

Centralization is long-term the worst kind of governance, inevitably becoming as self-serving as kingdoms and monopolies. The bigger it is, the worse it gets and the sooner it gets there.

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Even in the ideal case, where your central planners are competent and moral indefinitely, centralization is a swingy strategy, for countries or companies. Every investment is ultimately a bet, that you have correctly predicted the future needs of your citizens or customers. Centralized control, of states through an autocrat or central committee, or of markets by monopolies or megacorps, ultimately amounts to placing fewer, larger bets. When the bets are good, it is very very good; when the bets are bad, it is ruinous.

Decentralized decision making is ultimately conservative, risk adverse: it is never great -- a lot of people will be wrong, so things will never go as good as they might. But it is seldom terrible: even when context shifts and the underlying conditions everyone was betting on change, the wide diversity of bets means that at least some people won't have been completely wrong, maybe for stupid reasons, but it can prevent a complete catastrophe.

(The difficulty, of course, lies in socializing the losses and gains, so that you can benefit from decentralized decision making without it ultimately reverting to a de facto central committee through successive rounds of winnowing those who guess wrong, until the small number of people who had so far guessed right can begin guessing wrong at scale.)

> Autocracies are only short-term efficient. Once their initial aims are met, they become terribly inefficient, then corruption sets in, and then they must be forcibly removed.

From the point of view of Western individualism, yes. However, a strong autocracy relies on building a strong collective identity through education and the cultural institutions. That identity isolates the individual from his personal beliefs and justifies his suffering, for the purpose of collectively achieving "macro" goals.

A major mistake is to judge non-Western socio-economic systems through the lens of the Western intellectual tradition.

> strong collective identity

This makes a society weaker - it's effectively a monoculture that restricts the data available to the decision makers.

It also reduces a societies ability to innovate in art, culture and eventually technology and science - innovation requires the ability to take an outside view, to be self-critical, and a society that is too busy forging a 'strong collective identity' will make it harder for individuals to do that.

It even poisons a societies own understanding of itself and its history, since we have so far failed to come up with good ways of building a 'strong collective identity' without accepting and promoting lies about history.

> This makes a society weaker

I think there's some truth to this. But rampant individualism also makes society weaker. It reduces a societies ability to collaborate.

As with most things, you need to find a balance between the two. All-or-nothing is rarely a good approach, no matter what you're talking about. Everything taken to extremes turns bad.

> rampant individualism also makes society weaker. It reduces a societies ability to collaborate.

Let's not mistake diversity for individualism. We can be diverse, yet share overarching ideals - such as living together peacefully and in solidarity.

> We can be diverse, yet share overarching ideals - such as living together peacefully and in solidarity.

We can, but increasingly I see people arguing that we should forgoe those and determine our actions in society based on our own individual interest and market mechanisms.

Increasingly I see people argue we should take up a socialist society.

Not hard to see why a raise in either of the above would result in the other side getting even more extreme in reaction.

I feel like capitalism vs. socialism is a false dichotomy. We could and should have a society with somewhat equitable outcomes that nevertheless uses market mechanisms to achieve that. It's this cold war attitude of us vs. them which is the problem.

I probably agree with this, at least to some extent, but if the question is what is the better form of society, I'm not sure how relevant it is.

You can have societies that are very community minded and govern them in a free way and with a democracy. You can try to govern very individualistic societies with an autocracy.

There's probably an optimum level of accepted dissent in a society, depending on what it wants to achieve, and I tend to think that social democracies come the closest to achieving it, and certainly much closer than most autocracies.

The Western urge for constantly rethinking and reevaluating history and traditions, for innovations in art and science, does not lead to an inherently stable society in the long run that spans across centuries. The changes themselves introduce new kinds of problems requiring new solutions, and that affects the societal structure in unpredictable ways.

Japan and South Korea are western only in a superficial sense, in that they have copied the basic institutional structure of the industrialised West. However, the main forces acting on that structure are rather different, and the main actor is certainly not the "egoistic, cold, self-interested, autonomous individual".

> The Western urge for constantly rethinking and reevaluating history and traditions, for innovations in art and science, does not lead to an inherently stable society in the long run that spans across centuries

I'm not clear what you're saying here. Are you saying that it would be a good thing if society in western countries were more like what it was 400 years ago? Enormous improvements in science, technology, culture and civil society grew out of that 400 year history, and regressing or remaining static over that 400 years would be a disaster.

The only way to have a stable society that spans across centuries is to have a society that can change and incorporate new ideas, technology, people and ways of doing things. It's societies that aren't flexible and strong enough to cope with change that are unable to remain stable over long periods of time.

China as a nation dealt with 'change' in the form of white men on awesome ships with awesome guns coming and having their way for 100 years.

Going from their nadir in WWII to what they are now in 70 years seems awfully adaptable to me.

China was at the same level, or higher, in development as Europe in 1600.

By 1700, and certainly by 1800, Europe's interest in science, which then led to developments in advances in technology. This technology is what allowed the "white men on awesome ships with awesome guns" to have their way.

Perhaps if China was so top-down they could have also developed themselves more.

Toby Huff examines this disparity in his books Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution. A Global Perspective and The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West. The telescope was embraced in the West, but hardly used (except with a few isolate individuals) in the other major cultures in the 1600s.

I think it's more about multipolar vs unipolar.

The time period you describe includes multiple massive european wars between nation states who were incentivized to improve industrialization, logistics and yes technology.

China's periodic bloody uprisings don't create the same incentive, they basically didn't have foreign policy until it came knocking.

If anything, China is an example of a society NOT stable over long term. Here in the West, we basically had two large disturbances in 2000 years: collapse of Western Roman empire (which wasn't even as bad it they made it look because most economy was in the Eastern part of it, that fared reasonably well through that crisis), and Black Death. As a big big stretch, one can also point at Napoleonic Wars and WWII but neither was nearly as bad, not even comparable to the disturbances Chinese society was going through almost every century in the same period.

And their collective identity (or huge population) didn't help them fighting wars either, they miserably lost almost every conflict they got in, even ones with themselves.

> had two large disturbances in 2000 years

Your definition of "large disturbance" is pretty narrow. You missed things like the renaissance, the reformation (and subsequent proliferation of non-catholic faiths), the hundred year war, the thirty year war, two world wars, ...

A stable society that spans centuries can stagnate. See Imperial China and Japan before Admiral Perry showed up.

In 1600, the Chinese (and Moghul India) were probably more advanced than Europe in many respects, but there seemed to be little to no desire for further development. The telescope, which kicked off a revolution in the West, was basically ignored. When the Jesuits showed up in 1595, the China still thought that the Earth was flat:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Ming_Dynasty_in_Chi...

As science developed so did technology, and the European powers were able to basic steam roll over everyone else a century later.

Fantastic! Compare this utterly bullshit Chinese world "map" from 1609: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Sancai_T...

With Piri Reis map from 100 years before: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91XW2CEmU4L...

(which is a part of an atlas, picturing many areas of the world with literally amazing detail and precision)

Granted, Piri Reis did an amazing job, even raising a few conspiracy theories on how he did it, but here is the fairly average European map of the world from 1609:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3200.ct001217r/

> it's effectively a monoculture that restricts the data available to the decision makers

Would you call Singapore a "weak society" with little ability to innovate? It's essentially what GP was describing.

Not GP, but imo Yes.

Singapore is the best example of a monoculture in a diverse environment. Systematic rejection of one community and elevation of the other in government, education, military, etc. Not to mention how difficult it is to get citizenship if you're not Chinese in some form.

Also where are Singapore's innovations? Apart from building a fancy city, they have done nothing. Many Singaporeans comfortable enough and well off that I know often rush to settle down in Australia or USA or the UK, especially in tech. Why is that?

Singapore is a really good magnet for entrepreneurs from other places, but nothing much otherwise. A very artificial place with zero arts and culture - heck, they destroyed their primary language (Cantonese) in schools so as to be cozy with China for business.

In a person, inability to critically self-examine or tolerate criticism from others is a sign of a weak person not a strong person. It's the same in countries.

I'm not sure I agree that the GPs description is a good description of Singapore, but to the extent that it is, I believe Singaporean society is weaker for it.

> This makes a society weaker - it's effectively a monoculture that restricts the data available to the decision makers.

Bingo ! A monoculture is really weak because people that act the same and think the same. It's the reason even though Asia has over 2/3s of world population they are not responsible for 2/3s of all innovation in the world.

They make up for it by learning from everyone. They even send their kids all over the world to go to university.

In what way is Asia a monoculture?

So, it never crossed your mind that racist write people enslaved Asia for hundreds of years?

They destroyed the Asian government, drugged the Asian population, and forced financial restitutions on the Asians to pay for their their own enslavement.

But yet, here we are. Hundreds of years later, and the Asian countries are finally shaking off their colonial enslavement from the white man. And here you are, claiming that they add nothing to the world’s innovations.

It’s just a thought. And maybe something you should consider first before judging others.

China hasn’t been a colony since when? 100 years ago? Then it was Japanese colonialism. So Asian colonialization of other Asians. Then China decided on a political system that stunted their growth for 40 years. Vietnam stunted their growth for 25 years. Yet we blame the white man?

You seem to think that a society can turn on a dime. And that past historical grievances does not factor into modern day realities.

Some parts do turn on a dime. Recovery tends to take longer in many cases because people are slow to assume that the cause of bad times won't come back. This can be good or bad depending on what the correct reaction to bad times is. If the correct action is saving that is very different from the correct action to be not doing anything.

You're conflating autocracy with collectivism. Collectivism exists in a very healthy fashion in democracies / free markets (for example Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Hong Kong before the clampdown).

Eastern collectivism doesn't need a rod of iron to enforce it.

The notion of a "strong collective identity through education and the cultural institutions" that "isolates the individual from his personal beliefs and justifies his suffering" is not uniquely Eastern. It has a long history in Europe, with mixed results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationalism

Call me cynical but climate change, the biggest threat to mankind right is right in front of us. We will also face the biggest threat to what made our civilization and our democracy possible, which is cheap quasi-unlimited access to energy (petrol in our case). Combine both and I don't see democracies as being able to efficiently navigate us out of this combined nightmare to come.

As you said, autocracies are efficient for hard problems, and we're going to face the hardest very soon

Not necessarily. Autocracies don’t self-correct when it’s needed: dissent is not tolerated and dissenters are automatically out-group and dealt with accordingly.

I can see a very bad version of the trolley problem in our future. Do we let go of capitalism and democracy for a while in order to save the species or do we hang on to them and possibly lose it all? Autocracy can always be gotten rid of at some point, at least, you'd hope. With present day tech it might be a ratchet that once it clicks will not get reversed.

1°C rise per century.

1 foot ocean rise per century.

Threat?

Unmitigated, the forecasts are around 5°C in this century.

Unimitigated, the forecasts are around 3-7 feet sea level rise this century.

Both of these massively increase the probability of non linear disasters including the release of methane from permafrost and ocean floors, or the disruption of the Gulf stream which would disrupt global agriculture even worse than a 5 degree temperature rise.

There is no indication that problems are going to be linear related to temperature increase. Maybe it will be twice worse, maybe 20 times worse, who knows.

Among the many problems, you can expect heat to be so hot that 1 billion people will be living in a place where it's not physically possible to live (humidity doesn't allow the body to cool down): https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/05/04/world-he.... It won't exactly be all roses to the other billions too

Could be a meter this century. And if temperature keeps rising, glaciers will only melt faster. But that's just the sea level; there's also changing weather patterns, disrupted ecological systems, more powerful hurricanes.

It's absolutely a bigger threat than the terrorism that everybody was so eager to throw away their freedom for 19 years ago.

Everything's freezing again all the glaciers are growing again, climate change models predict next 50 years are going to be some of the coldest in a very long time..... threat?

I absolutely agree! I am just really struggling to put a time estimate on when the bill will come due for china. I think they can be in an upward trend for some more years as a technological follower. What I mean by that is that they use simple metrics of current technology (Ghz, GB, battery life, screen colors, electric car range and so in) and just “mandate” to get better in them. But all these things will eventually commoditise and if china wants to grow beyond that they have to come up with qualitative innovation. At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china. I think that is the point where their system (of this extreme obedient school system etc.) might start to struggle. I think the upper bound for that point would be a per capita gdp like south korea has (but probably much lower).

After that point (which might be in lets say 10-20 years) there can still be a veeery long downward slope (the soviet union lasted for 69 years).

I would be very interested in what other people think about this (and these timelines)

> At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china

This argument never sounded very true and intellectually honest to me. I mean, I want to believe in it, but when I scrutinize it precisely, I wonder - how can you measure the ability to innovate of someone who doesn't want (or need) to innovate?

At present time, China's competitive advantage is cheap specialized labour, and they're taking full advantage of that - as they should. That's the whole point of being behind in technology and racing to catc up! It might very well be that when they switch their focus, from copying to innovating, they'd be very good at that as well (or very bad! we literally have very little data to tell)

If you look at Japan and Korea who took the same approach of "cheap specialized labour", they both pivoted to high quality, and more innovative once they caught up. I have no doubt China will do the same, but at much larger scale. There's already a lot of innovative consumer products coming online, which I'd attribute to the vibe of rapid and efficient hardware products iteration in Shenzen.

Japan and Korea are collective societies, not autocratic ones.

China's goal under Xi is a return to the golden age of the Kingdom of Heaven, where all Chinese people exemplify the ideals and morals of the most civilized society on Earth. That goal is only tangentially related to the technical innovations they're making, and will eventually stifle them as the definition of "good citizen" and "proper pursuits" becomes more hardened and inward-looking (much like it did during the Middle Kingdom).

Maybe or maybe not. Given that they're basically picking a very similar recipe from the economical development playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if they arrive at a similar outcome. And South Korea was ran by violent dictarors until its recent democratic history. I don't think the same will happen to China, but I wouldn't dismiss the ability of its citizens to innovate based only on the autocratic nature of their government. It's not like if the Chinese people are deprived of imagination. They have it, and they have the ability to act on it, and they do.

The autocratic environment might not be most amenable to free thinking and innovation, but then I'm not convinced that being free from autocracy is truly necessary for innovation to occur. Plenty of innovation occurred when Europe was ruled by Kings, or in 1900 Russia. Even within autocratic corporations, plenty of innovation occur.

Anyways, I don't wish for autocratic governments, but I'm not willing to dismiss China's ability to be innovative based on that.

Many of the innovators in medieval Europe and Soviet Russia were seen with suspicion, when not outright persecuted. Innovation, beyond safe incremental productivity improvements, requires nonconformism and unconventional thinking. After all, why would you create something new if you are content with what you have?

How do innovative transportation technologies(SpaceX, Hyperloop), food choice(plant, lab based meat), robots and AI, green tech, etc not "proper pursuits"?

They're good business, they offer more power to China, why would they change that?

And considering they're history, they've probably learned the lesson about the weakness of ignoring global technology.

And sure, they do have the "great firewall", but it's smart enough to let the science\technology in while filtering the politics out.

> And sure, they do have the "great firewall", but it's smart enough to let the science\technology in while filtering the politics out.

That's not true, and given the current trend (everyone gonna use TLS) it is impossible for the "great firewall" to be smarter. For example, HN is blocked in China.

They're very good at it. We have plenty of data to tell.

In the industrial sectors that I watch (test equipment, industrial machinery), China has been climbing the ladder at a startling rate, from "outsourced labor" to "copycat" to "bottom tier" to "mid tier" in the last decade. They're now gunning for high tier equipment, and they show every indication of getting there in the next few years.

They also invest in education, and especially in STEM. There are more Engineers being produced every year than their competitors.

How do you measure qualitative innovation? If research is a good measure of innovation, China is only second to the US in AI research, for example.

If innovation is measured by consumer adoption of new technology, TikTok is the first major AI-first consumer application. In other markets too, China has made major innovations in the consumer space that have not caught up in the West yet - ecommerce, fintech, consumer goods and more. None of these are top-down CCP mandated innovations.

If China is smart, and they are, they will simply outsource the innovation. If you have enough money you just poach innovators out of US/Europe; have them work remote if they don't want to come to China.

It will basically flip the "system" we have now.

As opposed to... what? Democracy?

You think that democracies are long-term efficient?

Democracies don’t have corruption?

Democracies don’t become self-serving?

I mean, I prefer to live in a democracy because of individual freedoms but it’s not terribly well-organized.

> Democracies don’t have corruption?

They sure do, but the distributed leadership means there's hopefully someone pushing against corruption, even if it's inconvenient for other goals of the government. Even if they don't succeed, at least they keep shining some light on it. (I'm looking at your Aussie government blocking the anti-corruption group)

> Democracies don’t become self-serving?

Same. There's always going to be some inefficiency, but the closer we are to actual democracy and the less biased it is, the better it seems at ejecting the self-serving members of the government.

Only short term efficient so far. All systems eventually suffer from rot, but efficient authoritarianism lasting more than one lifetime isn't impossible. Perhaps their political system there's more power in skimming growth than extracting rents. The history of democracy as we know it is very very short. Don't believe the cold war propaganda.

What system has lifted the most people out of poverty? It ain't American.

I think they're only as good as their autocrats, and not just in terms of good intentions. Singapore fared better than others, but it wasn't entirely centralized either.

The cogs in our governance (everyone else) are pretty rusty, though.

Indeed. Autocracies work great when they make the right decisions, but work horribly when they make the wrong decisions. It’s basically the govt picking winners and losers rather than letting the market select for them.

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