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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

The reason liberal democracy is so successful is because it's the safest system to become wealthy in through means that don't involve influence in a bureaucracy or paying off gatekeepers*. That means essentially anyone can become successful, which unleashes the potential of a much bigger proportion of the populace. This makes freer societies dramatically more innovative, industrious and successful.

* Gatekeepers still exist in liberal democracies, no system is perfect, but they don't control everything. The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.

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> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.

Not necessarily. Regulation can free citizens and business owners from enslaving business practices of powerful business. The mistake is to think that "free market", and much more so "free society", is the same as "no regulation". This is not true. Free markets, and especially free societies, need some regulation to keep the rich in their place and from smothering everyone around them.

I agree completely, see one of my other replies on this. I only meant the less influence they have on who wins and who loses, in the sense of picking and choosing.

> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have

which is why governments and corporations continue to expand and add more and more rules, regulations, verifications, safety checks, privacy violations etc... they have a vested interest in restricting, rather than promoting, freedom.

governments have no such vested interest.

existing corporations do, and yes, they are often successful at regulatory capture.

but ... private citizens, families, communities (geographic and of interest) also have a vested (and legitimate) interest in more rules and regulations, verifications, and safety checks, and sometimes (just sometimes) they are successful are getting government to implement these things.

when you look at a rule or regulation, you'd better be really sure about its history before you lay the blame at the feet of corporations seeking to restrict freedom.

In fact many regulations were fought tooth and nail by corporations. Environmental protection, tobacco health warnings, seat belt mandates, nutritional and content warning labels on food. Limitations on misleading adverts. Many, many more.

Arguably these regulations promoted competition. By raising awareness of these issues consumer information regulations helped new entrants promote innovative healthier or safer products. Increasing public confidence in a class of products can even make those products more popular.

Absent regulation individual companies can become locked into a race to the bottom that can turn a market into a cess pit. But introduce minimum quality standards and consumer confidence and participation can rise. There are spectacular examples of this in developing countries where effective regulation of financial services builds consumer trust and adoption of banking services. Used car sales and prices in many countries boomed when regulations were brought in to ensure customers were properly informed about the car's history and that the cars passed basic checks, because suddenly customers could trust that they weren't being ripped off. The narrative that regulations are necessarily bad for markets is simply not always true.

Right, and it's up to us to try and vote in politicians that militate against those tendencies, for example the way many financial regulations were swept away in the UK in the 1980s, or many examples of deregulation on airline industries (long way still to go), long distance telecoms and haulage industries.

Regulation is very much a two edged sword though. Too little and cartels and monopolies are unconstrained, and individual customers are too easily cheated by deceptive practices. Too much regulation and the cost of entry into markets gets too high. It's a constant balancing act.

> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have, and the bigger the incentives are for gatekeepers to help others achieve success.

I am personally concerned that gatekeeping is increasing significantly lately, and I'm concerned about the effects that will have on long term economic growth and inequality.

That's a nostalgic sentiment.

Looking at the top 10 richest people [0], most of them weren't born into anything close to the level of wealth they have now. None of them were poor, so "essentially anyone can become successful" is almost certainly an overstatement, but the ability to go from "raised by dentists/lawyers/professors/engineers" to "among the richest in the world" is evidence of considerable mobility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...

I spent more than a year working for the guy who went from "raised by ..." to "the richest man in the world". And when I say "working for", I mean "worked in the same converted garage".

Bezos' stratospheric economic "mobility" is not evidence of a more generalized economic mobility. In a system that is even vaguely capitalist, there will always be people who become incredibly wealthy without inheriting most of it. Their existence is not evidence of "considerable mobility", it's merely evidence of some sort of capitalistic economy.

The fact that the 10 richest people on earth were not born into stratospheric wealthy is a testament (of sorts) to capitalism; if you want to know about economic mobility, you're better off focusing on statistics, not the exceptions that prove the rules.

Exactly. We could have a system where every year 10 random poor people are chosen to become super wealthy. That isn't "economic mobility" in any meaningful or healthy sense.

How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile?

Is that the social mobility that we care about? Anyone who is willing to work hard and already has the means to attend an Ivy League school can become a billionaire.

Top 5% in the USA, or top 5% in the world?

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin were NOT top 5% in the USA. Depending what period in his childhood that you look at, Sergey Brin wasn't top 5% in the world either. (His family was educated, but they arrived in the USA as refugees from the Soviet Union.)

Several others started with rather less than you might expect. For example Elon Musk arrived in North America with only a few thousand dollars to his name, and had to work manual labor to get by. (Yes, his father was a businessman, but the two of them have a..difficult..relationship.)

It's my lived experience. I've watched it happen. Two of my jobs, both of my favourite ones in my careers, were working for companies founded by ordinary people from what I suppose are reasonably call disadvantaged backgrounds. One of them was started by Mo Ibrahim, who started life in Sudan too poor to afford shoes.

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

Though I agree with the sentiment and am all-in on democracy in general, personal stories are selection and survivor bias all the way down.

It might just be that you are the lucky one, and by definition, are surrounded by other lucky ones who landed similar jobs. Many millions others might have tried and failed and live in poverty or are dead. You'd need data on all those millions to talk about the % chance of someone succeeding, and to show it's better here vs there.

But that's all unhelpful. I think hope is important. I'd love to see us have a national consensus around equal opportunity, egalitarianism, and tolerance to different ways of life (and not just the "different" that I agree with!).

It’s possible to return to that prelapsarian state (at least to the degree it actually existed)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

Ah, the good ol' days.

Exactly

* The reason liberal democracy is so successful is because it's the safest system to become wealthy in through means that don't involve influence in a bureaucracy or paying off gatekeepers*

I think that is mostly unique to the US . Not at all a feature of all democracies. The meritocracy is still mostly intact in the US, whereas in other areas talent is not as greatly rewarded.

"Liberal democracies" are conflated with being part of the global upper class. Which major wealthy liberal democracy hasn't participated in colonialism or invasion in the last 200-300 years?

I assume there are proper aristocrats making your same argument about their way of life. That they are wealthy because they have the "right" system and not because they were born into a corner of the globe made prosperous by modern economic exploitation.

> "Liberal democracies" are conflated with being part of the global upper class. Which major wealthy liberal democracy hasn't participated in colonialism or invasion in the last 200-300 years?

There are a few. Switzerland, Norway, Sweden (depending on how far back you go), Iceland, Ireland.

And, if you're going back 200 years and thinking about Great Britain, well, sure, they had colonies. They also arguably were not a liberal democracy. They had parliament, but they also had the king. Who controlled international policy (which determined whether they had colonies)? I don't know enough to answer that, but I'm not sure they should automatically be put in the "liberal democracy" bucket.

The list of countries anywhere that haven't enthusiastically engaged in warfare at one point or another is rather short. Yes Britain conquered India, we have a bloody history, but show me any period in India's history before then that wasn't soaked in blood.

I'm not excusing anything, I'm just saying human nature is what it is, or has been historically. Power has generally been in the hands of warrior elites, because if it wasn't a warrior elite would come along and seize it. Liberal democracy, when it works, is a massive improvement on that state of affairs.

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