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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

This goes to a little-appreciated fact about democracy - the evidence suggests that while there is a common perception that democracy has failed in any given year, and that any given instance of incompetence will surely sink us all this time. But over time it consistently turns out that democracies are making consistently better decisions than the authoritarians. Similar to how liberty usually gets much better results but high-status people refuse to accept that the plebs can make decisions for themselves.

I think people just can't handle the complexity of distributed decision making, so are consistently biased to believe that small, centralised & appointed authorities make better decisions than the hive mind. Similarly to how everyone knows how a kingdom works, but people get hazy really quickly on how the successes of the worlds many parliamentary or republican systems of government actually function.

Dictators cannot manage multiple constraints simultaneously. Democracy is just better at resource allocation. Insofar as somewhere like China remains ahead of somewhere like India, I think it depends on the ability of the CCP to simulate a typical democracy internally. Once groupthink takes hold, without a release valve to turn over the people, I don't see how a government recovers.

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Another factor I'd argue is important but often not explicitly called out is the ability of a group of people to change their mind. Democracy provides this via elections -- and when elections become too disconnected from decision making, eg regulatory capture or excessive veto points or other mechanisms or emergent practices that insulate decisions from electoral consequences, democracies stop working as well.

Organizations, be they states or businesses or any other institution, that have a greater ability to change their collective minds aren't guaranteed to always make better decisions at any given moment, but over time they're able to course correct in a way that less flexible approaches simply can't.

I think it boils down to collection and processing of information. Add to that the fact that different actors in the system follow different kinds of goals. The real world is very complex and in order to transport information we need to simplify and quantify according to some model we made up. Further up instances work on the model instead of the real world. Those models become more and more abstract the further up in the chain you go. The reason for this is the limited information processing ability. One human brain can only handle so much. Talking or writing can only transport so much. An organization can only handle so much. We can have worse or better abstractions and less or more efficient organization structures and communication methods. But if your basic unit of information processing are humans with their limited brains it will always be difficult to do any central planning. Especially if the information gets distorted on the way and rules are not followed as they are intended. Then you need to add control systems that take further resources and control systems for the control systems and so on. I assume this is why central planning has failed in so many areas.

But what if we could create a super brain that can handle all the detail information collected at the lowest level and integrate it into one huge model of the state of the world? There would be no misaligned incentives inside of this brain, no communication bottleneck, no abstraction loss.

I'm sure that we won't "simply create" such a central instance and make it work in a single try. But I'm sure that it could work in some areas and produce very good results. Then it's up to our governments and society on how to use this power.

Efficient proprioception is useless if key behavioural incentives are misaligned with key aspects of the environment.

Humans are quite good at creating collective organisations that are delusional, even though some of those organisations have excellent information about the state of their environment, because the invented incentive structures for action favour simplistic short term "maximisation" of fetishised behaviours instead of optimisation for (even) the medium term healthy future. Resource allocation is still looking frighteningly suboptimal right now, and simply empowering that with a "smart" central AI bot following the same patterns probably won't improve much.

I'm skeptical about the human race getting past this. Humans want a lot of stuff, and are prepared to form huge organisations to get that stuff, without really thinking through whether they really need it, what the other impacts will be, or why they are even doing what they do.

What is the human race trying to be?

Why?

How does the pattern of incentives get aligned?

It seems like we only have the weakest responses to these questions right now.

Those are important questions we seem to desperately avoid as a society. Things are happening despite not having those answers.

My guess is that humans will be sidelined as AI is developing exponentially. There probably won't be a big war human vs machine instead we will probably see humans being turned into some kind of zoo animals as we already are if you look from far away. Then the AI will do its thing in space while we sit here happily staring into the stars.

Note that while I partially agree with this hypothesis this graph (can't see the whole article) does not speak to that.

What this graph shows is the reliability (or lack thereof) of the official statistics.

The data still shows a number of unfree countries showing significant GDP growth even if you look at the satellite based estimate. Many of them are still above many free countries. This is not surprising, because many of those unfree countries are early in their development curve and have had a lot of easy gains to make.

To support the hypothesis you present, you'd need to investigate how the growth rates of countries at a similar level of development, correcting for global trends, fare under different levels of authority.

That said, personally, my hypothesis is that sadly (because it's depressing in terms of how little impact changing government potentially has) regulatory and legal stability matters far more than specific government type. E.g. look up China's reported GDP growth before and after Deng got into power. China's growth after the revolution until Deng got into power was growth punctuated by massive crises that reset things whenever the rules changed under people. Once Deng got into power it stabilised even before his economic reforms, because while the system was still deeply authoritarian, people learn to play the game however rigged it is as long as the rules don't change all the time. Even deeply brutal dictatorships can see sustained growth - especially in developing countries growing from a small base with lots of easy wins - as long as they're consistent.

And that is exactly the primary danger of an authoritarian system for economic growth: It might well work fine for a while, and to stick to China they learned a lot from the stability Deng brought and have since been afraid to rock the boat, but with an autocratic system there's always a significant risk that the next leader will change the rules again.

Meanwhile, even really broken democratic governments rarely manages to more than slightly change the trajectory (there's a certain irony that I'm writing this from the UK after the last couple of weeks chaos, but even though I think our current UK government are idiots, I don't think they'll have much of a lasting effect) because they tend to tinker around the edges rather than fundamentally change the rules (e.g. consider the massive backlash the UK government faces over tinkering with tax rates)

Decentralized decision making is usually better because of the local knowledge problem. But not always. It's the wisdom of crowds vs madness of crowds dichotomy. That's why it's good to have constraints on democracy in the form of Constitution-type documents, and why representative democracy can sometimes be better than direct democracy. There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. It's not really a just or perfect system, it's just the best one we have, to recycle that old cliche.

Though a more common failure state is 2 wolves telling 98 sheep that "democracy sucks, don't listen to these experts/socialists/Jews, we need a strong wolf in charge" and getting 1/3 of the sheep to vote for them, in a near literal "When I voted for the Leopards eating people's faces party, I didn't expect the leopards to eat my face!" situation.

The most common failure mode is when governments don’t listen to the legitimate concerns of other groups, cherrypick the attacks made by a small minority, carry out reprisals to “deter aggression” and start to dehumanize the other population by claiming they are inherently fascist or dumb or bloodthirsty. Then their mass media selects only the things that reinforce “other group does bad things, our group simply makes some mistakes but has great intentions” and “other side must be defeated 100% or it will come back and can’t be trusted to uphold a deal”.

Example: When both Ukraine and Russia were in one federation called USSR (similar to USA, Yugoslavia or EU) then Crimea or some cities moving from Russia to Ukraine would have been regarded as an administrative change, requiring various adjustments to signs and flags. No one would even think of killing each other over which republic’s flag would fly over what territory, let alone escalating to a nuclear war that threatens to destroy human life on the planet. Think about how insane that is.

In a libertarian world, cities would simply vote for a free market of competing agencies providing police, road maintenance, etc. And the whole package of “services” from a state would be unbundled and not worth fighting over. The concept of “territorial integrity of a country” or “national armies” would not be something that would even matter. The people of Hong Kong or Catalonia or Kurdistan or Bangladesh would be pretty happy and not have to fight for their “independence”. Countries shouldn’t own people. People should self-organize to get their needs met in peaceful arrangements and that’s all.

That world exists in the imaginary term: the land of wonderful things we could have in the long term, if everyone would just not do the thing they absolutely will do in the short term.

All solutions that need everyone to "just" unfortunately have one thing in common: they fail.

It doesn't matter what could happen if everyone "just"—they won't. It doesn't matter that "but if they did"—they won't. It doesn't matter that "Ok, but if"—they won't.

"But if" is not a possibility, and operating like it is will only keep us from whatever progress toward that wonderful thing we could actually make, incomplete as it might be.

What would prevent a city from raising an army to go capture another city's natural resources by force?

This is the biggest risk right now. Not that democracies will make short-run bad decisions (they will, but that's probably survivable) but that democracies will vote away democracy.

It occurred to me that voting away democracy is an absorbing state. You get stuck there once you reach that state. So the law of large numbers is working against you. It just has to happen once.

> There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

That problem isn't entirely inescapable, though. There's a whole mathematical discipline on voting systems (social choice theory) - unfortunately the important results are mostly negative (google eg Arrow's impossibility theorem, Condorcet paradox,...), but the specific problem of the "dictatorship of the majority" has a solution in principle, namely quadratic voting. But yeah, we won't really ever get a perfect voting system.

>efficiently selects the outcome for which the population has the highest willingness to pay

Majority rule does the same, no?

only if there are only two options, for more options any rank-ordering system will be plagued by Arrow's and other impossibility theorems. quadratic voting uses cardinal preferences, which avoids some of those issues, and QV specifically has linear marginal cost of votes, which can be shown to be optimal in a very simplified mathematical model of voter preferences.

but I don't want to evangelize QV too much here, it has enough proponents already and I'm not fully convinced that's is resilient to problems like collusion

You don't need collusion when quadratic voting works only in hypothetical cases.

It's something I haven't studied before. Why does quadratic voting solve the dictatorship of the majority problem? Do you mean to say that it attenuates the worst effects even if it doesn't solve it completely?

oh wow, I really got drawn into a discussion here. now I'm not an expert on QV, but my recollection is this: cardinal voting allows people to express the strength of their preferences rather than just the order. so if there's an issue that a minority cares about a lot while the majority is just indifferent, then the minority can concentrate their votes on that issue and move it higher up the ballot (more so than in an ordinal voting system).

so in your example, if the wolves have a 2/3 preference for sheep for dinner and 1/3 for apples, and the sheep has a 100% preference for apples, then with linear voting the group decision would be 5/3 vs 4/3 in favour of apples. with quadratic voting, the vote weights would be sqrt(1)+2sqrt(1/3) for apples and 2sqrt(2/3) for sheep, and apples would still win. so in this example, the sheep can push the group decision because its preference is stronger than the wolves', something it couldn't express by just ranking the options (if the wolves had a 100% for sheep, that would still win)

so as we just saw, there are different ways to implement cardinal preferences, and QV is one of them that has been shown to be optimal under some standard (but still debatable) utility assumptions.

that being said, if we were going to seriously consider implementing QV, I'd still have a lot of questions - I mentioned collusion, but also about manipulation resistance: what if the wolves anticipate this outcome and strategically misrepresent the relative strength of their preferences to make sure that their absolutely preferred option wins? they could still do that even without collusion. it's another common problem in voting mechanisms, I don't know how strong that problem is in QV (maybe the manipulation would be exponentially hard to compute, or very easy, Idk rn)

> There's also the inescapable incentive conflict of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

I don't think that situation is THAT common, given that usually the majority of people has the same problems, usually economic. Biggest exception would be immigration, since immigrants are generally in lower numbers, especially the ones that can actually vote.

The problem is that voters outside of that issue will be mostly apathetic due to information asymmetries + finite bandwidth to care about issues + active disinformation and propaganda by lobby groups.

So much the case that you don't even need a majority to get negative sum policies passed. The same dynamic happens with sufficiently determined minorities. Here's a few examples. Agricultural subsidies, carried interest loophole, local planning laws, lack of action on global warming.

The cases of majority rule leading to negative sum policies are probably more rare than the impact of determined minorities. Although I can think of Black voter disenfranchisement and immigration laws off the top of my head.

It's partly a money in politics issue, but it's also deeper than that. Farmers will actively vote out anyone who wants to take away their subsidies. Non-farmers don't care enough one way or the other, because the cost is dilute. You don't need direct money in politics for that mechanism to play out.

> Democracy is just better at resource allocation.

Only in certain ways.

Counter-examples: Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons. 108 billion pounds of food is wasted, which equates to 130 billion meals. $218B per year. 19% of all crop lands, and more water than Texas, California and Ohio combined. [1] Grown, then thrown out. Enough to feed all the world's hungry.

Free markets fail to price externalities all the time. Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and costs about $0.10/kWh. A human life is generally costed at $10M by actuaries for these purposes [2] so at 25 deaths per TWh, the human cost alone is $0.25/kWh. Coal power should cost $0.35/kWh, and yet, it's nowhere close. This leads to terrible resource allocation.

On the other hand, authoritarianism built China 24,000 miles of high-speed rail since the mid-2000s. That's good resource allocation. The US has 49.9mi total. Without the need to plan for a 2-4 year election cycle, the government can execute multi-decade initiatives effectively. Like HSR, and like OBOR. [3]

I'm of course not advocating for authoritarianism, however some introspection here is warranted, and the current situation isn't a 'pat ourselves on the back' moment. What we need isn't more freedom but just a little bit less, an approach where we staple the actual cost of the things we do onto them so that the market can then take over and do what it's good at.

A little respect for our rivals would go a long way IMO.

[1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report....

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...

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

Perhaps wasting 40% of food is economically optimal for us? As food becomes cheaper relative to other things, you'd expect waste to increase.

Nah, that's all democracy at work. The Farm Bill's continuous reauthorization since the New Deal to placate the voting populace in swing states subsidizes many crops to below their cost of production. Americans spend less of their paychecks on food than any other country on Earth. It's again a case of mis-priced externalities leading to poor resource allocation.

Maybe food production in America is subsidized and therefore artificially cheap but there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter)

>there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter)

If in the process you used practically finite fertilisers in the form of phosphorus from Morocco and nitrogen from fossil fuels, etc then you may wish to rethink that.

Ultimately phosphate is going to have to be recycled or extracted from much less concentrated sources. The average abundance in the Earth's crust is 0.1%, so supplying current world phosphorus demand (about 22 million tonnes/year; equivalent to 50 million tonnes/year of P2O5) would require mining about 9 cubic kilometers of rock per year. Difficult but not impossible.

aren't fertilizers mainly produced using the haber-bosch process which takes nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere, directly from air and combines it with hydrogen which is split from water, producing oxygen as a waste product which can itself be sold for oxygen cutting, scuba, and more?

of all the things that are limited in this world, this seems like it ranks among the least concerning. Sure, it takes electricity, but that itself can be much more efficiently collected going into the future

That's nitrogen fertilizer. Phosphate and potassium (the other two major plant nutrients) are currently obtained by mining. Potassium will ultimately be available from seawater (although the estimated land resource would supply current global demand for thousands of years), so is not as much a problem as phosphate.

But you are right that making nitrogen fertilizer doesn't require fossil fuels. It would be a major market for "green hydrogen", which would be a great dispatchable demand to help smooth variability in renewable power output and in other demand.

Ok let's at least not under-sell the problem. It's not "a few squishy potatoes" it's almost half of all food. Like you go to Subway, order a foot-long. The person behind the counter makes two, hands you one, and throws another into the garbage. Every single time you eat. I'm not so sure that's a good allocation of resources.

20% of farmland in the entire United States is doused in fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. Enough water for 3 states (which are running out, btw). Fossil fuels to for tractors, for fertilizers, for transportation, and logistics. All so you can throw it out.

So of course there are externalities: labor, land, water, environment, fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides, run-off, topsoil depletion and plenty more. All of which is not nearly as big a deal if it's done to achieve a goal rather than to appease the voters in Iowa. These are classic externalities that aren't priced in when you subsidize corn to below the cost of production.

I have to question the figure. There is food, and there is food. Wasting a pound of grain is much less of an issue than wasting a pound of beef. I suspect most of the wastage is in the lower value materials (obviously, there is less penalty to wasting them). And I suspect it doesn't include the stuff going to feed animals, which I suspect is used more efficiently (because it is simpler and those eating it cannot complain.)

The figure is echoed by the USDA. [1]

The report I linked in the original post includes a breakdown of exactly where food is wasted on pages 14 to 30. [2]

There's a pie chart on page 10 which includes a breakdown by kind of food too, as a percentage of waste by weight.

- Dairy: 19.1%

- Vegetables: 19%

- Fruit: 13.9%

- Grain: 13.9%

- Added sugars and sweeteners: 12.6%

- Meat, fish and poultry: 11.5%

- Fats and oils: 7.5%

- Eggs: 2.1%

- Tree nuts and peanuts: 0.4%

[1] https://www.usda.gov/peoples-garden/food-access-food-waste/f...

[2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report....

So, yep, meat is a small % of what's wasted. I bet the percentage of meat wasted is much smaller than the % of food overall.

Ok but remember that that's by-weight. Energy drops by a factor of 10 for each trophic level. One pound of meat requires 2.5-3 pounds of grain and 1847 gallons of fresh water.

It also requires 3 pounds of grain and 4.5 gallons of water per gallon of milk and dairy is almost 20% of the waste.

The scale of this waste is mind-boggling.

Yes, meat is at the top of a trophic pyramid, so it reflects much more production of plants (to feed the animals). If meat is used more efficiently, then that means there's much less "waste" going on there (except the inherent inefficiency of making meat from plants, but that's not what we're talking about with that 50% figure.)

> Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons.

Put another way, free markets produce 67% more than required. When it comes to food, most populations that eat prefer a market that favors the buyer.

But that is inefficient resource allocation.

We could reduce the waste food production and reduce 'carbon' output from USA.

Presumably next someone will point at another country and say 'they're worse'. That may be true, but it doesn't make the free market efficient, not make externalised environment damage go away.

That is efficient resource allocation, optimizing for scarce and important resources (in the case of USA, labor and customer convenience/time) at the expense of abundant and thus unimportant resources (in the case of USA, food).

Au contraire, the US is so wealthy and efficient at food production that to waste food is much more efficient than to spend the manpower to allocate or recycle it properly. (Most food waste goes into sewage and trash, which is efficient on a per worker basis.)

On the other hand, the second round of China's high speed rail investments are not expected to ever pay themselves off, and so the question as how "good" HSR is in China requires considering its positive economic and environmental externalities. There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution).

The US certainly has a problem with decentralization making it harder to build large infrastructure, and the US path of infrastructure development has been corrupted by car companies, but I would argue the real vice of the US system is its failure to build maintainable infrastructure: roads are left to crumble quite simply because there are too many of them, serving too few people to make their maintenance affordable.

>There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution).

That would be terrible for the climate no? Also I think rail is very much undersold in most places. On one hand airtraffic is given an unfair advantage over other modes of transportation in that it's fuel is basically not taxed across the board by most countries. On the other hand for road traffic the cost of infrastructure is socialised too and unfairly so. Industrial truck transport does lots lots more damage to roads than cars or the like yet they rarely pay the price for that. (where a special vignette does exist it generally doesn't match the cost) Meanwhile the environmental cost of road and air traffic is appropriately applied.

You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse.

While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems. Similar to their situation with unoccupied apartments: too expensive for most people, and riddled with safety problems (e.g. concrete made from sea sand). China is a great example of how authoritarian countries can produce stats that look good on paper (km of high-speed rail, number of houses), but when you look behind the curtain it's often crap. It's a house of cards to keep that 8% GDP growth on paper. But on the ground there are thousands of high-rise apartments with corroding rebar.

> You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse.

China is building 150 new nuclear power plants in the next 15 years (more than the entire rest of the world has built in the last 35 years) [1] and is adding solar capacity faster than anyone on earth, going from 0.1GW in 2007 to 307GW in 2021. [2]

> While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems.

For now. Safety problems will be resolved and people will move to live alongside the rail lines, which is a chicken-egg problem the US refuses to solve. It starts to look a whole lot better 10 or 20 years down the line.

[edit] @elosius: They've more than tripled nuclear generation in China since 2014, going from 100TWh/yr to 350TWh/yr - from 1% of power to 5% of power. Also, they've made huge strides in terms of air quality. Stop looking backwards, and start looking forwards. Air quality improvements will follow. [3]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

[3] https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-...

"Planning to in the next 15 years" doesn't speak to the current reality, the one wherein the US has a much more diversified portfolio of energy production, and far better air quality.

China also started industrializing many decades after the US.

Slight correction - I think sea sand is okay in concrete, it's the desert sand that's no good, too rounded. But there's a lot of desert sand in China.

You're also correct, but sea sand contains salt, which is corrosive to the steel reinforcement bars and reactive with other minerals. Such concrete fails catastrophically.

- The world produces far more food than necessary to feed everyone. The fact Americans are rich enough to e.g. let a pack of strawberries rot in the fridge is not a huge moral failing. Hunger is a political problem, not a logistics problem. America donates more than any other country in the world, not just in absolute terms but a per capita basis.

- We wouldn’t understand the economics of externalities without freedom of thought and expression necessary to cultivate vibrant academic life. China is on a trajectory to become the #1 environmental polluter on a per capita basis. No, it’s not because America outsources industrial production to China. China also severely overfishes. Bad economic decisions and neglect of externalities are not exclusive to democracy.

- China’s capacity and political will to build infrastructure is impressive. (Though plenty of countries like Norway also do that.) The problem with the authoritarian style of unchecked decision making is that they built far, far too much HSR. Without any cost/benefit analysis, they’ve ended up with a huge maintenance burden and many lines that are rarely used money pits. https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk

American governance does suffer from a culture of adversarial legalism, and an excess of citizen voice. That includes NIMBYism, environmental review, multiple conflicting layers of government, and other features that give small groups the ability to mount challenges to or veto beneficial projects.

https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...

>China is on a trajectory to become the #1 environmental polluter on a per capita basis. No, it’s not because America outsources industrial production to China.

Just a reminder that the average american still puts out about twice as much CO2 as the average EU citizen or Chinese and whilst China will or already did surpass the average European I'm not sure about them going up to the current average American output.

And no they won't take the 1# spot on a per capita basis. That spot will probably remain reserved for some among the petrostates for a good while still.

China's HSR is ~$900B in debt and most lines are expected to never pay themselves off.

And coal usage in China has risen while it has fallen in the US.

This is the "economic calculation problem" critique of economic planning proposed by the Austrian school[0]. A planned economy is sort of like having a single sysadmin manage all the resource levers for a data centre, whereas the free market is more like Kubernetes.

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

Human thinking naturally aligns towards authoritarianism, winner-takes-all, strict unbreakable hierarchies. The only reason democracies are so common in the world nowadays is that they end up being so successful, even the minority accidental democracies end up having a disproportionate influence and growth over the span of history.

> Human thinking naturally aligns...

Citation needed.

gestures broadly at world history

What exactly are you pointing at?

Long-term successful areas did not have authoritarian rule. Take Europe for example. There were all the many states, and even within them lots of struggle for power. Then there was the church (even after splits based on the same faith) as an additional layer parallel to the worldly powers. As far as I an tell it handily beat authoritarian competition.

Sure, there existed plenty of local authoritarian rulers, but how did those places do long-term and not just during there often short rule?

Maybe somebody knowledgeable could talk about China? They sure had plenty of strive and competition, but then they had dynasties and centralized rule. As far as I know, which is very little, European powers were quite successful in direct competition (when the two met) and also indirectly (overall results, not of direct encounters).

This is something for reddit's (heavily moderated) /r/AskHistorians, and I highly doubt the TL;DR of a historian's reply would support the assertion or would boil down to the above "gestures broadly at world history".

Genghis Khan or Alexander and other authoritarian rulers sure were great at conquering, but after that it was already over. And they accomplished it mostly by killing an incredible number of people, so instead of actually competing they just removed the competition altogether. Which only ever works temporarily.

> Human thinking naturally aligns towards authoritarianism

In addition, when we look at ape society and tribal humans, the statement is not true at all. Even the ape society is one of alliances, and brutal rulers are eliminated, for example "Scientists show that chimps will murder and eat their dictators" https://www.inverse.com/article/27141-chimp-murder-kill-cann...

Human monarchies often (usually?) had religious leaders with independent power rivaling that of the monarchs as far as I know (e.g. ancient Egypt)? For example: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1026/clergy-priests--pr...

> Throughout Egypt's history, the priesthood would serve a vital role in maintaining religious belief and tradition while, at the same time, consistently challenge the authority of the king by amassing wealth and power which at times rivaled that of the crown.

Given that we don't live in a LitRPG or Xinaxia fantasy universe where individuals can gain world destroying god-like powers, and that humans naturally are all about equally powerful and not orders of magnitude different in the abilities of their bodies and brains, authority always is a question of the network and not of just that particular single individual appearing at "the top". Keeping that network in sync and focused seems to be very hard judging by the history of actual usually short-lived (by history standards, it may well last the lifetime of a person) authoritarian rule. So maybe the attempt may be natural, actual success not so much.

I mean the "citation needed" part referred to humans naturally gravitating towards one man rule type systems.

Given that history is littered with monarchs, emperors, pharaohs, popes, with democracies being more of an exception than the rule until industrial times I'd say that's well established. Going back to pre-ancient times all tribes typically had one person in charge.

Even today we really can't help ourselves electing presidents, mayors, deans, CEOs, chancellors, etc. even in places that all have well established democratic decision making. There always has to be one person at the top or we apparently lose our collective shit.

> Going back to pre-ancient times all tribes typically had one person in charge

This isn't true. All social animals have hierarchies, but leaders in pre-agricultural human societies aren't "in charge" in the way that monarchs or emperors are

Sure it's usually more like the most prominent family figure having the most weight in decisions, but the basic idea is the same.

Not at all.

> I mean the "citation needed" part referred to humans naturally gravitating towards one man rule type systems.

Yes, and I responded to that, because of that.

> Even today we really can't help ourselves electing presidents, mayors, deans, CEOs, chancellors, etc.

Uhm... if this is what you cite as evidence for authoritarianism then I really don't know what to say. Choosing leaders is not authoritarianism.

Choosing one person to have authority over others is definitely authoritarianism in its most basic form. It's right there in the name.

All society in existence is authoritarian to some extent, otherwise you just have chaos since nobody enforces the rule of law. Some are just far more than others.

> Choosing one person to have authority over others is definitely authoritarianism

No it is not. This "argument" is getting a bit stupid.

Authoritarianism is defined as a form of government of a state, so calling any leadership that word is just plain wrong. A company with a CEO is not "authoritarian".

Regarding China, the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" gives the following explanation: due to a lack of major geographic barriers, China became unified under a single rule early, and subsequent irrational decisions by despotic rulers brought stagnation. In contrast, it was impossible to unify Europe by force in pre-industrial age, hence the ongoing competition (and resulting development) between all the states.

The Church didn't "beat authoritarian competition." The Church was Europe's authoritarian religious dictatorship. Kings and local war lords were its executives, not its competitors.

Have you not wondered why the Divine Right of Kings was so heavily promoted? Or why - until Henry VIII - the Pope could veto any aristocratic marriage he disapproved of?

The Church had an almost total lock on political power, moral authority of all kinds, class relationships, and intellectual enquiry. It was at the top of the feudal hierarchy - the biggest landowner, the biggest collector of feudal tribute (both voluntary and forced), the sole repository of all knowledge, and the biggest organiser of military campaigns (the Crusades.)

Which is why it maintained power across Europe for a millennium.

> The Church didn't "beat authoritarian competition

That is not what I wrote. I would appreciate responses to what I actually wrote.

Authoritarianism - there is one absolute power. I pointed out that this was far from true in Europe, church being just one of the things I mentioned.

> Kings and local war lords were its executives, not its competitors.

Of course they were competitors! They were both! That is the point! Of course they did not have only eternal war between them, that is the magic. They cooperated and were competitors. The Walk to Canossa only being the most famous example, it usually didn't end that spectacularly. Even within the church there was struggle, there even were two competing popes once (Western Schism).

That does not make an argument.

You're wasting your breath. There is so much "citation needed" going on in this entire comments section it's pathetic. Practically every statement everyone is making is completely unsourced. I expected better when I clicked through.

How has no-one replied with the usual quote?

> Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Winston Churchill, 11 November 1947.

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

How is this the top comment??

It ends by saying that, if authoritarian China has done better than democratic India, which is hard to argue with, it must be... because China is democratic!

The model must guide the data, you see! This should be roundly mocked, not upvoted.

Yeah, I kinda agree the last paragraph didn’t make much sense. I would add though:

- China and India have had quite different problems to solve over the last 80 years or so.

- China got ‘lucky’ recently with a few good leaders (in the sense that the country developed massively under them) in a row. But it seems that Xi isn’t such a good leader in that sense (he is in the sense of consolidating power and becoming leader for life). But the narrative in the west may not have caught up yet with the idea that China doesn’t have some magical super-competent government. It’s maybe harder to tell if they’ve been lying about population and gdp and suchlike.

- I think it’s more accurate to say that democracies allow bad leaders to be removed rather than that they allow good leaders to come to power.

I didn't say "more democratic". Democratic enough would be closer to the thinking.

And if you have any real insight at all into how the CCP internals function, do link a source. Because as far as I can tell nobody knows. It is very opaque. I have only been able to find low-quality guesses and what may be well intentioned but is functionally anti-China propaganda.

I wouldn't want to bet the farm on it, but for all I know they might be extremely democratic internally - similarly to how the UK is a model of democracy despite having an overt monarchy and system of nobility.

Yeah, it's a question of expectations. Lots of people like to decry the "failure" of democracy or of a particular democracy and it's really just a failure to live up to the incredibly lofty expectations we've set. The political dysfunction we see in America or Britain today may seem worse than it used to be, but in a historical frame of reference we're still functioning pretty close to the peak of human accomplishment.

> Democracy is just better at resource allocation.

It’s not democracy that’s better at resource allocation, it’s the free market.

Authoritarian regimes can seldom allow the free market to operate, because if they do it accumulates too much wealth / economic power outside the authoritarian’s control.

But there are examples of non-democracies with free market economies, e.g. Hong Kong under British rule.

I wonder if the two are not quite as separate as you suggest? Can the market be free without some kind of functioning democracy? Without democracy the market as you say is very unlikely to be free. Even with imperfect democracy we still see market failures due to monopoly power, externalities, and corruption.

True. In practice they go hand in hand (except in very few cases, like Hong Kong under British rule).

But I think the distinction is still important. For example I think there’s a good case for limiting democratically elected politicians influence over the economy, by enshrining private property rights and the independence of the central bank in the constitution (as e.g. Sweden has). How would you come to that conclusion if you think it’s democracy itself that allocates resources efficiently?

Democracy creates buy-in and legitimacy, and requires good ideas to be sold to the people rather than imposed on them. There is additional evidence that compulsory voting adds to this legitimacy (in ways that may be freedom-harming, if that matters to you - in particular, some people find evidence that Australia can typically impose stricter rules than other democracies because of compulsory voting). Some of this might go against the American tradition of democracy (which exists to help entrench freedom) but it is compatible with the Australian-British tradition of democracy (which is the goal in itself).

Democracy acts as a circuit-breaker for entrenched inefficient resource allocation. For instance, if there was no usable legislative process, but only an executive and a precedent-based judicial system, markets would generally be free, but this would allow the intergenerational accumulation of capital/wealth until some people have almost total power, and some people are essentially serfs. But in democracy, the mere potential for the mass of people to vote themselves wealth limits the incentives to aggressively accumulate capital/wealth. For instance, if the rich want their property rights to be respected, they need to make sure that the mass of the country has enough property to also want protection. And if that potential doesn't work, it can actually be used and new taxes and rules can be introduced that distribute wealth more efficiently.

As you can see, some might not agree with your conclusion that "there's a good case for limiting democratically elected politicians['] influence over the economy, by enshrining private property rights and the independence of the central bank in the constitution". By asking the question you did, you first presumed that democracy was inefficient and on that basis drew a conclusion, but then asked how a person who thought democracy improves efficiency would argue for the conclusion whose premises they disagree with.

Democracy is not simply representatives voting on your behalf; it includes protection of individual rights (including, to some degree, property rights) and also active civil society.

But in any case, I wonder if your example is not so strong - after all, the independent CB was only enabled by democractically-elected representatives voting for it.

> It’s not democracy that’s better at resource allocation, it’s the free market.

There is no "free market". Most (probably all) markets, particularly at national and international level are heavily regulated. Subsidies, levees, trade agreements, tax breaks... all of those are counter-freedom in the market, and also rely on good governance to perform well.

It's a scale obviously, and usually the more free markets are, and the less the tax take is, the more successful countries tend to be.

Even with authoritarian leaders. Singapore being a good example.

It's just that authoritarian leaders rarely tolerate free markets.

Is that actually true? Germany and scandi countries seem like major outliers. I’d guess that corruption and presence of good institutions are as important as tax % but would be interested in data either way.

They outsource their innovation to freer countries.

Germany is basically an industrial powerhouse but they are optimizing things, not innovating.

Without the US the standard of living would be much lower for these countries and the rest of the world. No smartphones for a start.

I think that’s hard to know. Nobody is ‘inventing’ smartphones except US, but there are substantial barriers to entry for non US manufacturers… language if nothing else. Also there is a massive network effect benefit by being just-first. My hunch is that if the US didn’t exist someone else would be doing this.

Sure, but it’s a bit like saying “there is no democracy because A, B and C”. To the extent these semi-free markets allocate resources efficiently it’s because they are partly free.

One might suggest that democracies are better at managing expenditures on public goods via the political process.

A fair and _competitive_ market is probably best, yet the constraints of both fair and competitive matter.

For example, it should be possible for a new entrant to compete in a market; but among other issues can fail with network effects (things tend to be cheaper in bulk), vendor lock-in (either literal or inertia), or credibility / quality concerns.

Competition can also be regulated out of a market with barriers to entry or a lack of (space for) alternatives. Regulations related to what type of housing can be built in an area, areas to build housing, transit options, etc.

An open, transparent, regulation and management of a market should strive to provide the best results for the people, and very clear to follow guidance about the needs of the people that can be fulfilled by offering more or better services. Resources those services utilize should also have clear and easy to comply with regulations. As an example; a location rated for use as a given type of building shouldn't need a complicated environmental impact assessment, rather the proposed use and construction methods should be compared to an already allowed impact with a pass / remediation / fail criteria.

Do people still think the free market is so great at allocating scarce resources given the lived experience of the last few years?

Seems to me that market participants at many different levels needed a fair bit of help with their reaction to events recently. For example...

- vaccine designers were allocated additional resources to accelarate testing their designs - in many countries, employers were allocated funds to retain employees to do nothing long enough to weather a period of reduced production - currently in both US and Europe, the "free-market" price of energy is held down by a variety of centrally controlled measures

It's not like these measures are taken by "lefty" governments either. Taking the example of the UK because that's where I live, the last two cabinets have been full of the authors of Britainnia Unchained, a document that argues Britain needs to adopt a "far-reaching form of free market economics".

The questions I have lately (as an Economics graduate myself) are....

Would things would have turned out better if only those in power had held their nerve and let the market do it's thing? (e.g. allow vaccine development to continue unassisted by government grants, massive unemployment as people voluntarily changed behavior in response to the pandemic, energy bills that rise from taking up 1/12th to 1/3rd of a family's disposable income).

Or are that the events of the last few years are so unprecedented that they merited a market intervention whereas for "normal" events, the market will respond better than centrally planned decisions.

Will the next few years be full of unprecedented events? Or will we be back to "normal" if/when the war in Ukraine is over.

Is the free-market allocating enough resources to solving the problem of climate change?

I don't know, if you look at places like Florida that did basically nothing in response to COVID, they seem to have come out quite well actually. It's the places that exercised a lot of central control in redistributing resources that seem to have come out poorly.

There has been a free market solution to climate change available for decades.

It could be argued that where it has been used, it has been the most effective.

Yet most people that present themselves as "free marketeers" have ignored the economics consensus and the science consensus.

They're basically just paid by rich and powerful people to say or do anything that benefits rich and powerful people. This has always been true since the days of royalty. And it's true today when fossil fuels and corporate monopolies make you rich and powerful.

Their alledged support for free markets is just as much a lie as everything else they say.

Sometimes they'll accidentally end up on the correct side of issues but its easy to see the pattern isn't "doing what economists say is most efficient".

Look at how they desecrate the good name of Adam Smith for example.

Democracy always looks broken and dysfunctional because what you see is closer to the truth.

Authoritarian systems can look clean and efficient because they are systematically hiding all their problems all the way up the chain of command. Often the leadership doesn’t even see the true state of things. Recent example: Putin’s lack of awareness of the true dismal state of Russia’s armed forces.

The crowd is just smarter

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/...

But people don’t trust them to have free time with UBI or free consumer choice with vouchers

> I think people just can't handle the complexity of distributed decision making, so are consistently biased to believe that small, centralised & appointed authorities make better decisions than the hive mind.

I absolutely agree with this. There is a natural process that occurs, where people are able to route around or resolve problems with no authority to "help". It is our natural state. In fact I see authority as a parasitical attempt to control and steer individuals at mass for the personal benefit of the parasites. Still, government has become an entrenched habit it seems, with many people still believing it is worth the ~40% of their income they pay for its wars, military, governance apparatus, etc.

Nb - we do not have democracy - we have representative democracy - we do not have a say on any of the thousands of decisions that government makes in our name, the person we elect chooses on our behalf, and can even do the exact opposite to what they promised with zero repurcussions! Hurrah, what a system!

> Dictators cannot manage multiple constraints simultaneously. Democracy is just better at resource allocation. Insofar as somewhere like China remains ahead of somewhere like India, I think it depends on the ability of the CCP to simulate a typical democracy internally.

I think you're dreaming that the CCP works on democracy! But, it is the chosen, future system. We will have (perhaps already have) citizen scores. We will be run (overtly, in future) by an unaccountable, technocratic elite.

I don't underestimate the importance of having the population (or most of it) has a saying in how their everyday life go (to some extent, e.g I don't think the moral laws can be determined by votes even if all humans voted on them). However, most of the benefits that usually attributed to democracy should be attributed to wealth, colonialism, and transparency/ no internal corruption (and no, democracy might help in reducing corruption and providing more transparency but it's not strictly required). When you look into (once) successful countries such as France, UK.. You can see wealthy and strong nation that win wars and keep overcoming obstacles, and you attribute that to the "democracy" and "liberal values" or simply you can ignore those liberal values and remember that "correlation doesn't imply causation" and then you can better explain things with colonialism and mass destruction of people, and nature to extract value, then it doesn't matter much how efficient you are. The British empire didn't conquer the 1840 famine by being a "democracy", it simply stole Irish people food making the crisis worse for them. Also when you look closely most of the democracies aren't that distributed, in every nation there are power structures that determine what the collective nation do, do you think really that all US people actually took the decision to destroy Vietnam? or fight Communism at any expense? or conquer and destroy Iraq? I don't think the American people are all that evil, the decision is cooked and it's enforced later via "democratic" channels.

You're presenting authoritarian states and democratic ones as independent. But some of the democracies are part of a geo-political arrangement in which they benefit from the existence of countries with non-democratic regimes.

my model of democracy isnt that it gets the good people in, just that it cycles out the people that have had their day.

from my experience, a government does most of its good work in its first term. then it slowly slides until its doing active harm. from a uk perspective the tories recent (not a) budget pouring the currency down the drain. or gordon brown announcing the end of boom and bust, are 2 nice examples. this kind of hubris only comes after a decade or so in power. then its time to vote the other lot in.

That hive mind is in fact a botnet that receives orders from TV, and it goes back to all the same people.

Depends on competency, commitment etc..

Post-war countries tend to be best served by a truly benevolent, uncorruptable, honest broker who can carry out the necessary plans, which should be fairly obvious if there is decent planning.

China was actually doing well when Xi came along, and there could be a very strong argument that as long as Xi stayed mostly at arms length that they would be doing just fine.

Xi is stepping in hard and it will likely hurt.

Singapore is a kind of authoritarian state and they're amazing in at least many ways.

That said, Putin was mostly hands off on the economy and Russia is not healthy economically, were it not for Gas and Oil they wouldn't be in great shape.

> But over time it consistently turns out that democracies are making consistently better decisions than the authoritarians. Similar to how liberty usually gets much better results but high-status people refuse to accept that the plebs can make decisions for themselves.

And still, corporations are mostly authoritarian, with top down decision making and big hierarchical structures. And worse, the majority of people are ok with this even if they champion democracy outside the workplace.

Most of us don't have a lot of influence in current democracies except by electing some representatives, but we do in the workplace, and there is where it's most restricted.

You are free to start a corporation and structure its decision making any way you see fit.

Technically you're free to buy a super yacht although funding that purchase might be a challenge.

Worker co-ops tend to do quite well once they're funded. They're not exactly prone to blowing up into unicorns (although there is e.g Mondragon) but their survival rate tends to be quite high. Suma wholefoods is an example of the resiliency of co-ops, they've basically totally discarded market based compensation rates in favour of a more ideologically driven, flatter model yet have been going strong for decades.

The problem is usually securing that funding in the first place. They seem to actually be more likely to pay off loans but less likely to get them. This is partly because banks generally want an individual to take responsibility for any loans and are uncomfortable with making a larger group collectively responsible. I suspect there's also a degree of prejudice against them because of the association with socialism even though they still operate in a market.

Equity is generally a difficult one as well as generally the members' control of a workers' co-op is derived from their ownership stakes. There are hybrid co-ops where some of the shares of the company are sold to external investors, but obviously this dilutes the model.

Worker co-ops have some success but require atypical financing to get off the ground which has limited the success of the sector.

Judging power structures by how often they turn into unicorns is nonsensical at best. The concept of a unicorn is exactly why you can't judge based on that. There have been so few co-op unicorns because there have ben so few co-ops, the fact that there has been at least one already is a statistical anomaly (because unicorns are statistical anomalies by definition)

If communist ideologies were the secret to corporate success you would see them being implemented everywhere.

So? I'm also free to leave a country that I don't like. That doesn't fix anything.

When optimising one constraint, dictators work great. Democracy + Capitalism is a two tiered system - the we set up lots of dictators in competition, work out which ones are good at what constraint, then allocate resources among the dictators based on the complex machinery of markets and voting.

We want corporations to be dictatorial. We're simulating dictatorships when we need single-minded focus. It just doesn't work for government because you get people who forget to grow food.

Because corporations are voted on all the time: buying or not buying their product /service.

I think the sense in which that counts as 'voting' (in the sense of a democratic political system) is only analogous in such a distant tenuous way that it is really a poor use of the word

This is only a problem for really big corporations (the ones that are too big to fail). But even then, in a dictatorship country the biggest corporations tend to be rife with corruption. This tends to hollow out the middle and make them unfit to compete without a guarantee of monopoly by the state.

It’s also not restricted to corporations. Look at the Russian military. It is a textbook case study of how years of corruption and nepotism can lead to a culture of abject incompetence and equipment decay. They can’t even provide bandages for their conscripts!

> corporations are mostly authoritarian

There is a pretty big difference to an authoritarian state: Companies have to obey local laws that other people make, and they have to treat their employees good enough that they don't quit.

Once companies start making their own laws (by bribing officials) or when they treat employees like shit (because they don't have other options), then they are just as problematic as other autocracies.

Good, healthy corporations work together with the society, and while decisions are made top down, they are not made in a vacuum -- no corporation can decide that their employees need to work 7 days a week, when the local laws prevent that.

“Companies have to obey local laws that other people make, and they have to treat their employees good enough that they don't quit.”

This would be true if one person quitting meant anything other than a job opening and search for a fill. Having worked under terrible conditions, I can tell you the person they hire will have no idea why the previous person left. It might not take long for the new person to figure it out. But market realities tend to make it take months to years for that new person to then turn around head to a new position. Meanwhile this is all enough for bad management to claim success.

Companies only obey local laws in so far as the threat of prosecution is real. This threat is undermined way too easily.

It usually does apply to skilled labour, as the new worker will need to be trained to fill the position, with profit loss for the duration. Everything is a tradeoff.

I was talking about skilled labor experiences.

> Once companies start making their own laws (by bribing officials) or when they treat employees like shit (because they don't have other options), then they are just as problematic as other autocracies.

I don't think it is as clear cut as you say. I think for example, that there is some lobbyism that is justified, in that they communicate with politicians in a way that can enable, say, innovation. But there's also lobbyism which might as well be called corruption. It doesn't seem obvious where exactly to draw the line here, so it is hard to conclude if and how problematic a company is.

> It doesn't seem obvious where exactly to draw the line here

In my opinion it's pretty clear: Lobbyism is okay as long as it is public and doesn't involve bribes. It's bad when it happens behind closed doors and involves either direct or indirect payments (eg. awarding contracts to friends of lawmakers).

> And still, corporations are mostly authoritarian, with top down decision making and big hierarchical structures. And worse, the majority of people are ok with this even if they champion democracy outside the workplace.

Public corporations are imperfect representative democracies, if you keep in mind that the citizens are the shareholders, not the workers. You can reconcile both if the employees have a controlling stake in the corporation, either because they collectively have most shares, or because their shares have more voting weight. This is more or less the European social-liberal model. This is being torn down following neo-liberal ideology because there seem to be more money to be made on short-term stock trading than developing a company over the long term, and that the interests of employees and shareholders are badly misaligned. Also, these employee-owned corporations are vulnerable to profit-oriented, corner-cutting companies willing to jeopardise long-term stability to race to the bottom. So this needs a specific regulation framework to work at scale.

> You can reconcile both if the employees have a controlling stake in the corporation, either because they collectively have most shares, or because their shares have more voting weight. This is more or less the European social-liberal model.

Not really. This sort of model was an aim of many social-democratic (not social-liberal: those are the FDP in Germany, the Liberals/LibDems in the UK, etc.) parties before the neoliberal turn in the late 70s, but it was never actually achieved. Germany comes the closest: workers get 50%-1 board seats at large employers, but that's not the same as ownership.

The key savers of democracy/capitalism seems to me to be the free flow of information, as well as people in short-lived roles (to avoid single-mindedness), such that on average good decisions can be made at all levels. Strict hierarchies like militaries and corporations can have these properties (and do well) or not (and do poorly).

The whole liberty thing _needs_ to be enforced vigorously to stop someone perverting the system into a dictatorship. In corporate life employees have some liberties - often some degree of choice in their role, trying to get a job at a different company or switch career, etc. While in a role you may be relatively constrained but constraints are common with other commitments in life like marriage, raising children, leading a volunteer organisation in your spare time, etc.

Corporations have external pressures though. If a corporation is run in a manner that is inefficient, it tends to be overtaken by a different corporation that does better. Or the board gets involved and fires the boss and replaces them with someone who promises to do better.

Countries also have external pressures, and will also be overtaken by other counties if they become unfavorable market competitors. The only real difference is that corporations aren't top of the food chain, governments are.

But efficiency has nothing to do with democracy. China is efficient and not very democratic.

I wonder how the average large corporation age compares to the average democracy age. Of course we can identify some outliers, but only because they are famously, exceptionally old.

Corporations are authoritarian, but markets aren't. The Market is the better analogy to democracy here.

Maybe the market is more democratic, but we still mostly work at corporations and have very little decision power over them. Plus, markets follow laws, and those we can't influence much either.

Bureaucrats are not elected either. Most government workplaces are no more democratic than a corporation.

Democracy is probably a better macro-level organizational system, but on smaller scales having a chain of command and an executive function is a godsend. Anyone who’s ever been on a consensus driven committee can tell you how well democracy works on smaller projects.

Not really comparable as long as the corporations are still subject to market influence. Corporations that become so powerful they can ignore the wishes of their customers exhibit many of the same flaws as totalitarian governments.

I'm talking about working for the corporation, not buying products from it.

> And still, corporations are mostly authoritarian, with top down decision making and big hierarchical structures.

... working on one particular problem.

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