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Comment by treflop | Hacker News Reader

In the case of the UAE, it wouldn’t be the money. It would be a change in leader.

The current president (one of only 2) is the son of the first and he isn’t as liberal or as charitable, although his dad did create the country by unifying the region after Great Britain pulled out.

But he isn't too bad, but if he goes away, UAE being an authoritarian dictatorship, it could go both ways.

Inconsistent and unpredictable governance is the death knell of many countries and any organization. That’s why authoritarian governments are never stable long term.

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Yes. The best, most effective form of government is a benevolent dictatorship.

However, the mega-fatal flaw is that it is not reliably sustainable.

Ultimately, every dictatorship becomes malevolent.

Then, the need to protect the malevolent leadership from the subjects forces closed, loyalty-based structures, and plants the seeds of the dictatorship's demise as mistrust and inefficiency rot the structure and the society. Meanwhile, millions rot and die.

In the actual history of the world, we mostly have had monarchies. In terms of actual "sustainability" I don't think any democratic government has surpassed the longest peaceful period of a monarchy yet. I could wrong.

I'm also quite sure that the longest monarchies have outlasted the longest democracies, but I think we'd have to define the "peaceful" qualifier.

It seems the nature of hereditary monarchies helps moderate the despotism, as there is an incentive to maintain the balance for the future of the monarchic family. If they get too despotic, they will get overthrown, and that's the end of the gravy train for not only them but also all their descendants; and they have the ability to train in these constraints from birth. So my conjecture is that this contributes to the longevity of the hereditary monarchies.

Hopefully they go the way of the UK: The Sovereign (King or Queen) gradually evolved to have limited power.

Given that the UK's gradual evolution involved lopping off one king's head and another king getting disposed when his military essentially refuses to resist an invasion, and that both of these were caused in no small part by the respective kings holding the wrong religion (and attempting to impose it!) according to their subjects, I don't think the UK is the model you'd want to see followed.

They would first need an angry mob of barons (sheikhs?) to force the king to sign a Magna Carta.

That's already the case; the king doesn't have absolute power, the sheikhs of each of the Emirates share power (proportional to how rich/powerful their emirate is). That's why Dubai's policies on so many things differ vastly from Abu Dhabi's; it's a bit like the US's federalism.

They seem to often be stable for decades which is dangerous enough for them

The native population is roughly 1M. All other 7M are immigrants. So they don't have to turn against no-one. Locals tend to get pretty good jobs and are actually expected to perform.

The UAE is actually pretty predictable.

All in all, I wouldn't call UAE a dictatorship.

I lived there a decade ago, and as a foreigner it felt pretty free to me. There are rules you need to follow that are different from the West, but that's not a bad thing, it's just accepting the local customs. When in Rome...

Compared to other Muslim countries, it's pretty relaxed. Foreigners can buy alcohol, eat pork, and pre and extra-marital relationships are tolerated among foreigners as long as it's behind closed doors.

Locals of course get favoured for positions of power within companies, but most of them are pretty well educated, so that isn't so bad.

You don't want to piss them off, as you don't know what connections they might have. But that's no different from the elite class in any other country, such as the UK or Italy - it's just there are a higher percentage of them, and it's not hidden away.

Many of the locals feel repressed at home, which is why London is a popular travel destination for them. You see women in burka with their eyes covered get on in Dubai, and by the time they've landed in London, they have changed into jeans and a fashionable top and are showing off their hair. If anything changes, that's probably going to be the catalyst. But most likely the UAE will just become more liberal rather than a big shift in power.

> That’s why authoritarian governments are never stable long term.

Authoritarian governments counter this issue with hereditary monarchy. The current leader can impart their knowledge and mindset on their next of kin, and having a clear successor removes power struggles and provides predictability. Even if the successor has different views this is often known far in advance, which allows people to take this into consideration.

It's by no means perfect and has lots of opportunities to go wrong, but over the last 1000 years or so hereditary monarchies have a much better track record of stability than democracies.

There's this little war called "World War 1" which resulted in the absolute collapse of the final world-power level monarchies.

As it turns out: the problems of monarchies is innate. Hereditary Monarchies lead to a separation into "Noble" vs "Peasant" classes, where Nobles have a genetic line to the throne. The Nobles believe themselves to be superior and start putting themselves into various sections of government, when in actuality many Peasants are actually better than the Nobles.

So when it comes to War (the only time societies can directly compare against each other), the side that has a bigger recruitment pool (ie: Peasant commanders, aka Napoleon's secret sauce), tends to win. This is also true of sciences, research, production, etc. etc. Every part of society, there are likely peasant leaders who are best at the job.

Peasants win not necessarily because Peasants are smarter, but because peasants are at "sometimes" smarter, and this "sometimes" happens in a large enough degree that anyone who cuts off their leadership pool into "Family members of the Monarch only" innately hampers their abilities to lead over time.

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Now colonial rule by far-away foreign powers is clearly a bad situation as well (as Britain's control over its former colonies can likely attest). But that's not "Democracy" either.

Hereditary monarchy may be an improvement over UAE's position (ie: better than foreign colonialism), but lets not get ahead of ourselves. The world gave up on monarchies over a century ago for a good damn reason.

I absolutely agree that monarchies have a lot of downsides. Democracies not only provide a bigger pool of potential talent but also align incentives between population and government much better. This seems to also be reflected in economic growth, where democracies typically perform much better.

Still, I think it's important to acknowledge that authoritarian governments have seen a lot of refinement over thousands of years, while democracies are historically the exception and only became popular 300 years ago. Expecting authoritarian governments to just implode without external influence seems unfounded.

accelerated world change has made examples from 1000 years ago, less relevant

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