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FiftyTwo comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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the best example of a successful non-democracy in the modern world is China. Their internal party system is extremely convoluted, but basically the party internally appoints members to positions, notionally on meritocratic grounds, though corruption and manipulation is endemic. Here is a more detailed summary.
Given the seeming economic success of this model would it be sensible for other countries to adopt it?
Is it possible to introduce sufficient additional safeguards against corruption and abuse of power?
No. The gains from not being stupid about economics and not engaging in centralized planning and actually industrializing are so enormous that they compensate for even wretched leadership. Soviet Russia industrialized and grew for a long time despite having awful and wasteful leadership, and the same thing is happening to China.
The question is, can they, with their wretchedly corrupt non-democracy, reach similar per capitas as Japan and America? Or will they remain in a middle-income trap? If the former, then their government could indeed be considered something other countries might adopt; but if the latter, they will merely have demonstrated what all acknowledge: the Industrial Revolution is pretty damn awesome.
I think there's a valid alternative narrative where China's explosive growth is the result of enormous quantities of previously untapped natural resources and a previous lack of infrastructure. One could argue that prosperity was inevitable for China as soon as it eased up on its isolationism, almost regardless of what government was in place.
Previously untapped natural resources are a good thing, esp. along with a well enough educated population with a good work ethic.
Previous lack of infrastructure? I'm not sure how that can be an advantage.
One way to a have a fast growth rate is to start out very low.
May be referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging ; but in general, we'd expect fast growth just from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_%28economics%29
I was thinking more in terms of transportation infrastructure, though maybe from having so little they will end up with one that doesn't reproduce a lot of past mistakes. It's just hard to launch an industrial revolution with having as little of that as they had to start with.
I thought the go-to example for a successful non-democracy was Singapore - it's a much nicer place to live in than China!
True, the standard of living in Singapore is much higher. But I didn't choose it as the example because: the transition has not been as dramatic (they had a better starting point) and there's lots of reasons to think that a system that works in Singapore won't scale well (island city state heavily dependent on trade and immigrant labour). By contrast the Chinese system has made great changes over a short period and has been applied to a much wider area and diversity of situation.
A couple of centuries ago, common wisdom was the opposite - Democracy was a nice idea but it could never work on something bigger than a city. From Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws:
See also here for more context. During the founding of the US, it wasn't expected that it would work, and then when the French revolution turned into a disaster (followed by similar disasters in Latin America), Democracy seemed less and less of a good idea. The tide only turned in Europe when the US failed to collapse, especially with the publication of Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
The U.S. may have been lucky because initially it was strung out along a seaboard which provided good transport and communication for the time, and as the U.S. spread into the interior, massive improvements in communication and transportation came along just in time, so we could have the cohesion that up til then was very hard to achieve except in a small state.
Some of the Federalist papers argued the opposite of what Montesquieu's point -- that a surplus of talented and ambitious people would tend to keep each other in check.
Anyway, Singapore poses a different question -- not whether small or large countries are best suited to democracy, but whether Singapore's (undemocratic) system could be made to work in a big country with rich and poor sections, and other wide variations of interest. Maybe Singapore, due to its nature could be administered well by one great CEO, but we haven't seen that sort of thing work well on a continental scale except maybe for short periods of time (usually followed by a traumatic succession crisis).
By the way Bryan Caplan has a blog post questioning how "undemocratic" Singapore really is.
China is playing catch-up, not innovating. When you're as far behind as China was 30 years ago, all you have to do is make yourself less awful to grow explosively. They became an economic success by emulating us somewhat, but the reverse will not hold true, because most places where they deviate from us they bias in the direction of more corruption which is hardly a good model.
Do you consider The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution a success? That's only about 50 years ago.
When you're trying to judge the performance of a system of government, some historical perspective is required.
China has been governed quite different since Mao died. I don't think it quite fair to treat pre-Mao and post-Mao China the same way.
I agree that there has been a huge difference. That's my point. The system has not demonstrated long term stability in it's methods and results.
Although I disagree with FiftyTwo's conclusions, I am nevertheless disappointed that it has received net downvotes.... it's a perfectly valid question after all, and we're not supposed to be doing downvote==disagree, right?
The original post indicates that upvotes and downvotes should be based on how convincing an argument is, so at least a bit closer to that than usual.