The Free World fears China’s rise. Will authoritarianism win? Is it a viable model? Will other countries take inspiration from China and follow its path? No. The system is doomed to fail.
Really interesting analysis and I hope you're right. Would be interesting to see how income inequality maps on to these variables. GDP per capita doesn't provide an accurate picture if much of a country's wealth is held by a small percentage of the population, as in the US and Russia. Some analysts have suggested that our high level of economic inequality is a factor in why parts of the population devalue democracy.
Another weakness of authoritarian systems is that leaders do not get reliable information from their bureaucracy out of fear of punishment for reporting bad news. This overlaps with, but is not the same, as free speech. We saw this in the initial reporting on covid in China as you said, and it helps explain why Putin's invasion of Ukraine has fared so badly. Given the critical importance of reliable information to economies and governance of large countries, this seems like a fatal weakness of autocracies that create a climate of fear among their bureaucracies.
You need freedom of speech and the ability to criticise or you crash and burn. Literally. Speaking to pilots, they tell me they would never fly on airlines belonging to authoritarian countries because if something goes wrong, you are unable to pass it up the chain of command due to it being perceived as criticism.
Plane engine on fire. Can't tell the pilot because I can't criticise him. Plus they have been indoctrinated to think that their superiors always know best.
Authoritarianism and restricting free speech, always leads to crash and burn.
Singapore merits its own post and analysis. What they accomplished is unprecendented and may well hold lessons for us all. I hope you decide to look into it in a future post
Singapore is indeed the outlier in the Asian controlled countries. Singapore university system always has a slogan campaign to motivate students and much of the population. About 1995, it was the slogan "Be Productive from 2:45 to 3:10 PM" It had been duly noted that was the 1 sigma of lowest productivity in previous survey studies.
Oct 20, 2022·edited Oct 20, 2022Liked by Tomas Pueyo
Some errors and issues with the argument that weaken its credibility:
HK is labelled as a petro-state on your Top 40 richest chart. It's obviously not. And it's not been politically free until very recently, and now no longer. So, it will need to be addressed in the same city-state outlier bucket with Macao and Singapore. You can explain away this better by making the case here that city-states are, generally, wealthier, wherever they are, just as large cities are generally wealthier per capita than their hinterlands. That's as true within authoritarian states (e.g. Beijing and Moscow) as within politically free ones (e.g. New York and London).
The India vs. China contrast is left to the end as a hand-wavey epilogue. Why leave it out from the "Authoritarian Regimes vs. Comparables" section? That's a GLARING omission since you have the two largest populations in the world directly neighboring each other, with a democracy vs. authoritarian regime... and the democracy is a lot poorer, both on net and per capita. How are these not a perfect comparable pair? Because it doesn't neatly match the argument? India is and has been as poor as the poorest Sub-Saharan African states, and that's embarrassing for the democracies-are-wealthy crowd.
Speaking of Africa, the divergent trajectories of Nigeria (a petro-state that is a democracy, but suffering the highest absolute poverty rate on the planet) vs. the likes of Ethiopia or Rwanda (both authoritarian regimes self-consciously in the China with better economic outcomes recently) further complicate the case. I don't personally think either will even achieve middle-income status, much less become among the wealthiest countries, so maybe they're just among the majority of states that won't be rich for other geographic reasons. But we invite such problematic rebuttals when we make generalizations like in the "Authoritarian Regimes vs. Comparables" section.
There's an answer to the above that would help to explain China's (relative) success, but also introduce a complicating, temporal factor: we shouldn't just compare China to near-peers now, but also to Chinas past. Because for MOST OF HISTORY China was the single richest place on earth. Having Europe and then its settler-colonies in North America and Oceania supplant it is historically aberrant and therefore telling. It's a massive failure that China today is poor. Something went REALLY WRONG in the Early Modern Period through the Second Industrial Revolution Era and then again during the 20th Century for China to stumble so far behind. Was it authoritarianism? Perhaps. That's an opening for your argument here.
To add another point to why criticism helps grow an economy is on the basis of Trust.
In the Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley points out a correlation between the level of trust in a society and the wealth of that society.
Trust in each other and in public institutions to protect their rights. If you can't openly criticize things in your society you can't fully trust that something is what it is. Without the ability to criticize there's no trust.
This is one reason why Amazon allowed public ratings when few stores at the time did. In the short run bad reviews stopped sales, but in the long run the culture of criticism means that people can trust the reviews of good products and by extension Amazon.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I wonder if there is an in-between. Right now we have democracy, which has too many cooks in the kitchen so we can’t get anything done, and we have authoritarianism which has one authority that can get a lot done, but maybe not in the best interest of the people.
I’m exploring this in my next few posts but I wonder if countries might have the benefits of both worlds if they act more like capitalism? At companies, there are board members who can ensure the better behavior of leadership, and employees can contribute to the decision making process, but there is still a group at the top who is appointed and trusted to make decisions. Thinking this through in my November posts ☺️
Democracy carries within itself the seed of its destruction. If it has survived for millennia it is because it confers some advantage. And that advantage is its ability to adapt to change. As a biologist, I compare the survival of a species to that of a society. The basis of natural selection is that there is genetic variability so that the species can adapt to change. In the same way, the survival of a democracy depends on the existence of different ideas that can facilitate the transition to the new challenges that sooner or later end up arriving.
Oct 20, 2022·edited Oct 22, 2022Liked by Tomas Pueyo
I came to the US 25 year ago on an H-4 visa. I realized not too long after that I had fallen into a trap. Especially Dem politicians told me (gleefully) that as a non-immigrant woman my place was in the home - and I should be grateful ! I could not be allowed to work, as the whole US economy would crash if H-4's started looking for jobs too ! But wherever I went I was offered one: full-time, part-time, seasonal, in stores, offices, banks, etc. So why could I not accept one of them, in an economy obviously needing workers ? I communicated this with politicians, government agencies, experts, university professors, etc. Furthermore, how could in the US of A (!) "the country of opportunity" a visa like this - sexist/racist - exist ? Many agreed. But whatever changed in immigration-land, the H-4 stayed the same. So you can be able to voice your opinion, people can even agree you are right, but as long as those in power are unwilling to change the rules, you are stuck and your life goes to sh-te. So much for constructive criticism & Freedom of Speech ! Useless if no one wants to listen.
I would like to hear your thoughts on how democracies can deal with unfettered freedom of speech. How will we survive when anyone can say anything no matter true or entirely fiction? So many in our country appear to want to believe lies. How will our country survive this?
I am not sure you can so easily throw Trump in with the authoritarians. First, his administration significantly decreased the amount of regulation. Second, while you can find plenty of pro-authoritarian material in his tweets and speeches, he throws out so much word-salad that his speeches are effectively ink-blot tests. You hear what you want to hear. Third, while he declared himself the winner of the 2020 election, the distributed power model of American government prevented him from remaining in power. The various election officials and judges, many of them Republican (and a good number of the judges were appointed by him), rejected his claims. Now he lives in Florida, not in the White House.
I agree that lack of ability to criticize the Glorious Leaders results in stupid actions. Case in point: watch the Chinese workers slosh every surface in sight with "tetra-methyl-death" in an effort to knock out the coronavirus - which is airborne. Now the US CDC recommended surface cleaning and hand washing for far longer than they should have - but Americans were free to argue with them and disregard their recommendations.
Agree with your overall conclusion. Thank you for the article. In the chart of the 40 richest countries, Hong Kong is coloured black, as a petro state. Later on you correctly note it is not a petro state. Is Ireland really that rich?
For an academic view of China's economic boom which tolerates corruption, see China's Gilded Age by Yuen Ang. She points out that corruption at high levels in China and USA are not so different, merely that they are legal in the US and illegal but tolerated in China. For example, buying legislators with campaign donations to induce them to provide government benefits is common practice in the US.
Would be interesting to explore the threats to free speech in the countries that traditionally safeguard this right. US, Canada, UK for example have all undergone some level of tightening around this freedom in recent years. I wonder if even ‘small’ restrictions (ex. US government working with twitter to censor journalists) have reverberations through our economy that can be measured? Great article!
Really interesting analysis and I hope you're right. Would be interesting to see how income inequality maps on to these variables. GDP per capita doesn't provide an accurate picture if much of a country's wealth is held by a small percentage of the population, as in the US and Russia. Some analysts have suggested that our high level of economic inequality is a factor in why parts of the population devalue democracy.
Another weakness of authoritarian systems is that leaders do not get reliable information from their bureaucracy out of fear of punishment for reporting bad news. This overlaps with, but is not the same, as free speech. We saw this in the initial reporting on covid in China as you said, and it helps explain why Putin's invasion of Ukraine has fared so badly. Given the critical importance of reliable information to economies and governance of large countries, this seems like a fatal weakness of autocracies that create a climate of fear among their bureaucracies.
You need freedom of speech and the ability to criticise or you crash and burn. Literally. Speaking to pilots, they tell me they would never fly on airlines belonging to authoritarian countries because if something goes wrong, you are unable to pass it up the chain of command due to it being perceived as criticism.
Plane engine on fire. Can't tell the pilot because I can't criticise him. Plus they have been indoctrinated to think that their superiors always know best.
Authoritarianism and restricting free speech, always leads to crash and burn.
Singapore merits its own post and analysis. What they accomplished is unprecendented and may well hold lessons for us all. I hope you decide to look into it in a future post
Singapore is indeed the outlier in the Asian controlled countries. Singapore university system always has a slogan campaign to motivate students and much of the population. About 1995, it was the slogan "Be Productive from 2:45 to 3:10 PM" It had been duly noted that was the 1 sigma of lowest productivity in previous survey studies.
Some errors and issues with the argument that weaken its credibility:
HK is labelled as a petro-state on your Top 40 richest chart. It's obviously not. And it's not been politically free until very recently, and now no longer. So, it will need to be addressed in the same city-state outlier bucket with Macao and Singapore. You can explain away this better by making the case here that city-states are, generally, wealthier, wherever they are, just as large cities are generally wealthier per capita than their hinterlands. That's as true within authoritarian states (e.g. Beijing and Moscow) as within politically free ones (e.g. New York and London).
The India vs. China contrast is left to the end as a hand-wavey epilogue. Why leave it out from the "Authoritarian Regimes vs. Comparables" section? That's a GLARING omission since you have the two largest populations in the world directly neighboring each other, with a democracy vs. authoritarian regime... and the democracy is a lot poorer, both on net and per capita. How are these not a perfect comparable pair? Because it doesn't neatly match the argument? India is and has been as poor as the poorest Sub-Saharan African states, and that's embarrassing for the democracies-are-wealthy crowd.
Speaking of Africa, the divergent trajectories of Nigeria (a petro-state that is a democracy, but suffering the highest absolute poverty rate on the planet) vs. the likes of Ethiopia or Rwanda (both authoritarian regimes self-consciously in the China with better economic outcomes recently) further complicate the case. I don't personally think either will even achieve middle-income status, much less become among the wealthiest countries, so maybe they're just among the majority of states that won't be rich for other geographic reasons. But we invite such problematic rebuttals when we make generalizations like in the "Authoritarian Regimes vs. Comparables" section.
There's an answer to the above that would help to explain China's (relative) success, but also introduce a complicating, temporal factor: we shouldn't just compare China to near-peers now, but also to Chinas past. Because for MOST OF HISTORY China was the single richest place on earth. Having Europe and then its settler-colonies in North America and Oceania supplant it is historically aberrant and therefore telling. It's a massive failure that China today is poor. Something went REALLY WRONG in the Early Modern Period through the Second Industrial Revolution Era and then again during the 20th Century for China to stumble so far behind. Was it authoritarianism? Perhaps. That's an opening for your argument here.
Great article Tomas.
To add another point to why criticism helps grow an economy is on the basis of Trust.
In the Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley points out a correlation between the level of trust in a society and the wealth of that society.
Trust in each other and in public institutions to protect their rights. If you can't openly criticize things in your society you can't fully trust that something is what it is. Without the ability to criticize there's no trust.
This is one reason why Amazon allowed public ratings when few stores at the time did. In the short run bad reviews stopped sales, but in the long run the culture of criticism means that people can trust the reviews of good products and by extension Amazon.
Thank you for writing.
Do have an amazing day ✨
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I wonder if there is an in-between. Right now we have democracy, which has too many cooks in the kitchen so we can’t get anything done, and we have authoritarianism which has one authority that can get a lot done, but maybe not in the best interest of the people.
I’m exploring this in my next few posts but I wonder if countries might have the benefits of both worlds if they act more like capitalism? At companies, there are board members who can ensure the better behavior of leadership, and employees can contribute to the decision making process, but there is still a group at the top who is appointed and trusted to make decisions. Thinking this through in my November posts ☺️
I also feel there should be more to learn from Singapore.
Democracy carries within itself the seed of its destruction. If it has survived for millennia it is because it confers some advantage. And that advantage is its ability to adapt to change. As a biologist, I compare the survival of a species to that of a society. The basis of natural selection is that there is genetic variability so that the species can adapt to change. In the same way, the survival of a democracy depends on the existence of different ideas that can facilitate the transition to the new challenges that sooner or later end up arriving.
I came to the US 25 year ago on an H-4 visa. I realized not too long after that I had fallen into a trap. Especially Dem politicians told me (gleefully) that as a non-immigrant woman my place was in the home - and I should be grateful ! I could not be allowed to work, as the whole US economy would crash if H-4's started looking for jobs too ! But wherever I went I was offered one: full-time, part-time, seasonal, in stores, offices, banks, etc. So why could I not accept one of them, in an economy obviously needing workers ? I communicated this with politicians, government agencies, experts, university professors, etc. Furthermore, how could in the US of A (!) "the country of opportunity" a visa like this - sexist/racist - exist ? Many agreed. But whatever changed in immigration-land, the H-4 stayed the same. So you can be able to voice your opinion, people can even agree you are right, but as long as those in power are unwilling to change the rules, you are stuck and your life goes to sh-te. So much for constructive criticism & Freedom of Speech ! Useless if no one wants to listen.
I would like to hear your thoughts on how democracies can deal with unfettered freedom of speech. How will we survive when anyone can say anything no matter true or entirely fiction? So many in our country appear to want to believe lies. How will our country survive this?
Hi Tomas,
I am not sure you can so easily throw Trump in with the authoritarians. First, his administration significantly decreased the amount of regulation. Second, while you can find plenty of pro-authoritarian material in his tweets and speeches, he throws out so much word-salad that his speeches are effectively ink-blot tests. You hear what you want to hear. Third, while he declared himself the winner of the 2020 election, the distributed power model of American government prevented him from remaining in power. The various election officials and judges, many of them Republican (and a good number of the judges were appointed by him), rejected his claims. Now he lives in Florida, not in the White House.
I agree that lack of ability to criticize the Glorious Leaders results in stupid actions. Case in point: watch the Chinese workers slosh every surface in sight with "tetra-methyl-death" in an effort to knock out the coronavirus - which is airborne. Now the US CDC recommended surface cleaning and hand washing for far longer than they should have - but Americans were free to argue with them and disregard their recommendations.
Agree with your overall conclusion. Thank you for the article. In the chart of the 40 richest countries, Hong Kong is coloured black, as a petro state. Later on you correctly note it is not a petro state. Is Ireland really that rich?
For an academic view of China's economic boom which tolerates corruption, see China's Gilded Age by Yuen Ang. She points out that corruption at high levels in China and USA are not so different, merely that they are legal in the US and illegal but tolerated in China. For example, buying legislators with campaign donations to induce them to provide government benefits is common practice in the US.
Would be interesting to explore the threats to free speech in the countries that traditionally safeguard this right. US, Canada, UK for example have all undergone some level of tightening around this freedom in recent years. I wonder if even ‘small’ restrictions (ex. US government working with twitter to censor journalists) have reverberations through our economy that can be measured? Great article!
" a world-class, benevolent, freedom-appreciating can be really good for you” -- this sentence no subject.