[darkpuma]

> "I am of the opinion that when a colonised city surpasses even the UK's GDP without being granted any meaningful democratic rights, they succeeded despite your rule, not because of it)."

Democracy is often cited as economically advantageous, but as Singapore demonstrates, authoritarian dictatorships are not necessarily fated to economic ruination. Sometimes authoritarian dictatorships do better than they would have under democratic rule. The trick to democracy is the results are more consistently in the middle; it's not as likely to go catastrophically wrong, but it's also not as likely to go spectacularly well. That's why we generally prefer it; it's the same reason we generally prefer compensation in the form of paychecks instead of lottery tickets. Sometimes people who play the lottery win, and sometimes authoritarian governments are effective governments.

Hong Kong during the colonial era might be another example of an non-democratic regime actually performing well. Or maybe not, I don't really know. It's hard to run a "parallel Hong-Kong experiment" to find out for sure.