[bane]

You're getting knee-jerk downvotes, but I think your reply is more thoughtful than some are giving you credit for. My original comment more or less agrees with you. However, I'd also temper it by saying that one of the downsides of a highly central government is that it falls prey to the negatives of the "Eye of Sauron". This means that where the relatively few people at the top can focus, and for however long they can focus, incredible things can be accomplished -- sometimes far in excess of what might otherwise be expected.

But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time. This results in massive efforts like raising armies or building spaceships or whatnot being possible, but efforts that aren't worth the time of the central power keepers (e.g. minding hobbits) fall entirely off the radar.

If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to. But as a practical matter they simply get ignored until they become national problems with national priorities.

[altonzheng]

> But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time.

A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically authoritarian states in structure. But I guess it's because they have such one-dimensional goals that this structure is so effective, as you said.

> If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to

Do you think it's possible for delegated authority to exist under an authoritarian system at all?

[bane]

Maybe? I think military systems are interesting to look at when thinking about this question. The German military was famously centralized in WW2 leading to all sorts of chain of command issues while many of the Allied militaries like to push decision making authority down to more local units while providing overall strategic direction.

However, in governance, its much harder to measure "effectiveness" -- and every measure ends up becoming a target/goal of those being measured. Is it GDP? Sentiment analysis of social media for indicators of social discord? I don't really know, and neither does anybody else.

So some authority simply sets some desired set of strategic goals (2% GDP growth, 3% increase in high school graduations, average household income up by 2.3%, etc.) and then works to create conditions such that those are met.

But with more of a diversity of goals seems to require a diversity of executors of those goals since human attention is limited. This implies again an ability to delegate and so on and I'm not really sure if authoritarian governments can spare the attention to make sure each of the delegated executors can work on such a plethora of goals.

In business, the number of direct reports to the CEO, COO, VP and so on seems to indicate the number of strategic goals an organization can pursue at once. In most companies it seems to be only a handful as the ability of the CEO to direct many reports diminishes as there are more of them.

In the U.S. this need to spread focus works in the executive branch by appointing department heads (cabinet secretaries) who basically have a single overriding raison d'être for their existence (e.g. commerce, housing, transportation, etc.) with a set of strategic goals that those executives can focus on. In the U.S. that's something like 15 departments (plus a very large number of independent "establishments and corporations) which are more or less treated like a company might treat a subsidiary rather than a department. [1]

China also has a complex system as well, much more complicated than I think outsiders give it credit for. It's not a surprise though, the ancient Chinese practically invented the idea of a bureaucracy [2]. I think the primary structural problem for China is not the simple notion of authoritarianism per se, but the parallel bureaucracy of the party structure.

1 - https://www.usgovernmentmanual.gov/ReadLibraryItem.ashx?SFN=...

2 - https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-a-chart-that-visually...