[nicbou]

The risk with the first method is that if the authority is wrong, no one can correct its course. One unlucky dice roll and you have 30 years of a dangerously incompetent maniac. Some will only judge such countries by their lucky rolls.

While a war unites a nation, it’s offset by the waste and destruction it creates. The cold war didn’t build more school and hospitals. All those resources went elsewhere, with the occasional dividend for civilians.

Mountains do get moved quickly when you sign blank cheques, but at a greater cost, with more waste and corruption. We put way too much faith in crash programs.

[karpierz]

I think this is why authoritarian governments can be more effective at economic growth when they're behind; they just follow the path that a more economically advanced power did, but with more focus and less concern for individual welfare. Hence China's rapid industrialization.

If that's true, then it'd fall apart when the central authority either becomes too inept or corrupt and the path to follow becomes less clear. Essentially, when the low hanging fruit is gone, the corruption/inepts of the authority would become clear.

[kingkawn]

The idea that working people weren’t ruthlessly exploited in the West’s industrial development is a historical fiction.

[nwah1]

Indeed. Quite a lot of Chinese slave labor was used.

[whimsicalism]

Sure, like how when the US let a million people die from a pandemic and China followed along by... averting what would have been 3-4 million deaths.

[seanmcdirmid]

If China only had higher standards for its wet markets and disallowed the wild trade all together, this whole pandemic would probably never have happened. At some point, Chinese medicine (which the wild animal trade supports) is doing much more harm than good (if pseudo medicine does any good at all).

[secondaryacct]

Yes what s ironic is that they now try to push traditional medecine as a remedy caused by a virus maybe originating from abusive use of traditional medicine material.

However now I think they just fucked up at the lab, importing bats from all over Asia as a mad rush towards cataloguing everything. The end, then, justified the means and safety was secondary.

Whatever hypothesis anyway, this tendency we have in China only to care about the goal, will end up in tears. Taiwan is prob our next fuckup.

[nicoburns]

My understanding is that the lab studying coronaviruses situated in close proximity to the wet market is the much more likely source than the wet market itself. And as labs in western countries have had similar leaks (see for example Foot & Mouth disease in the UK), I'm not sure we can really blame the Chinese.

[seanmcdirmid]

The best info we have is that it was a bio lab release, just an unusual transmission from wild bats to humans in a wild animal market. And really, for all the authoritarian power they seem to have, sanitation standards are shockingly low, and with their density, these kinds of things will keep happening until they basically go with Japanese level cleanliness standards.

Given its situation, china really had no choice but to go with a zero COVID policy. If they tried to handle it like the Americans did, 10s of millions of people would have died, if not more (because their density is higher with lower hygiene standards, not a good combination).

[nicoburns]

> The best info we have is that it wasn't a bio lab release, just an unusual transmission from wild bats to humans in a wild animal market

That's not my understanding at all. My understanding is that there are two competing theories, neither of which there is categorical evidence for:

1. A bat coronavirus jumped to an unrelated species (e.g. pangolins) that were sold at the wet market. Which then jumped again to humans. But we have not been able to find a close viral match in the intermediate animal population.

2. A bat coronavirus was accidentally leaked from a lab that was known (they have published papers on the topic) to be studying and actively mutating in gain of function research bat coronaviruses.

To me 2 is much more likely. The idea that the epicentre of a coronavirus epidemic was ~100m from the only lab in China that studies these coronaviruses, but that the source wasn't the lab is preposterous. It's possible, but it seems like far too much of a coincidence to me.

[Nekhrimah]

> The best info we have is that it was a bio lab release

Did you perchance mean wasn't a bio lab release?

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> more waste and corruption.

Does the waste and corruption cost more than the checks and balances though?

Looking at government IT projects, it feels like the overhead and paperwork make everything 10x more expensive, and taking a risk that some of the projects will end up "stolen" would still be cheaper. Especially if particularly egregious cases of corruption would be prosecuted after the fact.