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by reese_john
1544 days ago
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I wouldn't say so. Scale matters. What worked for Singapore, may not work for China. There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis. Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases
Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
[0] https://palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-ku...HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249 |
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I find this quite interesting. As a programmer I find you can only get to the real requirements by experimenting and going back and forth with the customer.
Applied to politics it would be really helpful if we could easily experiment "in the small" and then incrementally scale what works. However democratic processes, at least in my country, are so slow that most people go for the "go big or go home" approach.
It would therefore be helfpul to have incremental laws where you say start the implementation at city level, maybe in a few test cities, if that seems favorable automatically scale to a few states, and if that still works scale to the whole country.
In a complex economy you need these small "tests" to maybe patch issues before scaling it to the whole country. And you would avoid costly mistakes, trying things that sound good on paper but eventually don't work out well.