[cjalmeida]

I strongly recommend Acemoglu, Robinson classic book "Why Nations Fail"

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d...

It's very accessible, no economics background required. Along with Krugman and Kahneman, one of the few economics scholars that take the time to write a book for layman.

[omnee]

The rule of law is a key part of a nations success as argued by AJR. A very good exposition for the layman on the rule of law provided by Tom Bingham in the eponymous 'The Rule of Law):https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7734691-the-rule-of-law

While the above is informed by the UK's constitutional arrangement, the 8 principles are near universal when considering nations that have or aim for The Rule of Law.

The principles are:

(1) The law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable.

(2) Questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved by application of the law and not the exercise of discretion.

(3) The laws of the land should apply equally to all, save to the extent that objective differences justify differentiation.

(4) Ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.

(5) The law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights.

(6) Means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide civil disputes which the parties themselves are unable to resolve.

(7) The adjudicative procedures provided by the state should be fair.

(8) The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law.

[alephnerd]

I also recommend Acemolgu's recent book "Power and Progress" on the relationship between labor and technology [0].

If you don't like reading, Acemoglu gave a talk about it at HKS recently [1]

[0] - https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2023/longl...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT0NzlATjf0

[fekunde]

After reading "Why Nations Fail", which I really enjoyed, I wondered whether we could develop an LLM with a wide enough context window where I could input the lessons from such books along with data and metrics about a specific country. Then, the AI could prescribe tangible solutions and policy recommendations tailored to that nation's unique situation. I'm curious what an AI system like that might look like. I also wonder if it's possible to experiment with a smaller-scale version of this concept using today's technology.

[JetSpiegel]

I thought the Chicago School had already proved blindly applying "policy recommendations" from on high was a receipt for disaster and misery, but sure, let's do the same with AI, this time it will surely work.

[nradov]

What's the point? We generally know what economic policies work. But they aren't put into effect due to ideology or special interests. This isn't a problem with a technical solution.

[Eumenes]

> Krugman

Not sure I'd spend time on a Krugman book. He predicted in 1998 that the internet would cease having an economic impact by 2005 and that it would be no greater than fax machines. He's like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of economics.

[CyberRymden]

Krugman is controversial at times, but he is a serious economist. The quote is also taken out of two important contexts. 1. It was not a serious academic prediction but rather part of a fluff piece by the Times about future precitions. 2. The quote also exists in the context of a debate that was raging during the advent of the internet whether or not the internet would hyper charge productivity and economic growth. In hindsight, especially after the late 1990s, the truth is far closer to the fax machine rather than a new era of prosperity. The lack of visible productivity growth from a technology that has so visibly transformed our society is one of the bigger questions in economics today.

[AnimalMuppet]

The lack of visible productivity growth. In particular, it's not as visible as you expect in the GDP statistics.

Take TV Guide, for instance. Now, if anybody watches broadcast television, they can use the internet to find out what's on when. Is that better or worse for users than having a paper TV guide? In many ways it's better. But it shows up in the GDP as a negative, because nobody's buying TV Guide any more.

Or take Google. I can search for any information I want, for free. That creates immense value - immense in every sense except the GDP, where it doesn't show up at all, because it's free.

Wikipedia. Linux. gcc. The Wayback Machine. Even HN. All this is available to us, whenever we want it, for whatever purpose we want, for free. There's great value to us. Just nothing that shows up on the GDP statistics, because it's all free. (Yeah, I know, RedHat sells Linux, and Wikipedia asks for donations. They aren't Microsoft selling Windows and The World Book, though. You can still use them for free, and not get sued or jailed.)

[blackhawkC17]

These free things (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) are sustained by a high GDP that translates to high incomes and, in turn, people willing to donate time and money for them to remain free.

Let's try living in a country with a measly GDP per capita of $1,000 (Rwanda for example) and see how many free things we can get..

[psd1]

Alternative conjecture.

People give more consistently in more pro-social societies. But those societies are poorer, with lower percentage of computer ownership and programming skills. So they give things like care and food.

Trying to spin the west as the place where altruism is most prevalent seems incorrect. More data needed.

[blackhawkC17]

I think we're in agreement here. I never said the West inherently has more altruism. However, the West's high GDP is what enables Westerners to give more to free computing/internet-related projects offering excellent value.

Without a high GDP, there won't be much to give in the first place.

[kiba]

Sure, there's a lot of value. There's also a lot of slops and negative value. These days I don't even use wikipedia that much even though I googled things constantly.

GDP is a very gross measure of things to be sure, but also difficult to fake.

[AlbertCory]

> Krugman is controversial at times

Kind of like saying Lysenko was controversial at times.

He's not "controversial," he's just a bloviator. His credentials as a serious economist expired long ago when he signed up with the leftist team and agreed to never challenge them again, on anything.

When you have to spend many words on explaining the "context" in which someone's quotes should be viewed, you are losing.

[ninjagoo]

> His credentials as a serious economist expired long ago when he signed up with the leftist team

You might be (unpleasantly) surprised by the emphasis of the current year's nobel economics prize winners on the importance of societal institutions and the need for inclusivity to advance the wealth of nations :-)

[AlbertCory]

I'd be more surprised if you linked to any of Krugman's recent columns and I actually thought they were worthwhile.

[kbelder]

Krugman triggered some self reflection on my part when I read a column by him that was really stupid. Not just politically biased, but got economics wrong.

This is a Nobel winner in economics, I warned myself. Are you really putting your judgement ahead of theirs in their own field of study? I wanted to make sure I wasn't just doing the HN thing of arrogantly assuming I'm an expert in a field because I read a book once.

The eventual conclusion I came to was that I should always make sure to hold some allowance that the export may be correct and myself wrong, except when it's really obviously dumb, and that Krugman's writing fell into that camp.

[Eumenes]

Indeed. He is more politico and less economist these days: https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman

[cyberax]

> Kind of like saying Lysenko was controversial at times.

This is BS. Krugman has very specific theories that made predictions validated by practice.

Remember 2008? He made a prediction that an increase in the monetary base wouldn't cause inflation. This prediction was spectacularly confirmed. He also made a case for fiscal intervention: it wouldn't cause inflation, and it would speed up the recovery. And his prediction again was confirmed.

More recently: he predicted that the inflation spike was transient, due to supply chain issues rather than fundamental changes. And he's again been vindicated.

[opo]

>...And he's again been vindicated.

Saying that Krugman was vindicated is quite a stretch. As the economist Noah Smith wrote:

>...In 2021, Krugman tweeted: "I like it and plan to steal it. This report does look like what you'd expect if recent inflation was about transitory disruptions, not stagflation redux".

As Smith pointed out:

>...But in late 2021, inflation spread to become very broad-based. Services inflation was always significant, and took over from goods inflation as the main contributor in 2022.

>The notion that this was just some transient supply-chain disruptions that was only affecting specific products was absolutely central to Team Transitory’s claims in the summer of 2021. And that was incorrect.

>...Team Transitory also called the end of the inflation at least a year and a half too soon.

On October 13, 2021 Krugman tweeted "Three month core inflation. Why isn't everyone calling this a victory for team transitory"

>...So they didn’t entirely whiff here. They just greatly overstated their case. And their complacency in 2021 probably fed into the Fed’s decision to delay the start of rate hikes until 2022, which in retrospect looks like a serious mistake.

What did get vindicated was mainstream economics as taught in our textbooks. As Smith wrote:

>...Mainstream macro’s first victory was in predicting that the inflation would happen in the first place. In February 2021, Olivier Blanchard used a very simple “output gap” model to predict that Biden’s Covid relief bill would raise demand by enough to show up in the inflation numbers. His prediction came true. He didn’t get everything right — he thought wages would rise more than consumer prices, and he neglected the lagged effects of Trump’s Covid relief packages and Fed lending programs. But his standard simple mainstream model got the basic prediction right when most people made the opposite prediction, and this deserves recognition.

>More importantly, mainstream macro appears to have gotten policy right.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/grading-the-economic-schools-o...

[ninjagoo]

> He predicted in 1998 that the internet would cease having an economic impact by 2005 and that it would be no greater than fax machines

The future is hard to predict. Using that as a reason to discount a Nobel-prize economist's economics-related work sounds like a gap in logic.

[nradov]

If economists can't predict the future then what good are they?

[cjalmeida]

If developers can’t produce code without bugs, what good are they? /s

[js8]

I read the summary from the review and I am not convinced that neoliberal US and EU have a less extractive governance structure than China has, as the authors seem to claim. It's been a decade since the book was published and China is still going strong. We will see.

[dash2]

China has become more and more authoritarian under Xi, its GDP growth stats may be dodgy, and recently its housing bubble has popped big-style. It could go the way of Japan. I agree with your last sentence, all the same.

[zorked]

China is the #1 trading partner of nearly every country in the world. That's all you need to know about how bad they are doing.

[MichaelZuo]

How do you know this?

I don’t want to single this out but tangible proof of a net increase in ‘authoritarian’ decision making, compared to say a decade ago, has never been posted on HN, as far as I know.

Most of the in depth analysis I’ve seen suggests that although enforcement actions have become stricter over the past decade, the actual number of new laws and regulations has gone down.

And more importantly, the number of contradictory laws and regulations (between central authorities, and between the centre and provinces) has gone way way down.

So there’s much less leeway to punish on a whim or trap someone in a double bind, compared to a decade ago. Which suggests a net decrease, if anything.

[vlovich123]

It depends on if you’re talking about authoritarianism as it relates to the average person or the political and ruling class. There have been a lot of reports of Xi getting rid of a lot of potential adversaries when he announced himself ruler for life and the imprisonment of Jack Ma and stripping him of his wealth for making challenging statements against Xi seems pretty authoritarian.

[MichaelZuo]

Does it makes sense to discuss it relative to the ‘political and ruling class’?

Since they pretty much all have party cards already. And the moment they give it up means they’re kicked out from any decision making, from what I understand.

Yes internal factions within the party can arbitrarily punish each other for made up reasons all day long, every day of the year.

So in a sense it was already authoritarian without limit.

But that’s not new, nor different from any other big political party.

[vlovich123]

The kind of punishment authoritarian regimes dish out is much more severe in ways that you couldn’t do in the US (imprisonment, seizure of assets, death). In fact I’d argue it’s the only kind that matters. Authoritarian regimes rarely go after normal people unless they speak out actively against the government (which China does) and instead focus on controlling and censoring anyone in a position of power and let the implicit censoring of the entire population flow downstream from that.

[inglor_cz]

The difference between oligarchy that deliberately maintains balance of power and interests between, say, dozens or hundreds of prominent players, and a one-man rule where the "courtiers" are just richer than an average citizen, but equally subjugated to the Dear Leader, is enormous.

Both Russia and China developed since 2000 from one to the other, and I wonder what the end game will be. In Russian case, the development led to re-establishment of the imperial idea and an attempt to conquer formerly held lands by force; that is something that the oligarchs wouldn't start, but a neo-Tsar absolutely did.

Communist China used to be way less externally aggressive than Russia / USSR, but I don't like the current military gestures by Xi. Not at all.

[feedforward]

People were saying when the PRC was founded 75 years ago it would collapse any day now. They were saying this during the cultural revolution. They were saying it earlier this year, as China sent a robot to the far side of the moon to collect moon rocks and bring them back to earth. And they're still saying it. I'm not holding my breath.

[kiba]

Just because PRC didn't collapse doesn't mean PRC perform well. On the contrary, the current strength of PRC is probably a reversion to mean, what China would be like if it wasn't so mismanaged, and yet decades late from where they could be.

States can endure a lot of mismanagement. Look at North Korea for instance. What we won't know is when we hit the breaking point.

What is happening in Russia may lead to an eventual collapse, though unlikely. There are some signs of a loss of monopoly on violence as the system is pushed to its breaking point. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's a scary possibility nonetheless.

[doctorpangloss]

There are HN posters with the ability to see hard data inside America's largest tech and manufacturing businesses, but don't investigate the question, "How much of what you buy every day was made in China?"

[jltsiren]

You have a short-term perspective. All kinds of governance structures can work for a single human lifetime, if they manage to get the right people to the right places. But those people will eventually retire and die. Good institutions make it more likely that their replacements will also be competent and have the right motivations and incentives.

PRC has enjoyed ~45 years of stability and economic growth under four leaders. Until now, the leaders have retired voluntarily, and there has been an ordered transition of power to the successor. But Xi Jinping is clinging to power in a way his predecessors didn't. If he stays beyond 2027, it will be interesting to see if China can survive his death.

[CyberRymden]

Do you actually think China has fairer courts, more open financial markets, and better business environment than the EU or US? For the longest time Hong Kong had to fill those gaps for China in order for the country to attract capital.

Regardless, even if China does today the explanation still holds considering China only transformed a few decades before the book was written.

[JetSpiegel]

I think China is a worse country to live that the US or EU, but a better business environment. China's State Capitalism is simply more efficient than the neoliberalism hellscape that came up from the Soviet Union's collapse.

I see the rest of the world becoming more similar to China than the other way around, unfortunately. The US is already a pseudo-Soviet state economically, and is on the brink of becoming a dictatorship on top of that.

[blackhawkC17]

> I see the rest of the world becoming more similar to China than the other way around, unfortunately.

I hope they enjoy the mediocrity that comes with state-dominated economies.

> The US is already a pseudo-Soviet state economically.

Maybe I'm blind, but I have no idea how someone looks at the USA and concludes this.

[JetSpiegel]

Extremely inequality that keeps increasing, political movements that try to change this are killed in the crib, a dying empire.

Just because the Central Comittee is called Blackrock, doesn't mean the American economy is not being more and more centrally planned. Free Enterprise is dying.

I mean economically, the political system is still "free" (less and less), it's not a dictatorship (yet).

[blackhawkC17]

> Just because the Central Comittee is called Blackrock, doesn't mean the American economy is not being more and more centrally planned.

Of course, you'll mention BlackRock, the never-ending boogeyman for people with little economic knowledge.

[nabla9]

Not really:

https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?contextual=aggregate...