[bruce511]

Govts are typically "large enterprise". In most cases the largest enterprise in a country.

In some countries they also have the burden of being legible to outsiders. Between the shareholders (voters) and journalists etc there's a lot of process that has to be transparent.

This transparency is legibility driven to extremes. If an enterprise kills a project (think Windows Phone) its done, and we move on. If a govt kills a project there's a lot of external attention on what went wrong, who's getting fired (or going to jail) and how "our money got wasted".

So yes, as things get bigger they matter to more people. The more people involved the more every single thought and action has to be meticulously detailed.

Which is party why (democratic) govt is soooo bad at actually getting anything done. Feudal govts, and autocratic businesses, get a lot done - much of it quickly. It might not be good. It might be motivated my enrichment not care, but it gets done fast.

A good autocrat moves the needle, and things get a lot better very quickly. A bad autocrat achieves his goals, often at enormous cost to the organization (which may not survive. )

[lelandbatey]

Eh, autocrats get away with looking like they move fast due to their lack of transparency; slow things can be dismissed or not propagandized, fast things will be shouted from the rooftops.

Autocrats don't automatically execute faster.

[godelski]

Autocrats also had thousands of years and generations to give their citizens freedom of expression, the freedom to innovate, to eat, have access to clean drinking water, to solve child mortality, to extend life expectancy for those who lived through childhood to be past 60, to put a man on the moon. Yet the progress of civilization was far slower before democracy.

Similar to what you suggest, many say history is written by the victors. But instead history is written by those who can write and survive. There's not much written from the perspective of a commoner for most of history. But where those writings survive, the situations do not appear pleasant.

[ben_w]

The UK during the first half of the industrial revolution was about as democratic as some of the ancient Greek city states, and even that was an improvement over the reaches of the British Empire.

What solved all those things you list was industrialisation and (arguably) capitalism*, but capitalism itself is tens of thousands of village-sized autocratcies** where each has the freedom to try things and fail (though even that varies with time, hence debtors' prison), and back then people were still working out what "workers rights" and "health and safety" meant, hence the radium girls, or children being crushed by the power looms they were paid to clean while they were still running.

To illustrate your list with e.g. food, what solved food was the Haber-Bosch process, which is responsible for about half the nitrogen in our bodies today; the British Empire thought famines were nature's way of finding balance.

* the argument against capitalism here is the Soviet Union; the counter-argument is that the Soviets could literally just look at and copy what already existed by that point; the counter-counter-argument is that they also invented some stuff of their own; the counter-counter-counter-argument is that vanishingly few of those examples were actually state-of-the-art, and the only ones I can even think of is the first half of the Space Race.

** most corporations are not democracies; the rare ones which are, are "worker co-operatives": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

[godelski]

  > Which is party why (democratic) govt is soooo bad at actually getting anything done.

I find this and similar claims quite astounding. The last few hundred years seems to have been some of the most productive times for humanity. The great technological leaps forward. In that time we went from an agricultural society where many were malnourished, illiterate, and life expectancy was far lower (not only was the child mortality rate magnitudes higher but expectancy past 60 years old was abysmal) to a society that put a god damn man on the moon and maybe more importantly a toilet in every home.

All that happened under democracy.

So I call BS to claims that democracy means the government is so bad at getting things done. Perhaps you're pointing the finger at the wrong variable.

  > A good autocrat moves the needle, and things get a lot better very quickly. A bad autocrat achieves his goals

It's true, a benevolent dictator can do a lot of good. It's also true that we don't have the proof for the counterfactual of what I discussed above.

But if these autocrats were as good as you suggest then it begs the question of why the Industrial Revolution and many of the great leaps forward didn't happen under them? Or why during the rise of democracy in the west did the remaining monarchies and autocrats not also flourish? Post WW2 why did the top down economies of the USSR and China also not see such success? (China didn't succeed until much later, when it opened up) Those countries across that same time that democracies made such advancements did not win out.

You can say that maybe those leaders weren't the best, but we're talking about many generations here. So then what? Benevolent autocrats are rare? That seems like a great flaw.

You also forget the old cliché: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. History has shown that there were many kings and rulers who sought to do good and do good by the people, yet in these efforts caused great disaster. You could take the Four Pest Campaign as a relatively recent example. It was definitely implemented with good intentions but ended up being one of, if not the, greatest environmental disasters of all time. Estimates are that between 1% and 10% of the population at the time starved.

This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.

On paper I think the idea of a benevolent autocrat sounds good. But in reality there are so few examples of benevolent autocrats who made their citizens lives better. Sure, many built great monuments but that's not the same thing. It is simply difficult to role effectively over so large of an ecosystem. The world is too complex for one man to make informed decisions. I'm sure if you are honest with yourself you'll find that even far smaller tasks, ones you may be apart of, share this feature. When a single mind cannot handle all the complexities, you must turn to a collective. But a feudal society is not a dictatorship, even if it appears so locally

[mike_hearn]

> The great technological leaps forward ... All that happened under democracy.

I think you're conflating "governments were democratic at a time these things happened" with "the government did these things directly itself via its institutions".

Of those achievements, only the space race was actually executed by the government, and it's not a great counter-example because it was done purely to compete with the achievements of an autocratic government (the USSR).

The rest was private sector efforts. It wasn't a government institution that built toilets.

> it begs the question of why the Industrial Revolution and many of the great leaps forward didn't happen under them?

They did. USSR famously went through forced industrialization.

[clarkevans]

Democracy is successful when it creates the business-regulatory environment and marketplace that let the private sector advance human welfare as well as technology.

[godelski]

Please read my entire comment

  > Of those achievements, only the space race was actually executed by the government

  > The rest was private sector efforts

Your point is?

[joarxpablo]

I also don't think that autocracy is more productive than democracy, but the industrial revolution is absolutely not dependent on democracy.

Imperial Germany was a practically feudal political system and yet it still managed to drive some of the most important inventions of its time and rivaled the UK and US in its economy. France under Napoleon III was by no means democratic, but had no trouble growing its economy.

More recently China has moved from an almost purely agricultural society to a fully industrialized country entirely under the auspices of an authoritarian communist party. Opening up and reform still happened under autocracy, it did not lead to any further political freedoms. The Soviet Union actually did have tremendous growth during the Great Depression but of course also stagnated after WW2 (perhaps due to its very high military spending trying to keep up with the US).

I think in general there is just a correlation between economic growth and democracy, but that they are not causally related (democracy might rather be caused by economic growth, but that is still debatable).

[ben_w]

In addition to what the other's comments have said, I think you're missing two things here:

(1) The comment you're replying to didn't say autocrats were "good", they said they were "fast".

(2) Authoritarian failures are also present in capitalism, because most corporations within capitalism are top-down organisation, "my way or the highway" from whoever your manager is, and most corporations fail quickly. The reason this works anyway is that society benefits because of the out-sized benefit of the few which succeed wildly; on a global scale there's something similar, with ~200 experiments called "nations" rather than "corporations", and right now the world is mainly getting richer and cleaner because of the outsized success from China — because the economic policies of China happen to be the ones which work, not because China's the most free.

[monknomo]

The thing is though, when you look at actual autocrats, they aren't really even fast. They are perhaps fast at protecting themselves by enriching their friends and impoverishing their threats (ie anyone that is not their friend), but you can't tell me Idi Amin or Ghadaffi built out the trains to run on time. Not even Mussolini really did that (in fact, they became worse, and also Italy ran out of bread)

[ben_w]

That's evidence of them being "not good" rather than "not fast"; the former isn't in dispute.

Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

[godelski]

  > Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.

The "move fast and break things" strategy is a fantastic strategy when you are approaching a problem and trying to figure it out. But if you don't go back and clean things up when you do then you're left with a lot of junk and dead weight. A lot of technical debt builds up this way. It's slow and no singular instance is to blame. Just like how you don't get fat by eating a single cookie. Hell, you don't get fat by eating an entire fucking cake in one sitting. You get fat by doing so repeatedly and by not doing things to mitigate that buildup.

You can't run fast when you're fat. And you don't get fat overnight. It is slow. Maybe you gain a pound a week and lose a second on your mile time every day. You likely won't notice such effects. But by getting fat you have to work so much harder to move fast.

This is true for weight, software, countries, and all sorts of things. Professional athletes spend far more time on maintenance and implementing good habits to ensure nothing slows them down. But often we look at those things as if they provide no progress. Maybe they don't move us literally forward, but they are definitely key to doing so. Let's not make this mistake

[ben_w]

Again, you're arguing here on the basis of quality. The points you're making here are not in dispute.

> It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.

One of the key things about autocrats, their defining characteristics even, is they get to disregard any law they want to.

This is not fun for anyone relying on that law. It is not somewhere sensible people will choose to invest in.

But it is fast.

Technical debt is a fine example, but you know what? Easy debt fuels capitalism. I've seen one codebase that had an incompetent mutilate it for something like a decade, and another that was ISO 9001 rated. The train-wreck with all the debt was still easier to handle and faster to implement features and fix bugs within, and lasted in prod much longer than most software companies.

Lots of governments keep promising the equivalent of finally refactoring the old codebase, it's hard and slow but some even make progress. Autocrats? They can just order them all gone. And when it turns out that wasn't a good idea? It was a bad idea done fast.

[godelski]

  > you're missing two things here:

  > (1) The comment you're replying said they were "fast".

I actually did address this. It is my opening paragraph

  > (2) Authoritarian failures are also present in capitalism

I also addressed this, in my second to last paragraph

  > success from China

Interestingly I also brought them up. Read what I said about them carefully. I get it, it's a comment so I brush over 70 years quickly, but I do discuss it.

But when looking at China make sure you consider 2 things

1) China didn't succeed until it opened up and started working with the West. The policies from Deng greatly reshaped China. A man Mao kicked out of the party twice and was called a capitalist. He was the one who created the special economic zones they have today (like Shenzhen). It's something his successor continued and even Xi has. Interpret this how you will, but China's wealth didn't happen until these events and the wealthiest regions are either those zones or incredibly close to them (like Shanghai being sandwiched by two)

2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead. I expect every programmer to recognize that building a flappy bird game is pretty easy, but doing it first isn't. China has been done great on this front and hasn't fallen for the middle income trap like many others but they're not completely out of it yet. It looks like they'll succeed but be careful in counting your chickens before they hatch.

(You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)

But regardless I'm not sure what China matters in this discussion. I said

  > there are so *few* examples of benevolent autocrats who made their citizens lives better. 

I specifically chose to not write "no examples" because it would be inaccurate. China isn't the only one either. This isn't a binary outcome and there's many nuances. No two countries are the same, nor are two autocrats. There's many variables at play here. But what we, as citizens, care about is the trends, success rates, and stability. Maybe 70/100 democracies are stable and beneficial to citizens and 10/100 autocracies are (these numbers are entirely fictional). If given odds like that, which would you prefer? Neither is a guarantee of success.

And I want to restress something from my first comment. With great power comes great responsibility. In other recent threads we've been talking about government overreach and Flock has been in the news a lot lately. So the concept of Turnkey Tyranny gets discussed. This is still relevant here. One of democracies greatest flaws is that has the power to turn into an autocracy or any other form of government, at the will of the people. So the concept here is that you do not want to give strong powers to benevolent leaders because you cannot guarantee the next won't be. The core idea here still holds true under autocracies. The trouble is, a Turnkey Tyrant is always on the table for those countries and there is no defense. This key can turn even with the same person in power and is frequently turned with a belief that the ends justify the means. It's an all too common occurrence in autocracies, happening with people we've discussed and many of those benevolent autocrats we alluded to.

[ben_w]

> > (1) The comment you're replying said they were "fast".

> I actually did address this. It is my opening paragraph

This opening paragraph?

  I find this and similar claims quite astounding. The last few hundred years seems to have been some of the most productive times for humanity. The great technological leaps forward. In that time we went from an agricultural society where many were malnourished, illiterate, and life expectancy was far lower (not only was the child mortality rate magnitudes higher but expectancy past 60 years old was abysmal) to a society that put a god damn man on the moon and maybe more importantly a toilet in every home.

In isolation, it's about speed.

But then you followed it with:

  All that happened under democracy.

Which suggests that you intended the first paragraph to be about comparing free nations to dictatorships and not acknowledging that the dictatorships, which also did those things, were also fast — in fact, faster. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516066

> I also addressed this, in my second to last paragraph

This one?

  This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.

If so, not the point I was making here.

95% of businesses fail. How transparent are those failures? Generally not, which also leads to people making predictable mistakes like investing in bubbles.

> 2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516066

> (You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)

I could ramble on for a long time about how I think national self-images differ from reality, to the cost of those living in them, but I don't think it would add much over noting the current weaponisation of the word "woke" by those who want to deny all historical mistakes, and before that having grown up in the UK with "it's political correctness gone mad", and the UK's political classes' differing reactions to the destruction of two statues dedicated to two different philanthropists — one of whom was a slave trader (apparently we should be sad about the destruction of that statue), the other was Jimmy Savile (where the destruction of the statue was met with broad agreement).

Also as a Brit, lots of us have absolutely no idea why most or all of our former colonies might not like us.

> If given odds like that, which would you prefer?

In this hypothetical, am I in the aristocracy or in the working class?

If a citizen, you're still missing my point entirely, and I think the parent point too.

Illustration of why: same question but of corporations, workers vs. shareholders (the equivalent of aristocrats). What the people with the money want has very little in common with the interests of those at the (metaphorical or literal) coal front.

Move fast and break [things | laws | treaties | people]. Sucks to be the one who gets broken. Sucks more when it's broken fast. The point is, and only is, that it's fast.