I think the key passage is “ Getting the right authoritarian leader can be beneficial, but getting the wrong one can be disastrous.”
Democratic governance is not about implementing the popular will or picking the best leader. It is about ensuring a peaceful transition away from bad leaders. Authoritarian leaders are very hard to get rid of without violence, and that violence can easily turn to civil wars that tear apart societies.
Democratic governance may be the second worst form of government, but the worst form of government is all the others.
Yup! Peaceful transitions of power + fewer famines is about all you get from Democracy. Those sound small, but are actually HUGE. Power transitions are an incredibly common source of bloodshed and civil war
Besides controlling for human capital, yet another problem with the belief that democracy causes economic growth is that democracy also tends to cause high national debts, which cancel out much of the supposed economic "growth".
Welfare and democracy don’t mix. Welfare is an effective way for politicians to buy votes. Democracy is a tragedy of the commons creating some of the largest pyramid schemes in history (i.e. historically high national debts). https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/democracy#democracy-is-TOTC
The PRC government is the most responsive of all, with 80% of Chinese citizens saying that it responds to their needs and 82% saying they have 'enough' or 'too much' democracy.
An alternative to the western understanding of a liberal participatory democracy can be summed up in the notion of "the mandate of heaven". This is a simple way of describing legitimate authoritarian leadership that is popularly accepted so long as at least an attempt at utilitarian fulfillment is evident.
Yup. My politics is literally "we should clone Lee Kuan Yew 200 times and install him as dictator-for-life in each of the ~200 countries in the world."
He’s the only proven great, non-corrupt, and empirically successful “benign tyrant” we have actual DNA for - time for some radical experimentation in governance!
What you're describing is what the Greek philosophers who opposed the disorder of democracy termed "a philosopher-king". This is not to say that kings would literally be philosophers, but would be wise and benevolent--the way that actual philosophers optimistically viewed themselves.
> The problem is that Singapore is an intensely boring society which looks like one huge mall.
One thing you might notice, though, is that pretty much all "upper class enclaves" could be described this way. Beverly Hills? Highland Park? Tyson's Corner and Mclean? Magnificent Mile?
The commonality between Singapore and these other places is that they're all clean and nice and generally well run, as well as being prosperous.
I think you pretty much have to choose between "prosperous and well run, but boring" and "interesting."
And personally, I'd definitely take "boring and prosperous and well run" over "homeless fentanyl zombies crapping and shooting up in the streets," but you know, maybe that's just me.
Not really. Lots of rich American areas are really beautiful. Singapore is not.
I think your choice is a false alternative. Ordinary effective policing is needed. Queen Anne Hill in Seattle has it. It's 12th and Jackson in Seattle that does not. It could be the whole city. But the rich protect their own. Madison Park in Seattle does not have fentanyl zombies.
> Not really. Lots of rich American areas are really beautiful. Singapore is not.
Oh here, we profoundly disagree. I think for a built up urban area, Singapore is literally the best you can do. The verdant plant life and greenery everywhere, including literally on most of the skyscrapers and buildings, the well-placed parks and gardens and ancient trees, the walkability and transport, the road traffic levels - all much better than other built up urban areas around the world.
> I think your choice is a false alternative. Ordinary effective policing is needed.
I totally agree on the policing thing. It's made worse because ~80% of police time is wasted on overhead and traffic stops, all while crime closure rates for everything from murder to rape and property crime is abysmal.
I'm not sure how false the alternative though - empirically, that seems to be the choice in most American cities. "Live in a rich area with actual policing," or "live in a non-rich area that's a dystopian hellscape tailored for homeless people and criminals." And a lot of times even the rich areas are dystopian if they're anywhere near a downtown.
Well, I can't compare Singapore to Queen Anne Hill, Madison Park, Russian Hill, etc. Yes, the parks are nice although not used much given the weather. Perhaps it is a problem of era -- the nicer American communities were largely built up before the post-war aesthetic collapse.
Singapore's achievement is huge, but, like all of Asia, it suffers from its addiction to contemporary aesthetics, hick modernism that prioritizes looking high tech to livability, and affection for tower blocks. America industrialized when there were still people of taste around, people who had a sense of what a human civilization should be. That shattered in WWII for reasons that are still not clear, and the hideous mess that is the typical Asian city is the result. Obviously America also has heartless suburbs from the same era.
This was a great post, but the most important thing that wasn't mentioned is what we should replace democracy with. Although democracy is clearly and obviously very flawed, many people are still inclined to support it anyway because they believe that it's better than every other political system that's ever been tried.
I've proposed that we should replace democracy with a meritocratic system, coupled with a political structure to prevent potential shifts towards corruption over time. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/democracy
"More recently, Ziho Park found that the association between democracy and economic growth is due to the fact that Western countries favour democratic regimes and impose sanctions on non-democratic regimes."
In our world today, despite the bias against non-democratic jurisdictions, there are a few who've done very well, e.g. Singapore, HK, China. In many ways, their governance is better than in Western democracies.
It would be incredible to see a world where non-democratic regimes had an equal opportunity to prosper as democratic ones, where we could see many more Singapores and Chinas.
I really wish the dissident right would stop simping for China. It's a country currently in the middle of committing demographic suicide with a housing bubble orders of magnitude larger than subprime.
If 200 million Chinese die in the next 30 years because of an impending demographic, economic and geostrategic implosion, I suspect that will put them back at square one. DR commenters like Yarvin et al are usually skeptical of line-go-up GDP arguments and Singapore is the ur-example of Spandrel's IQ Shredder, so it's a bit strange I need to point this out.
Singapore and HK are city states, and HK had some democracy and Singapore is a democracy (the PAP would not win if it didn't do a good job).
China has vastly underperformed its IQ and appears to be slowing down in growth at a fairly low overall level. Its COVID policy was horrific and its demographics are apocalypse level.
HK was not a democracy under the British. It has some level of democracy today (20 out of 90 legislative councils are directly elected), but the mayor (Chief Executive) isn't elected.
Yes, lack of democracy kept China very poor for fifty years. If they were a Democracy there would have been no communism.
What they've accomplished since ditching communism isn't impressive. It's exactly what you'd expect to happen even without particularly good governance. Lately they have stumbled hard.
Singapore has free and fair elections. Sure, the PAP does some thing to favor itself, but its success is largely just a function of its good performance. Democracy is about throwing out bad governance without a civil war, the PAP has governed well.
HK is a tweener government of limited democracy. It vastly outperformed China which had no democracy at all.
Well, there happens to be another country in the world with 1.4b people and it's been a democracy for more than 50 years (78 years in fact): India. If you don't believe China is impressive in comparison, then I don't know what to say.
India has an average IQ of 76. It's doomed by its poor genetics.
I remember people saying India vs China would be some kind of test of democracy versus authoritarianism and I always laughed. Chinese are high IQ. Indians are trash. IQ is still the #1 driver of whether you become a developed country or not after "not communist".
The West embraced trade, capitalism, and industrialization the earliest, so it gained wealth and power and got to set the rules of the global system. I believe trade, capitalism, and industrialization are keys to prosperity. The question of this article is whether or not democracy is necessary as well. I believe it's not; you seem to believe it is.
The West does not impose sanctions because of moral atrocities. If it did, Israel would be under severe sanctions today. The West imposes sanctions on regimes that hurt American power and interests globally.
Here is a big reason why Democracy has failed in the United States.
The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of representative democracy. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech, thereby giving entities of wealth and power total influence in elections.
An interesting essay and one that will resonate with all those on the Right who have been saying for some years now that the idea of democratic pluralism (as in vote Left get Left/vote Right get Right) has long since become a media fiction that obscures the reality that we are governed by a permanently entrenched 'Deep State', 'Blob', 'Machine', 'Cathedral'....call it what you will. [Although the Trump2 phenomenon seems just now to be maybe finally contradicting this pessimistic view of electoral democracy]
Two further observations:
* I think 'the affluent' needs more definition. For example what one can broadly call the Lawyer Caste exerts particularly outsize power.
"Perhaps the biggest problem with the modern conception of liberty is that the freedom it promises is perhaps not, when it comes down to it, something that most people particularly want. They would rather fit in because a herd instinct is inherent in human nature. It is a not uncommon observation, among Liberalism’s sceptics, that most people - whatever their nominal IQ - have group-think tendencies. The need to be liked, to go with the flow etc is just too overriding. So you get our post-1960s paradox....the phenomenon of copycat 'individualism' which began in the 60's with the 'hip' denigration of so-called 'boring' 1950's so-called conformity."
"An interesting essay and one that will resonate with all those on the Right who have been saying for some years now that the idea of democratic pluralism (as in vote Left get Left/vote Right get Right) has long since become a media fiction that obscures the reality that we are governed by a permanently entrenched 'Deep State', 'Blob', 'Machine', 'Cathedral'....call it what you will."
Prosperity is often confused with democracy. When people feel prosperous, they call it "democracy." Half the game of politics is selling the idea that if you participate in the democracy, you will have greater prosperity.
So... is the authors' contention that welfare-state expansion is purely a function of women and minorities entering the electorate, and nothing to do with the poor themselves? I'm not sure that passes the smell test, personally.
Interesting article.
I think the key passage is “ Getting the right authoritarian leader can be beneficial, but getting the wrong one can be disastrous.”
Democratic governance is not about implementing the popular will or picking the best leader. It is about ensuring a peaceful transition away from bad leaders. Authoritarian leaders are very hard to get rid of without violence, and that violence can easily turn to civil wars that tear apart societies.
Democratic governance may be the second worst form of government, but the worst form of government is all the others.
Yup! Peaceful transitions of power + fewer famines is about all you get from Democracy. Those sound small, but are actually HUGE. Power transitions are an incredibly common source of bloodshed and civil war
Congratulations Alden 🎉
Besides controlling for human capital, yet another problem with the belief that democracy causes economic growth is that democracy also tends to cause high national debts, which cancel out much of the supposed economic "growth".
Welfare and democracy don’t mix. Welfare is an effective way for politicians to buy votes. Democracy is a tragedy of the commons creating some of the largest pyramid schemes in history (i.e. historically high national debts). https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/democracy#democracy-is-TOTC
The PRC government is the most responsive of all, with 80% of Chinese citizens saying that it responds to their needs and 82% saying they have 'enough' or 'too much' democracy.
Supporting their opinions, we find that China meets all six criteria for democracy. https://herecomeschina.substack.com/p/the-democracy-gap?r=16k
An alternative to the western understanding of a liberal participatory democracy can be summed up in the notion of "the mandate of heaven". This is a simple way of describing legitimate authoritarian leadership that is popularly accepted so long as at least an attempt at utilitarian fulfillment is evident.
Yup. My politics is literally "we should clone Lee Kuan Yew 200 times and install him as dictator-for-life in each of the ~200 countries in the world."
He’s the only proven great, non-corrupt, and empirically successful “benign tyrant” we have actual DNA for - time for some radical experimentation in governance!
This would be fine, if possible.
What you're describing is what the Greek philosophers who opposed the disorder of democracy termed "a philosopher-king". This is not to say that kings would literally be philosophers, but would be wise and benevolent--the way that actual philosophers optimistically viewed themselves.
But you just never know, do you? :^)
The problem is that Singapore is an intensely boring society which looks like one huge mall.
> The problem is that Singapore is an intensely boring society which looks like one huge mall.
One thing you might notice, though, is that pretty much all "upper class enclaves" could be described this way. Beverly Hills? Highland Park? Tyson's Corner and Mclean? Magnificent Mile?
The commonality between Singapore and these other places is that they're all clean and nice and generally well run, as well as being prosperous.
I think you pretty much have to choose between "prosperous and well run, but boring" and "interesting."
And personally, I'd definitely take "boring and prosperous and well run" over "homeless fentanyl zombies crapping and shooting up in the streets," but you know, maybe that's just me.
Not really. Lots of rich American areas are really beautiful. Singapore is not.
I think your choice is a false alternative. Ordinary effective policing is needed. Queen Anne Hill in Seattle has it. It's 12th and Jackson in Seattle that does not. It could be the whole city. But the rich protect their own. Madison Park in Seattle does not have fentanyl zombies.
> Not really. Lots of rich American areas are really beautiful. Singapore is not.
Oh here, we profoundly disagree. I think for a built up urban area, Singapore is literally the best you can do. The verdant plant life and greenery everywhere, including literally on most of the skyscrapers and buildings, the well-placed parks and gardens and ancient trees, the walkability and transport, the road traffic levels - all much better than other built up urban areas around the world.
> I think your choice is a false alternative. Ordinary effective policing is needed.
I totally agree on the policing thing. It's made worse because ~80% of police time is wasted on overhead and traffic stops, all while crime closure rates for everything from murder to rape and property crime is abysmal.
I'm not sure how false the alternative though - empirically, that seems to be the choice in most American cities. "Live in a rich area with actual policing," or "live in a non-rich area that's a dystopian hellscape tailored for homeless people and criminals." And a lot of times even the rich areas are dystopian if they're anywhere near a downtown.
Well, I can't compare Singapore to Queen Anne Hill, Madison Park, Russian Hill, etc. Yes, the parks are nice although not used much given the weather. Perhaps it is a problem of era -- the nicer American communities were largely built up before the post-war aesthetic collapse.
Singapore's achievement is huge, but, like all of Asia, it suffers from its addiction to contemporary aesthetics, hick modernism that prioritizes looking high tech to livability, and affection for tower blocks. America industrialized when there were still people of taste around, people who had a sense of what a human civilization should be. That shattered in WWII for reasons that are still not clear, and the hideous mess that is the typical Asian city is the result. Obviously America also has heartless suburbs from the same era.
This was a great post, but the most important thing that wasn't mentioned is what we should replace democracy with. Although democracy is clearly and obviously very flawed, many people are still inclined to support it anyway because they believe that it's better than every other political system that's ever been tried.
I've proposed that we should replace democracy with a meritocratic system, coupled with a political structure to prevent potential shifts towards corruption over time. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/democracy
Excellent. I have stated before that a meritocracy is the way to go.
"More recently, Ziho Park found that the association between democracy and economic growth is due to the fact that Western countries favour democratic regimes and impose sanctions on non-democratic regimes."
In our world today, despite the bias against non-democratic jurisdictions, there are a few who've done very well, e.g. Singapore, HK, China. In many ways, their governance is better than in Western democracies.
It would be incredible to see a world where non-democratic regimes had an equal opportunity to prosper as democratic ones, where we could see many more Singapores and Chinas.
I really wish the dissident right would stop simping for China. It's a country currently in the middle of committing demographic suicide with a housing bubble orders of magnitude larger than subprime.
China completely eliminated extreme poverty among 1.4b people in the past 30 years. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-by-world-region
That's an unprecedented achievement, and it would be incredible if the rest of the developing world accomplished the same.
China certainly isn't perfect, but among developing countries, it has done a good job.
It has not really eliminated extreme poverty. No one in China actually believes this.
But the economic achievements are very impressive. Whether they are worth the catastrophic effects on the environment remains to be seen.
Not living on a dollar a day is not an accomplishment for a society with an average IQ of 105.
"Not living on a dollar a day is not an accomplishment for a society with an average IQ of 105."
The vast majority of Chinese are paid much more than a dollar a day.
A society's standard of living depends on what they are paid and what that wage can supply.
If 200 million Chinese die in the next 30 years because of an impending demographic, economic and geostrategic implosion, I suspect that will put them back at square one. DR commenters like Yarvin et al are usually skeptical of line-go-up GDP arguments and Singapore is the ur-example of Spandrel's IQ Shredder, so it's a bit strange I need to point this out.
Singapore and HK are city states, and HK had some democracy and Singapore is a democracy (the PAP would not win if it didn't do a good job).
China has vastly underperformed its IQ and appears to be slowing down in growth at a fairly low overall level. Its COVID policy was horrific and its demographics are apocalypse level.
Keep in mind that China's GDP per capita was at Sub-Saharan Africa levels as late as 1997. https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/how-china-is-different-from-the-soviet
China has experienced a remarkable amount of progress in < 30 years. Growing an economy with 1.4b people is not easy.
Singapore is effectively a one-party state and has been since 1965. Elections are structured to favor PAP (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkxf4SC_SBk).
HK was not a democracy under the British. It has some level of democracy today (20 out of 90 legislative councils are directly elected), but the mayor (Chief Executive) isn't elected.
Yes, lack of democracy kept China very poor for fifty years. If they were a Democracy there would have been no communism.
What they've accomplished since ditching communism isn't impressive. It's exactly what you'd expect to happen even without particularly good governance. Lately they have stumbled hard.
Singapore has free and fair elections. Sure, the PAP does some thing to favor itself, but its success is largely just a function of its good performance. Democracy is about throwing out bad governance without a civil war, the PAP has governed well.
HK is a tweener government of limited democracy. It vastly outperformed China which had no democracy at all.
Well, there happens to be another country in the world with 1.4b people and it's been a democracy for more than 50 years (78 years in fact): India. If you don't believe China is impressive in comparison, then I don't know what to say.
India has an average IQ of 76. It's doomed by its poor genetics.
I remember people saying India vs China would be some kind of test of democracy versus authoritarianism and I always laughed. Chinese are high IQ. Indians are trash. IQ is still the #1 driver of whether you become a developed country or not after "not communist".
"In my comment, I was careful to remain agnostic on the question of whether democracy is causally relevant to economic prosperity." Then we agree.
Can you think of a "western" country that does not have a US military base?
The West embraced trade, capitalism, and industrialization the earliest, so it gained wealth and power and got to set the rules of the global system. I believe trade, capitalism, and industrialization are keys to prosperity. The question of this article is whether or not democracy is necessary as well. I believe it's not; you seem to believe it is.
The West does not impose sanctions because of moral atrocities. If it did, Israel would be under severe sanctions today. The West imposes sanctions on regimes that hurt American power and interests globally.
Democracy is like crowdsourcing the ignorant.
It's a huge redistribution machine from the productive to the unproductive, and from the powerless to the powerful.
It's not the Wisdom of the Crowds but the Tragedy of the Commons.
Outstanding piece; excellent survey of the relevant research.
Great insight guys. Just the sort of thing i subscribe to Aporia for. Will read, absorb, reflect..
Excellent, informative article.
Here is a big reason why Democracy has failed in the United States.
The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of representative democracy. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech, thereby giving entities of wealth and power total influence in elections.
An interesting essay and one that will resonate with all those on the Right who have been saying for some years now that the idea of democratic pluralism (as in vote Left get Left/vote Right get Right) has long since become a media fiction that obscures the reality that we are governed by a permanently entrenched 'Deep State', 'Blob', 'Machine', 'Cathedral'....call it what you will. [Although the Trump2 phenomenon seems just now to be maybe finally contradicting this pessimistic view of electoral democracy]
Two further observations:
* I think 'the affluent' needs more definition. For example what one can broadly call the Lawyer Caste exerts particularly outsize power.
* Democracy is also questionable in principle as well as in practise. As I wrote recently in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/has-liberalisms-flame-burned-too
"Perhaps the biggest problem with the modern conception of liberty is that the freedom it promises is perhaps not, when it comes down to it, something that most people particularly want. They would rather fit in because a herd instinct is inherent in human nature. It is a not uncommon observation, among Liberalism’s sceptics, that most people - whatever their nominal IQ - have group-think tendencies. The need to be liked, to go with the flow etc is just too overriding. So you get our post-1960s paradox....the phenomenon of copycat 'individualism' which began in the 60's with the 'hip' denigration of so-called 'boring' 1950's so-called conformity."
"An interesting essay and one that will resonate with all those on the Right who have been saying for some years now that the idea of democratic pluralism (as in vote Left get Left/vote Right get Right) has long since become a media fiction that obscures the reality that we are governed by a permanently entrenched 'Deep State', 'Blob', 'Machine', 'Cathedral'....call it what you will."
Yes, we live in a plutocratic oligarchy.
Prosperity is often confused with democracy. When people feel prosperous, they call it "democracy." Half the game of politics is selling the idea that if you participate in the democracy, you will have greater prosperity.
So... is the authors' contention that welfare-state expansion is purely a function of women and minorities entering the electorate, and nothing to do with the poor themselves? I'm not sure that passes the smell test, personally.
Switzerland has a low turnout in election but they have the magic formula and popular votation :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_formula_(Swiss_politics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland
Did the author take this into account ?
Examples of popular will triumphing over elite human capital.
1) COVID, elites wanted lockdowns and restriction, ordinary people didn't.
2) Entitlements, elites would prefer fewer entitlements, people support them.
3) Law and order, elites generally soft on this stuff, people want enforcement.
4) Immigration, currently determining whether elites or the people will get their way.