The problem with that line of reasoning is that those countries are categorically different from democracies.
Those countries do not have the interlocking systems of laws, elections, values, that constitute democracy, things like 1) rule of law 2) private property rights 3) protections for minorities 4) independent judiciaries 5) systematic transitions of power through electoral systems with competing parties 6) independent constitutions that require 2/3rds or more majorities to amend, 7) separation of church and state (this includes cult of personalities), I could go on.
Superficially, it seems fair to compare democratic western countries to China, Russia, and Arab monarchies/dictatorships. But you easily slide into a category error. The very fact that they are not democracies means the people in those countries lack concrete tangible mechanisms and systems to ensure their freedom, independence, and safety, in a productive society that also protects minorities. The people are just fundamentally less free than they would be if they were in a democracy.
Your criticisms of western democracies are well founded. The biggest problem in modern democracies is simple greed and regulatory capture (and intensification of capital in a low % of the population but that's connected to greed and regulatory capture). But that's not an argument to adopt a Chinese, Russian, or Arab, system if there is one beyond greed and authoritarian control. That's an argument to fix our democracies (ironically, the idea of fixing a government and society in this way is unique to happening within a democracy, otherwise what are you fighting for? more oppression?).
The grass is always greener when you assume you'll be in the powerful, rich, or successful, portion of society. But you can't assume that. So we have democracy.
Today it doesn't deliver. People go to the US because the status and the money, despite the visa process, the education system, the housing market and the infrastructure. Soon enough they will catch up to the status and the money, and the West will have little to offer.
It is easy the point the finger to everyone else, but it is the West that aren't fighting for it. We want the global markets, the large companies and the Chinese investments. You can't have both. You can't on the one hand have an idea of how things should be, and on the other sell it to highest bidder.
There are probably hundreds of articles about China "stealing" industries from the West. But overall they are just buying them to the delight of the owners, either with money or effort. And then the West somehow thinks that the Chinese should be the ones considering them successful.
In general, I agree with you. I would not use the current US as a stirling example, historically, though the US system has been largely successful. We probably disagree on the level of success though.
I can't speak from the US perspective, but in Canada many people come and they like it here. Not just because of status or money. Because people don't just need or want status or money. They like it here because here we actually work to balance security and opportunity. Not everyone is happy. But they're not unhappy and without rights, they're just unhappy. Liberal democracies have been trying to create [Rawlsian justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice#The_Two_Pr...) and some have been more successful than others.
I think the idea that economic success and liberal democratic values coincide has been too quickly conflated. I share your view of West - China trade. The West thought that liberalizing economic markets would naturally cause liberalized societies and democracies. Allowing China to enter the WTO without serious stipulations and controls to ensure democratic transition was a mistake. And now they flaunt their economic "success" as the sign of a successful counter to democracy. Western industries and governments that cozy up to China risk serious moral hazard and we are already seeing the effects of that.
We missed our chance to seriously allow a liberal China to take shape when it would have been best to.
But China still relies on the west for trade. And that is our leverage. Going alone against China is suicide. As a block of democracies, however, we could stand up to them quite easily. We just can't be greedy. That's a hard sell in 2019 apparently.
That is sort of the point. People see the US as an example of democracy because of its prosperity, not because of its democracy. If you want democracy you probably go to Finland instead.
Everything is worse in these authoritarian countries not just the freedom. That is another thing people generally don't understand. There is nothing to catch up to. We just have to make sure to not get worse ourselves. And to actually use the advantages we had. That is why I am saying that it is the West that is defeatist. It is we that are changing our ways, to a large extent from our post war ideals.
If you want the feature of democracy you have actually be democratic. Which many areas of our societies increasingly aren't. It is nice to be able to say whatever you want, but if no one is listening there is no effect. The point is that something should happen, otherwise we are just cargo culting ourselves and being jesters for those in power.
The United States is a constitutional republic.
This results in people _experimenting_ with things, and sometimes they work sometimes they don't. But there is a huge variety of experience and people just trying things out, or doing their own thing-- which increases the culture vibrancy and tapestry of diversity.
That is your opinion. You'll find that many people disagree. Maybe not here, in HN, openly.
You'd think that, but the middle income trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap happens for a reason, and widespread liberal or even democratic values might be required in order to escape it. The thing is that the wealthiest countries in the world, aside from special cases like big natural-resource endowments, have always featured broadly-liberal values and a reasonably-diffuse power base. Starting at least from the Italian and German renaissance, The Netherlands in the early-modern period, etc. And this dynamic has only become more important in a modern service economy where growth is powered by continued entrepreneuship and innovation - it would be huge news if this became suddenly untrue.
Chances are if you look back at those societies it wasn't the liberalism. They were probably horrible by modern standards. It might just have been the trade of information and resources. Today you can do probably do that without the values. Or at least if the West doesn't do it that way, who is the competition?
If everyone in the US is worried about their mortgage, who is going to be more creative than Google to the point where Google can't just buy them? The same probably goes for society. If the West doesn't do democracy very well, who are the Chinese losing to?
Maybe you are right, but I still would trust the future to some idea. That is when you lose. When you think "well this can't happen" and then it does. Because the quote about astrophysics also goes for society, that "the universe has no obligation to make sense to you". Chances are it doesn't have to be certain way at all. Most of history certainly isn't fair.
Of course, that's what you'd expect a deity to say, but American Evangelicalism is chock full of prosperity theology adherents: good people are rich people, rich people are good people, they are closer to god, and rich people closer to god deserve more and better things: Privilege. Bloodlines. Family name. Everything should be a product so that the wealthy can buy anything and as much of it as they want. Everyone else gets less or inferior versions, including public education, health care, environment, and justice. It's foundational in all ideologies, except liberal democracies - which at least in political science we don't actually say the U.S. started out as one. Rather it was designed to be a polyarchy in contrast to a monoarchy, using representative democracy with highly restricted access (you had to be a "better" person to participate, i.e. white, male, landowner) but it is a potential liberal democracy and has tracked that way over time, but does often resist. It is tedious. But that is the system. Churchill said it was the worst form of government except for all the others.
Most of history is not fair, indeed it was also not prosperous. It saw centuries of anemic economic growth, and it was very violent. Genetics show we aren't all that different, we're mainly products of environment, the bloodlines nonsense is just that nonsense. We are best off educating as many as possible, and mostly letting people make their own decisions. In aggregate, I trust most people most of the time make good choices slightly more than 50% of the time. If it's not true, and instead the state of man's nature is so hideously flawed that we need lords, then I saw we are doomed. We never get off the planet. We will destroy it, and ourselves with it.
All rapid technological change brings risk to economic and political stability. I think it's useful to see anti-tech more as a desire to spend time being deliberate and integrate it, rather than as curmudgeon.
I think it is less important that people have 100% trust all the time in their government, than trusting it's possible to change it when it is failing.
When any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community has an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal. http://www.civiced.org/resources/curriculum/mason
I am not saying that things shouldn't be fair. I am saying the opposite. Things should be fair and you should make it so. That is sort of my argument here, that you can't expect things to be fair. If you design your system around hierarchies it doesn't necessarily matter if it is capitalist or socialist. Democracy isn't going to win that. China is amazing at being unfair.
Things don't stop at the border. If all your clothes are all made under undemocratic conditions or your real estate is bought by oligarchs, how democratic are you? In a non-scares world what defines you is what you don't do. China also produces things under even worse condition other Asian countries.
My thesis is that democracy doesn't fall with China, it falls with the West. Because we are the ones not finding our way. I mean, to take a capitalist approach we want China to not be able to handle technology. That is the somewhat point, that in democracy you can do more sophisticate things and still live to see it. Now instead we find ourselves at disadvantage because we don't now how to handle things.
China does have these mechanisms. They may not be as effective as the ones in democracy, but they do exist. For example, their affirmative action policies are among the strongest in the world.
Also, China faces growing pains that the US already dealt with long ago. Just like how Americans viewed native Americans as fundamentally incompatible with contemporary civilization, China views the Uighurs and other minorities the same way. The American solution was war and driving natives on to ever smaller patches of land. The Chinese solution is forced assimilation. While I'd like to think that the US could deal with this problem a lot better today, our pattern of military intervention leaves me skeptical.
In that matter, don't you think it's the financial status that pushes all the ideas back? There is a fundamental tradeoff between resources spent on individuals vs total resources.
Indeed. The world as a whole is heading towards a situation where a larger and larger fraction of resources is under the control of a shrinking number of extremely rich people.
The corporations largely have diffuse ownership (they're owned by a hundred million people's 401(k)), and the top level executives are generally "rich" but e.g. Tim Cook has less than 1% as much money as Apple Inc.
The problem isn't that Bill Gates has too much money, it's that we have institutions with too much power and not enough accountability, both government and corporate. And then they use that power to conspire together against ordinary people.
What we need is to shrink the size of all entities to be less monolithic and more local and manageable.
Corporations are a legal fiction by which power is granted to people, so, no, that's not what is “really happening”. Corporations obscure the real distribution of power.
The reality is a ever narrower class of ever more wealthy (relatively as well as absolutely) people directs society.
> The corporations largely have diffuse ownership
Not so diffuse; the set of major capitalists is very small compared to the whole population, and the share of stock (and overall wealth) they control is quite large.
The point is that corporations distort the real distribution of power. Apple's money nominally belongs to its shareholders, but in practice it's under the control of their executives, and they have many perverse incentives derived out of everything from personal enrichment at the expense of the shareholders to tax avoidance to empire building.
Moreover, even under the set of incentives they're "supposed" to have, it means that a significant chunk of the economy is set toward advancing the interests of the fictional entity Apple Inc. even if its interests are not aligned with any individual person.
> Not so diffuse; the set of major capitalists is very small compared to the whole population, and the share of stock (and overall wealth) they control is quite large.
It's diffuse even then. Jeff Bezos is the richest man, has more than a hundred billion dollars, most of that money is in his own company, and yet even then he doesn't have majority ownership of even that company.
An "ordinary" billionaire, i.e. someone with a billion dollars, could invest 100% of their money into Apple and still barely own 0.1% of it.
Moreover, nearly all of the wealth of the rich is invested in corporations. Those investments yield returns, but the corporations are controlled far more by their executives than the nominal owners. Most importantly, that wouldn't change even if there were less "wealth inequality" unless the corporations were also made smaller -- it would in fact get worse, because the ownership would be even more diffuse, leaving the executives with even less accountability.
That's not the claim that was made, which was the corporations are the real holders of power, which was offered as an explicit denial of the claim that a narrow set of wealthy individuals hold power. That corporations are a vehicle by which the exact distribution of power among individuals may vary from what you'd think by looking at net worth alone does not change the fact that power is really held by a narrow set of wealthy individuals. (In fact, it concentrates power even more narrowly in the most wealthy by suppressing the effective power of the diffuse minority of wealth held by broad masses in a way somewhat similar to how FPTP electoral systems dilute the political power of diffuse minorities of votes.)
> Apple's money nominally belongs to its shareholders
No, it nominally belongs to Apple. Shareholders do not, either nominally or practically, own the assets of the corporation, they own a claim to a share of the liquidated net assets after satifying liabilities in the event of corporate dissolution, along with certain rights defined in law and corporate governance documents with regard to governance of the corporation while it is a going concern.
In practice, this increases the effective relative power of major (even if not majority individually) shareholders and reduces the power of small minority shareholders beyond what share of ownership alone would suggest.
That is a refutation of that claim, because the distortion takes the control away from any individual and constrains it within the path defined by "law and corporate governance documents with regard to governance of the corporation while it is a going concern."
Bezos can make himself CEO despite not holding a majority position, but if he gets cancer he can't decide to liquidate all of the company's assets (not just his personal shares) and then use it all to look for a cure. Because he's still not in control of it, the corporation is, which is different.
He also can't decide to purposely suffer major losses in order use the company's resources to solve significant social problems like climate change, even if he wanted to, without the consent of the other shareholders.
> In fact, it concentrates power even more narrowly in the most wealthy by suppressing the effective power of the diffuse minority of wealth held by broad masses in a way somewhat similar to how FPTP electoral systems dilute the political power of diffuse minorities of votes.
Yes, absolutely, but the thing causing that to happen is the incredibly large size of corporations, not the wealth of particular individuals. If Amazon was 10% its current size and correspondingly Bezos owned all of it, he would be in control of fewer resources than he is now despite having the exact same amount of personal wealth.
And then he could decide to use the company's resources to cure cancer or fight climate change, because he would be the sole owner, so there would be even less power bound up in corporate restrictions.
> No, it nominally belongs to Apple.
You can't have it both ways. Either the corporation is a legal fiction and the real power lies with some natural persons, who for a corporation are nominally ultimately the shareholders, or the corporation is a thing unto itself with its own rules and goals and is the owner of the assets, in which case the distinction between the corporation and the individuals is quite relevant precisely because it affects how the resources are used.
This seems to have been caused by democracy and lack of adequate checks on it. Our political system has gotten too good at pitting people against themselves.
For example, housing. It costs too much and people can't afford it. There are multiple policies we could adopt to address it.
One is to make housing prices go even higher. It's not such a problem to pay $500K for a house that should cost $200K if it can be sold for $1M by the time you retire. People like the idea of this because it allows them to make money "for free", especially the people who have already overpaid for a house. So it remains a popular policy even though it's blatantly an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
Another is to have the government subsidize housing or otherwise adopt policies like rent control or designated affordable housing. But the common factor in all of these policies is to have the effect of raising overall rents, and on top of that the ones that cost money then have to be paid for from taxes that could otherwise have gone to something actually useful.
So then the middle class gets presented with a false dichotomy which is really squeezing them from both sides. Then the ones who think they're going to be rich choose policies that purposely increase housing prices so they can make money even though they're just inflating a bubble that may pop before they can get out. The others support policies they think will make housing more affordable, not realizing that they won't qualify for the programs so they're really the ones paying the higher rents and taxes to support them.
Then the half of the middle class that votes with the rich allows them to get their policies, and the other half that votes with the indigent allows them to get their policies as well, even though both policies hurt the middle class.
The traditional solution to this was to place limits on government power so that they're not even allowed to enact the policies that bring about this kind of myopic kleptocracy, but that seems to have fallen out of favor, presumably because enacting it requires being in power and if you're already in power then it's more profitable not to limit your own power as a kleptocrat. Or even more problematically, to expand it every time you have enough of a majority to do something like passing the Seventeenth Amendment, threatening to pack the Supreme Court if they won't uphold your unreasonably broad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, or removing state-level restrictions on what kind of zoning/housing laws individual cities can pass.
Democracy as a shallow concept is mainly good at handling despots. The 0.1% can't get much power even if their influence is relatively large because the other 99.9% is against their one sided interests. But if you manage to convince 10% of something they could potentially get 51% of the influence, especially locally, at which point you have a big problem. Now 10% of the people can decide what to do against the interests of 90% of the people. A two party system makes this even worse in the US.
That said, it can be solved within democracy. It isn't the first nor the last challenge facing society, especially a changing one. I think we need to realize that we are in a second industrial revolution, with information this time.
This is silly, the west has always had legalized corruption and nepotism. John f Kennedy employed his brother as secretary of state, and raped his 19 year old intern. Things are getting better, not worse.
But as I said, if the lesser corruption doesn't deliver then it doesn't matter. The West can keep pretending that increasingly not delivering cost effective housing, education, health care and other things of importance in a knowledge economy is just repeated "flaws" and not a result of the current system.
Maybe is better to pay consultant instead of corrupt politicians, even if the consultants then tend to award the politicians after the fact. The problem is that the corrupt politicians in some of these other countries are now delivering results.
Shenzhen has opened a new subway station every month on average for the last 15 years. And there are certainly cities in the West that need more subway stations. Maybe cities in the West could even produce subways better than the Chinese. With less corruption and at lower cost relative to income. But as long as that isn't happening, the ability to do so doesn't matter much. So at least to the extent that the West can't produce these things it is still a problem.
That sounds more like a value system rather than a philosophy of governance. An authoritarian or a libertarian could make a case that their way will deliver those things.
An obvious example is the "three wolves and a sheep deciding on dinner" problem. Democratic, not egalitarian.
Both democracy and egalitarianism have many forms and interpretations and open up unresolved philosophical problems. Bundling them together just causes more confusion.
Can you be more specific about what you think the difference between fairness and equality is? For example, if one person is smart enough to become a doctor and another isn't, but then doctors get paid more than housekeepers, is that the difference? The system is fair (anyone smart enough and willing to can become a doctor) but not equal (some people aren't smart enough and doctors get paid more).
But using that as the difference is more of a communist ("to each according to his needs") ideal than a democratic one.
And authoritarians generally don't even care if the system is fair -- if it's unjustly enriching their own people then it's authoritarianism working as intended.
I guess there in theory there could be libertarians that have very high criteria for what an informed choice would be. To a point where it would be democratic. But that is probably closer to social liberalism.
One can of course question whether most authoritarians care much about their own ideology. But as an ideology they do care that the system is fair, just not society overall. People do believe that it is fair to have a "strong leader". They might not care much if the leader is enriching themselves as they aren't equals. They would care if the leader loses face and don't seem as "strong" as thought. Because then their position would be unwarranted.
I think this is a misunderstanding of why people want money. Because none of that stuff is boolean. You don't have education or not. Harvard and community college are both "education" but they're not the same.
Even when people buy a sports car, it's not because they derive $60,000 worth of benefit from fast acceleration, it's primarily a method of status signaling. Which in turn creates social opportunities in everything from business networking to romance.
You can create a minimum floor for everyone (NB: a UBI is an outstanding way to do this across all domains), but "money buys stuff" applies to pretty much anything, including incremental amounts of education, community and security.
> One can of course question whether most authoritarians care much about their own ideology. But as an ideology they do care that the system is fair, just not society overall. People do believe that it is fair to have a "strong leader".
This is fundamentally impossible. There is conflict in politics not only because of misunderstandings but also because different people have different interests. The "strong leader" will have to make choices that benefit some people over others. If all you're doing is redefining fairness to mean whatever the leader decides it is then you're not creating a fair society, you're just creating a society and defining fairness as whatever subsequently happens.
In some sense that is also what we do with the output of the democratic process, but that only has a claim to fairness as a result of the fairness in the inputs (one person one vote). With authoritarianism the selection process can make no such claim, not least because the existing "strong leader" would by definition have enough de facto control to stay in power indefinitely and then anoint a successor at the end.
If the West ever returns to the idea of democratic society where everyone should have access to education, housing and good working conditions. Where we run our countries, our infrastructure and invest in scientific progress together. And where we believe that running businesses in line with the values of society is better. Then they would want democracy as well.