Re:Chinese airline completes maiden passenger flight with do...
by chaostheory on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @06:41PM
(#25587707)
Another argument would be that SK wouldn't have been able to maintain their GDP-per-capita growth without switching to a democratic republic.
Re:Chinese airline completes maiden passenger flight with do...
by yorwba on Thursday December 31, 2020 @04:45AM
(#25591183)
That might seem like a good argument if you only look at the growth rate trending down under the authoritarian regime since the 1970s, but it's actually a bad argument because that trend continued unchanged after the democratic transition.
So if democracy actually has some effect on economic performance, it's not strong enough to overcome broader trends. Which makes sense if you consider that authoritarians like making money, too, so blocking obvious productivity improvements would only be shooting themselves in the foot.
If you look at actual data https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat... , you'll see that Korea has had high GDP-per-capita growth since as far back as the 1960s, with two years of shrinking: 1980 after the assassination of the dictator Park Chung-hee and 1998 after the Asian Financial Crisis, which was also the first time the ruling party let go of their power after losing a democratic election.
The economic cost of lack of free speech isn't as great as the economic cost of uncertainty (because it discourages investing). Not knowing who the next dictator will be and not knowing who will win the next election are both sources of uncertainty.