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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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democracy is optional as long as you make sure that people can buy a car, washing machine and color tv. And top it with AI powered surveillance state. A carrot and stick - forever. I think that O'Brien would find it amusing how this strain of Angsoc works.

This assumes that authoritarian societies will be able to match open societies in harnessing new technologies and making them available to the public. A key thesis of Acemoglu & Robinson in Why Nations Fail is that authoritarians are bad at this because vested interests prevent disruptive innovations and markets from coming into being. Xi's reluctance to facilitate greater consumer spending on goods like healthcare in China is not a good sign for China in this regard. While the CCP have done a brilliant job of incorporating the technological stack of the West, it's less clear they'll be willing to tolerate new products if they create threats to harmony.

This assumes that authoritarian societies will be able to match open societies in harnessing new technologies and making them available to the public

Until there are no open societies, at which point it doesn't matter, and was 1984's premise.

I’m not sure that non-western authoritarian societies need quite western tier standards of living- China isn’t as prosperous as South Korea, but it’s still much more prosperous than China was, and most of the low hanging fruit is there. People care a lot more about the difference between the third world and the second than between the second and first, and even less about the difference between upper first world places like the US and lower tier ones like southern Europe. Washing machines, climate control, and meat every day count for more than tv sizes due to diminishing returns.

Xi's reluctance to facilitate greater consumer spending on goods like healthcare in China is not a good sign for China in this regard

Healthcare is unsolved problem in all of the world right now. I don't think that there exist a system in the world that is affordable, immune to brain drain, sustainable and high quality. So there doesn't seem to be obviously wrong policies there. His management of real estate and banking sector is probably more worrying.

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