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I got thinking about this when Richard Hanania pointed out that the political systems practised by Vietnam, Japan, Korea and China could hardly be more different from each other: China is nominally-communist-but-really-state-capitalist-and-authoritarian, Vietnam is actual no bullshit communist, Japan and Korea are modern capitalist societies. And yet, the day-to-day experiences of living in any of those countries are remarkably similar: low crime, low rates of children born out of wedlock (coupled with low fertility in general), high rates of educational attainment, high life expectancy. It suggests that, to the extent that your country following a particular political system makes a difference to the lived experience of its citizens at all, the difference is mainly felt on the margin. A particular political system can help to safeguard and maintain stability and economic productivity in a country, but you'll never establish a stable, functional and economically productive country without a critical mass of human capital, regardless of which political system it nominally follows. A corollary of this is that debating what political system your country should follow when it doesn't have the prerequisite human capital is like debating what colour to paint your car when it doesn't have an engine.
I agree you need human capital. But compare say Hong Kong with Beijing over the last hundred years.
Or compare the Ming Treasure Voyages cancellation with the European Age of Exploration. China was on top of the world, but their institutional infighting manifested as stasis while Europe's often-more-literal infighting manifested as a mad scramble for power, and the difference in incentives set China back centuries.
Compare East Germany with West Germany, or South Korea with North Korea. The economic effects of better vs worse governance on nearly-the-same-genes can literally be big enough to see from space.
I think a more interesting wrench in the gears is the question of better vs worse culture, though. South Korea has a lot more lights than North Korea in all the satellite photos, but at 0.72 and still falling TFR they might as well start turning lights off now before the last person "leaves". Their genes haven't significantly changed, and their government changes over the past 60 years (since the TFR started falling from 6) seem unrelated, but the cultural changes have been massive and baffling. Nerds started getting a mathematical handle on voting system foibles and game theory back around the time of Condorcet (though we've now got much better alternatives to FPTP than IRV-misnamed-as-Ranked-Voting, so the lesser-nerds' focus on the latter at this point in history is weird...), and likewise for economics and at least the most obvious Communism-level economic mistakes. But does anybody have any sort of mathematical analysis of WTF happened in South Korean culture, to cause the gender war to get so bad and the fertility rate to plummet eight-fold in 2 or 3 generations? It's like the stereotype of the pushed-into-overachievement kid burning out and becoming suicidal, but on a 50-million-person scale!
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