3/24/2023 0 Comments Concrete stamp![]() ![]() This puts somewhat of a damper on the common trope that China’s autocracy allowed it to race ahead of India’s democracy.įraud is one reason to doubt the legend of authoritarian competence. Martinez finds that India’s growth, in contrast, has been only modestly exaggerated. Even if the reality is somewhere in between, it implies that China’s growth, while undeniably impressive, is less of a singular achievement than many believe. By official statistics, China’s GDP almost quintupled over the last two decades Martinez, using satellite data, estimates that it less than tripled. Martinez finds that one of the worst offenders is China. In other words, democracies tend to be pretty truthful in their economic statistics, while authoritarian countries tend to vastly overstate their economic performance. Source: Martinez (2022) via The Economist The Economist has an excellent writeup on this paper, so I’ll just repost one of their beautiful graphs: In a recent paper, Luis Martinez looked at satellite data on night lights - a proxy for economic activity - and found that authoritarian countries (as measured by Freedom House’s rankings) tend to have a much bigger discrepancy between reported GDP figures and observed light output. And this is actually very typical, because dictators lie constantly. Mussolini actually didn’t make the trains run on time - he just built some big fancy train stations, while the trains still ran late. But I want to push back on the notion of authoritarian effectiveness in two concrete ways.įirst, I’d like to note that much of the notion of authoritarian competence is built on simple myth-making. I would certainly never claim that only democracies can govern effectively - Park Chung-hee, Deng Xiaoping, and Lee Kuan Yew certainly put that notion to rest. I’m not prepared to render a verdict on whether and when democracies or autocracies are more effective at governance (there is a very long academic literature on this, but few solid conclusions). When people tell you that “Mussolini made the trains run on time”, this is what they mean. The selling point of authoritarian rule has always been that dictators, oligarchs, and strongmen are competent and purposeful - that democracies dither while authoritarians act. But even though this vision hasn’t yet emerged, the authoritarians of the world are already making a pretty good case for liberal democracy simply by being incredibly incompetent. "All right." I changed my approach.A week ago, I wrote that the supporters of liberal democracy need to offer the world a concrete vision of the kind of future they want to create. "I was a little upset for a moment, then Captain Johnson was in front of me shooing everybody back to their seats and I couldn't see." If you're an arsonist looking for a cast-iron alibi and want to be five miles away when the fire starts, it's the perfect answer." It's been used hundreds of times, especially in war-time sabotage. All you have to do is to crush the tube, break the glass, drop the tube in your chosen spot, walk away and after a predetermined time the acid that was in the glass eats through the shield, meets the other acid and starts a fire. In one compartment you have a free acid, in the other a different acid enclosed in a glass tube. You can get a little plastic tube with a central composition shield dividing it into two compartments. ![]() "Of course." She stared at me, wide-eyed. "There way a funny smell-" she began slowly. They all seemed to crowd down past the middle-" He had a gin soon after take-off, then switched off his reading light, draped a newspaper over his head and went to sleep." And Mr Corazzini is the one person I'm sure didn't leave his seat before dinner. We know Marie LeGarde can't have had anything to do with it. "Can you remember who went in there, say, any time up to an hour beforehand?" She looked at me for a long moment before answering, and even in the fading light of the aurora I could see the understanding coming into her eyes. "I was in the galley most of the time, getting the meal ready." "Do you believe now that the fire was caused deliberately?" I asked. "Tell me, Miss Ross, did anyone ask you earlier in the evening when dinner would be?" ![]() "And reduce the number of suspects-though, I suppose, he could still have got an accomplice to plant the acid tube." Then, suddenly, I had what was, for me, an inspiration. "That seems to cut him out," I said thoughtfully. "And you didn't think this worth mentioning to me," I said heavily. ![]()
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