alt Hacker News[warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically]
Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems.
China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.
One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.
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> China's technocratic rule…seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.
This requires that those in/with the power actually have altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China?
I elided the population starving part in order to not distract from the possibility of truly selfless governance strategy. It may very well be the case that millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable. But that not everyone sees it that way is really what we're fighting against.
"I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go hungry."
"But mah profits!"
"You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but that's now a solved problem"
"But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"
Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.