alt Hacker News> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney"
More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems.
This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.
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Western democracy is very interesting.
Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects.
But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)
I wonder what longer cycles with easier recall methods might yield.
It's also where autocracies fail spectacularly and lead to decades of misery for their citizens.
> This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.
This is the wrong characterization, and in fact it's where monarchies lost out to democracies. Without an organized system of replacement in response to poor performance, autocracies with a poor leader are stuck with that poor leader for life. Ask North Korea how that's going. The upside is that if you have a brilliant leader, then you also get the benefit of that brilliant leader for life. The variance in an autocracy is absolutely huge, and that's their weakness in the long term. Democracies take the edge off, and are intentionally designed to have both less upside and less downside, trading performance for stability. Xi Jinping looks good comparatively because we have gormless losers like Trump and Biden to compare to him to, but he makes plenty of his own mistakes as well (the whole Taiwan situation is a unforced error driven by his own ego, similar to Putin with Ukraine), and we've seen historically what China looks like when it's stuck with a shit leader for decades (Great Leap Forward, anyone?).
I think of the four year cycle as one year to whine about the previous (if different) government you took over from, two years of governing and the last as a ”get ready for election”. So in the most optimal scenario you get three ”peaceful” years. It’s very few things that can be done well in three years at ”ruling a country”-scale.
I think that has something to do with the prerequisites of democracy.
I believe one important factor for a democracy to work properly, is to have a large number of citizens who 1) can stand up and push back when they feel something is wrong, and 2) is sufficiently knowledgeable. We don’t have that anymore. Of course I’m also to be blamed for that.