alt Hacker NewsSerbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
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Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
I hope it works out for them. In my home country students overthrow the government and put a Nobel Prize winning economist in charge. Now GDP growth has collapsed and the security situation has become precarious.
I’m also reminded of Ashraf Ghani, the last President of Afghanistan, who was a professor and wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” He ended up fleeing the country like a coward as it collapsed.
It’s notable that students played a major role in the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended up putting the Ayatollah in power. In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?
I feel most comments in this thread do not really understand what Vućiċ regime was.
Google Aleksandar Vućiċ Voja Nevolja meat grinder…
Vučiċ is successor of people that assassinated Zoran Ðinďić, a Serbian prime minister. Basically drugs and arms dealers from either mafia, secret service or special forces.
Even if this government ends up being corrupt the level of moral lows they would need to hit to reach previous regime is staggering.
So people justifiably think it can’t get worse… but that only the time will tell…
I am from Serbia, a student, and supported the movement from the start, and I hope it works, but there are a few risks
I think it's inevitable that the "leaders" will just appear from the student list, then the student list gets destroyed, those leaders form their own parties and we'll elect another radical idiot who's not from the student list
Even now a few days after winning the election, you already have people from the SL who have a "brand", and who get idolized
Also people in our country are accustomed to corruption in our country, and if the new government starts beating down the corruption, the people will start hating the new government
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just are vulnerable to these things.
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Hopefully the Serbian youths learned from them.
The shiny-brained parliament started with a decision to revoke the license from Alta bank. This one was the most popular bank of Russian relocants, because only this one allowed to transfer money from the Russian banks. As a result - a lot of people now have their accounts blocked, and the promise was left, to start the insurance payouts, so I believe it was said "your money are completely safe". Closing of the bank was a low-hanging fruit decision, which everybody liked, because Alta bank was under dictator Vucic's protection, presumably the corruption schemes took place, and so on. In fact, thousands of Russian relocants have been left with blocked accounts and with no money. On Monday, hundreds of those people will siege the 1 or 2 Serbian bank branches in attempt to open the account there. Other banks there are European - Raif, OTP, etc, so they're not allowed for Russians.
Interesting, that the brainiest parliament in the world started with a very populist decision, so it's the degradation from the very beginning. These brilliant minds better would've been stayed in science, rather than getting into politics.
Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
Maybe it might lead to Serbia turning it around. The fewer lawyers, lobbyists, professional politicians, landlords, real estate people and bankers, who have had their chance around the world running various governments, to no avail in many cases. A wider variety of professions in the legislative body is needed and it can’t hurt anymore than what has gone on in the last 80 years.
I understand China has a large number of engineers. Involved in their government in comparison to the United States…
I dunno man. Having worked with organisations that exist purely to coordinate academics and doctors in the medical field made up of a committee of the same folks...I only have concern. Smart as they maybe in their fields...academics are usually poor at management, logistics, empathy and organisation.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
It's extraordinary they managed to form a list in 2025 and defeat the super corrupt, super established incumbent. A huge win for Serbia and democracies everywhere.
I'm a bit skeptic on all those professors and PhDs being a boon, though. In Portugal, we've been ruled by PhDs since 1926, if not before. Most ministers are professors, many of them independent. Results haven't been good. I hope Serbia proves us wrong.
At least student movement succeeded in an authoritarian / totalitarian country. The movement was a dangerous move and can be fatal. Please remember that in 1989, Chinese students and workers protested in Tienanmen Square, and got massacred and failed.
At least this parliament is elected by people, not manipulated by a corrupted authoritarian / totalitarian party or such.
At least Serbia society can get a chance to rest or recovery after a lot of destruction happened.
Wish them the best.
Im so hyped to see how this goes!
Power to the people man!
I'm really excited for this to be successful and stay in place.
It's going to end up being something quite unique perhaps in a ways similar to Switzerland's unique democracy.
We will see how spectacularly it will fail. But hey at least some young blood, they will probably try honestly.
And they won't be able to change anything due to the massive HR-like bureaucracy.
I wish them all the success. This may threaten many governments. Youth and citizens around the world will watch how this government will perform. Hope.
I feel governments are made of people who barely know anything. It is getting worse. From the US to European nations, India to Australia. Make deals with powerful people, get a seat, serve the powerful. That is modern democracy.
In India at one point AAP had raised hopes. But they couldn’t work as a team. Let us hope Serbia shows the way for others. If they get some good advisors it might help. AAP infighting felt to me like infighting of French revolutionaries though it was not that bloody.
good thing they're stem oriented. serbia can only go up from here.
vs electing lawyers as done in other countries.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Pardon, i may be naive, but shouldn't a stable democratic parliament be somewhat a representation of the citizens who elected them? Do more than half of all serbians have a Ph.D.? I fear this "revolution" isn't what you think it is..
>> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
I have much more faith in an electrical engineer than the rest of the academics. Especially sociologist and economists.
It is a courageous experiment, I wish them the best.
I hope they are confident enough to reach out to people who can help them in matters where not smarts but experience is needed.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988).
Ah, our old pal scientific governance. I'm very curious to find out how it will turn out this time.
The entire world should be cleaning up the toxic lead reside generation from it's legislative bodies. It's done enough.
Are we still doing this thing where we attribute success in one area to completely different fields? You may as well elect Opus 5.5, seen as it is already superhuman at certain tasks.
Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was the world's brainiest hedge fund.
people who don't understand politics and economy (defined as study of human behavior), it will be a crazy show
> Rather than stand themselves, the students pulled together a slate of trusted figures—not just academics, but also farmers, lawyers, artists, teachers, and a former basketball player.
I came here to say that it's not "just academics", as many of the comments here seem to imply.
It’s interesting that Boris Tadić, the former president of Serbia (part of the previous regime, who lost to Vučić 14 years ago) echoes the same type of pronouncements about politicians and the commenters here on HN, and I do not mean this in a particularly laudatory sense. Just recently he was sending messages about how political experience, political vision and the like are key. How to be a political leader one needs this or that, or how Serbia requires this or that type of engagement with future technologies to remain relevant, comparing the student movement to blockchain (yes, really). This (incredibly vain and pompous) man doubtlessly has the most political experience in Serbia right now, and sits in several boards of Chinese and other multinationals, with other consulting roles, pretty much proving the bankability of his political talents. And yet that’s the person behind a series of political decisions and circumstances which inaugurated the previous regime.
Also, looking around the globe at professional politicians once also lauded for their political talent, like Macron, or Merkel, I’m really not seeing their policies paying off in spades, nor their "political vision" proving particularly beneficial to their citizenry at the moment. In all three cases, it seems, seasoned politicians made capital errors in judgement which are now causing resentment, almost unprecedented political realignments and upheaval across these nations. People are incredibly quick to judge the potential behaviour of a future political formation - yet Western democracies are by and large falling apart, as a result of career politicians’ actions, inactions, stupidity and avarice? As people speak more and more loudly on certain issues, like Palestine, these same politicians are comfortable ignoring them. Where is the scepticism for them, or the viability of this guild-like way of structuring the political sphere as the way forward? We are living the consequences of having career politicians lead, do we like it so much we cannot conceive of anything better?
Anyway, if you look into the local press in Serbia and especially enclaves like Twitter, there’s a wonderful symmetry: the EU champions are terrified the student movement has already shown "concerning" right leanings, they’re busy counting how many EU flags the students have draped themselves in while marching, and aren’t happy. The right is deeply worried about how the "globalist, NGO, pro-EU camarilla" is already deeply embedded in the student movement (they went to Brussels, after all!) and is perhaps even planting their candidates into the mix to sell out the country’s interests to the globalists. I am being slightly ironic here, but I have nothing but contempt for this thinking on both sides. Winning the election required the participation and support from both these camps’ voting blocks, which tells you how bad the situation truly was, since sworn enemies were forced to cooperate with a political unknown just for the chance to win against the existing political regime.
In a sense, only a political unknown could have won, as all pre-existing political factions, (mostly comprised of these praised seasoned politicians, many of them three decades into their careers) would not or could not muster the strength or wherewithal to work with one another. No nationalist would ever cooperate with a globalist pro-EU green party, even if it cost them their country, democracy, and those same national interests they hold sacrosanct. Likewise, no progressive citizen party saving democratic principles would ever work with what they view as backward retrograde nationalist movements threatening to plunge the country back into the type of rhetoric and milieu as existed during the wars of the nineties. Also, at some point the decades-long careers of many politicians was perfect cannon fodder for the regime’s propaganda machine, gleefully cataloguing their past sins and outright inventing them if the need arose. After a while, political experience morphs into evidence of one’s political parasitism.
It took a decentralised student movement which could not be targeted and besmirched, to engage the non-voting public and voters on both sides of the political spectrum. Part of the reason why all parties which took part in this election were swept away (except for the students and the outgoing regime) was because of failing to recognise the political moment. This election, in my view, was a single-issue election - the workings of democracy and stopping corruption and the further decay of institutions. This is what the political movement will be judged on, and what will determine its political future. The citizenry, at this juncture, is willing to table discussions on foreign policy for the sake of internal affairs and weeding out corruption. Most foreign powers and press corps, sadly, are interested primarily in the foreign policy implications of this new movement, and seem like they couldn’t care less if Serbian citizenry lives in caves, favelas, or in a thriving democracy.
Many things are still unclear, such as the exact relationship between the Parliament and Government, once formed, and the direct democracy practiced by the student movement. It is unclear how effective it will prove, or how they will select their allies and collaborators, as it’s perfectly obvious that the movement cannot simply replace the totality of public administration. Regardless, the new regime will enjoy a broad latitude and a measure of good will among the citizenry not seen in a generation. It needs to use that to good effect. If it fails to deliver, they will be ridiculed and attacked by members of both internal factions, and will more than likely splinter, and usher in a return of Vučić, who - lest we forget - is now the only opposition party in Parliament, with a sizeable number of representatives, and plenty of corrosive residuals and slush funds and media operations still at his disposal. Lest we also forget, with 700k party members, it is a powerful organisation even without the corruptive backend of the state apparatus.
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
What's the political leaning of this movement? Isn't this what's important?
good days are coming for my country, I am beyond happy <3
Wherein I predict phds do not make good politicians.
Oh in fact, there's a term for it
Out-of-Domain Appeal to Authority
Man hacker news hates academically successful people
For the folks out there that remember the USSR, am I the only one getting strong Правда vibes from that headline?
Many say this cannot work.
... checking notes ...
Ah yes. China used to have 100% technocrats in their leadership 30 years ago. No one with a law degree in sight. Nowadays it is less, but they still have quite a few.
It can work.
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The Simpsons tackled this once.
To me, an unspoken truth about politics is that it is extremely boring. Not governing, that is interesting. Doing politics. It's not clear from the article how involved the Students plan to remain once the government is formed, but I suspect a return to conventional politics lies ahead, for better or for worse.
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Now, here's a challenge for you: name an elected government that's the polar opposite. The greatest by assemblage of premium-grade idiots to have ever managed by any civilisation. I know - it's a very hard question.
> a sociologist, several political scientists
How embarrassing.
Oh yes, this happened on an episode of the simpsons.
Pretty cringe, and if what I've seen at the top of university faculties is any indication, it's gonna be a shitshow. There's something to be said for at the very least the common working class man having a direct say in things, if not the deciding say in the things.
There's no modern historical indication that more degrees results in better governance.
Is that really difficult to analyse elections in a non-biased way? This article is really missing the point.
> Many of the new representatives have zero experience in politics. But their unparalleled professional expertise should be helpful in reforming Serbia,
So non career politicians.
This is essentially a technocratic government that is left leaning. Just because they are academics, researchers, doctors, engineers and sociologists does not mean they cannot go corrupt themselves (it will). The EU itself is heavily corrupt as well.
We have also seen how corrupt a technocratic right government can get in the US. It will be no different to a left leaning one once money and promises are involved.
To give an analogy of what this is, this is like electing effective altruists from Anthropic with the difference being that they are using your money (taxes) instead of theirs and giving lots of promises for your vote.
If they are serious, they need to pass the world toughest anti-corruption laws while also significantly growing their own economy or borrowing economic policies from the least corrupt nations in the world such as Singapore and to exceed them.
> Student List has promised to fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law.
While these are good promises, the problem is that this is the first lie that they have already made.
They better do all four of them without angering the electorate otherwise they can’t be trusted.
Meh getting them elected is one thing can they overcome the institutions and the bureaucracy stuffed with corrupt friends and former politicians that’s completely different.
It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.