If Russian invaded Ukraine, would you favor or oppose war against Russia?

[The Brain]

Share democracy seems to work ok.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Most corporations that are not tightly controlled by a founder or founding family generally have a form of accountable autocracy. There is no real day to day say over how the CEO runs things and there is no checks on his power within the organizational stack, but the board of directors can remove him/her, and generally CEOs do get pushed out for underperformance. That is to some degree how I think the Soviet model was "intended" to work, you have an "absolute" leader, but a Politburo who can step in if he goes astray--as they did when they removed Khrushchev for example. The issue of course...is if there's an absolute leader, can't he use his powers to eventually stack and control the Politburo? Yep, and that's exactly what happened repeatedly in the USSR--Stalin was initially part of a ruling troika and was able to consolidate power. Brezhnev was brought in to replace Khrushchev and served at the pleasure of the Politburo for a time, but 7-8 years or so into his rule he had effectively sidelined any power that could hold him accountable and the rest of his Premiership he was a fully unaccountable leader.

Of course some corporations tend to get like this too where the CEO is college buddies / country club pals with half his board, and where they are very unlikely to ever act against him. Publicly traded companies are still subject to a large outsider investor coming in and demanding a shake up of the board, though.

They also are subject to outright going under and running themselves out of business, part of the corporate model is that theoretically only the strong survive (unless you're an automaker or investment bank.)

[OttoVonBismarck]

And FWIW the U.S. model at present is odd--we are still regularly voting parties out of office for doing badly, but it's not the core problem. The main issue is mostly everyone who governs the United States does so poorly now, and has for some time, because of all the minoritarian "checks" in the system that allow one minoritarian faction to intentionally sabotage government nonstop for over 10 straight years now. It makes the entire government bad and of course the voters are always unhappy.

[DGuller]

And FWIW the U.S. model at present is odd--we are still regularly voting parties out of office for doing badly, but it's not the core problem. The main issue is mostly everyone who governs the United States does so poorly now, and has for some time, because of all the minoritarian "checks" in the system that allow one minoritarian faction to intentionally sabotage government nonstop for over 10 straight years now. It makes the entire government bad and of course the voters are always unhappy.

Ultimately I think the voters are the stupid ones.  They're like the teachers that give everyone a C, because they have high expectations and standards.  What they don't realize that is that if you give a C no matter what, you give up your power to influence the behavior of the students. 

Many voters equate being cynical about the political process with being intelligent, and thus they're too intelligent to ever consistently reward the less bad party.  Why wouldn't politicians just do what they want if they see that there is no reward for doing the better thing or a punishment for doing the worse thing?

[Sheilbh]

I think it's important to consider how it works and how sustainable it is, though. It's basically always been true that if the decision makers in any system are very narrow, you're going to be able to push big changes fast. You saw that with Mao's Great Leap Forward, with the rapid industrialization of Russia in the early Soviet era--and even with the things FDR did in the 1930s--while a democratic leader, FDR enjoyed majorities of over 70% in both houses of Congress and had almost a dictatorial level of power in many respects. The massive military build up that made the United States into the world's pre-eminent Naval Power that started in the 1930s, the huge and sweeping social welfare changes etc, none of that would be possible in a more divided government seen in most periods of U.S. history.

Taking just the U.S. for an example though, while periods of strong one-party rule might introduce sweeping changes, there's almost always a somewhat predictable result--after enough time the ruling party starts to accumulate "problems", almost like cancer cells growing in the system. Corruption, lack of respect for the electorate, self-dealing etc. This eventually reaches a point where the ruling party collapses and you move onto a new era of the party system. This happened to the New Deal coalition in 1968. I think you saw a similar process in Canada and the United Kingdom at various points in relatively recent memory--long term Liberal Party rule with large majorities (for roughly 13 years) ended in the collapse of the Liberal Party and Harper ruling for years; arguably the UK is even more prone to these long periods of party domination than the U.S. is, with very long stretches of single party domination.

These unfree societies in some respects are akin to those periods in democratic systems, except there is no mechanism to bring them down when their excesses grow out of hand. This used to in a sense just be how governments worked, especially in the era of hereditary monarchies when there were virtually no accountable governments anywhere. So, it didn't really matter, everyone was prone to periods of misrule, and you just had to hope your country didn't suffer too many such eras consecutively or bad things might start to happen.

Unfree societies doing well even for a few decades is not particularly new, it's been a thing forever. The question is over the long term how well they compete with systems that tend to better sort out the sort of morasses that accumulate when you have the same unelected, unaccountable people in power forever. A more complex question is how unfree and unaccountable are the current crop of autocrats. Putin seems virtually invulnerable to domestic opposition. Xi likewise, but we in the West tend to know a lot less about the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party than we should, so it may be Xi at least is still held quasi-accountable to some degree (I just really don't know.)

Some of these autocrats / quasi-autocrats like Erdogan and Orban, I'm not even sure are really in power out of anything like government competence, they're appealing to revanchist nationalist interests. That's fine too as a way to hold onto power, but actually lets the leadership get away with even more than maybe in a system where the public is buying into the strong leader because they believe he will make the country better.

I don't think Western style, liberal democracy is the only way to run a country. I do think that without some strong evidence, the history of the last 200 years is that over longer stretches of time countries with entrenched, unaccountable leadership, have progressed slower, been stable less, experienced more setbacks etc than countries where the political leadership is held to account for its rule. That's a different matter from "how stable is that accountable form of government", some societies simply don't tolerate democratic norms well, and any democracies that have ever flashed up in them are only transient at best.

I also think we need to update ourselves a bit on the last few years, because to some degree these talking points made more sense 5 years ago than now. China is actually showing very serious cracks in its economic development model, to the point many are now worrying about the possibility of a major Chinese economic depression on the horizon. Some of this is directly attributable to Xi steering the country away from the approach of Deng and Deng's first two successors--and that very steering is possible because Xi is not accountable to anyone, and is more of an ideological nationalist than were Ziang and Hu.

I think that it's worth looking at whether it's sustainable in the long run - and it might not be. But I also think there is a "in the long run we're all dead" angle to this. To use Putin as an example, in terms of the policy objective's we'd probably think Putin had since he came to power in 2000, I think he's probably achieved most of them. Russia's domestically stabilised because the economy grew - absolutely because of petrodollars - which has allowed for a real increase in people's living standards, an end to the demographic collapse and co-opting the post-collapse elite. In foreign policy, Russia is back on the world stage having one-to-one summits with the US President (so France and Germany want the same) - there was a point following the colour revolutions when it looked like many former Soviet states might re-orient to the West which was broadly stopped and the big gap is Ukraine. I think it's fair to see he's been one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century in terms of achieving what his goals were. We can say, in the long run this is probably doomed to failure, I don't know how much that should temper or influence our response to Putin now.

Similarly it may be tempting to write off as just petrodollars/luck - but I don't think that quite works because there are plenty of examples of authoritarian petrodollar regimes with grandiose goals not achieving them. At this point I think MBS's Saudi seems like a very prominent example when you look at what he's been trying to achieve v results.

In a way - aside from Ukraine - I think this is an interesting moment in terms of whether the long run is coming to bear on especially the illiberal democracies and we are going to see the importance of the democratic bit. So in Hungary the opposition have decided to form a united coalition to compete against Fidesz and they are polling neck-to-neck, similarly in Turkey AKP are not doing well in polls but crucially their coalition partner is below the threshold so it seems more likely that the CHP and IYI would have a majority. In both cases they have elections in the next eighteen months and it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Similarly I think it's tempting to point to just nationalist revanchism or propaganda as the key to success. But there have been material successes - which I think drives their support far more. In Orban's time in office unemployment fell from about 12% to 4%, their debt credit ratings have improved, numbers in poverty have declined, growth has increased as have wages. Part of the reason AKP is declining in the pollls now is because of the self-induced currency crisis - but the core of Erdogan's popularity was basically very good, more or less continuous that moved millions of Turks into the middle class. None of this is to say these are great guys or that there isn't corruption or other problems - in fact I think their politics is built on growth and basically improving the economy/life for many people while also taking a cut - but I think that record is key to their popularity. And if we think - and I do - that their version of illiberal democracy is a threat as a model/system, then I think we need to identify where are the successes within our model and if there aren't any why not? For example, does our economic orthodoxy stop policies like making jobs through work programs as Orban did in the early days, or big infrastructure projects, or expensive family subsidies? Because if our system doesn't produce politics that can deliver for people then that system isn't any more sustainable - and I think there is a reason that the Cold War was the age of high welfareism across the West.

I think looking at the last 200 years I'm less sure. For almost all of that period Russia was probably one of the two most powerful countries in the world. I think it ignores the contingency of WW1, for example, and the chaos that war throws a system into. But for the 19th century Russia had utterly unaccountable leadership, profound social inequalities and chaos at times - but also explosive growth and was, I think, the key power that a lot of international politics revolved around. Similarly that period is one of relative decline for Britain and France (generally, arguably, the more classic "liberal" states in Europe) even if that was less profound than, say Austria-Hungary or Turkey. I don't quite know how Germany fits in - and I think across it all you have to include empire and the ability to use force to extract wealth and create markets. It doesn't seem like a clear whiggish picture to me.

On China - you could be right. But I think given the success of China - on their terms - in the last forty years including (from their perspective) surviving Tiananmen/the fall of Communism and responding to a global financial crisis, I think it is worth at least thinking about the alternative - which might be wrong. But I think the alternative would be that some of this is clearly Xi personally, however in the run-up to his assuming power the other prominent candidate was Bo Xilai of the Chongqing model and red songs and Mao revival. Given that I wonder how much of this is Xi and how much of it was a collective decision at that point to move in this direction. There's no doubt Xi has enormous power now but I wonder if it's a mistake to assume that was almost done by surprise and how much - if the leading candidates were Xi and Bo - that's the decision that was made.

With the economy I think it's worth putting Evergrande and the debt issues into the context of what the CCP was talking about as issues a couple of years ago. One was a concern around debt and over-leverage in the Chinese economy, there was a concern about investment focusing on speculative real estate v the "real" economy and worries about inequality - all of these are familiar to our issues in the West (both pre-crash and in the age of QE). It is not clear to me that what's happening with Evergrande is a failure or the result of deliberate policies that were trying to deflate a bubble and address the first two of those issues. On the third issue of inequality you have the state wiping out a huge private tutoring market and the forced philanthropy of "common prosperity". Again what is our answer to real estate bubbles, misallocations into speculating on property rather than investing in the "real" economy or inequality? Because I think if we take China seriously, we need one.

It may just be about power and control. It may fail, because in the long run these systems always do. But again I think it's a mistake to assume that, not even consider the possibility of the alternative, and let that shape how we respond to/engage with China.

Edit: Or to put it another way - I'm not sure that being able to point to the last two hundred years or the collapse of the USSR 30 years ago is necessarily an obvious vindication of our system in the context of current issues and challenges which these regimes arre also facing and arguably delivering on.

[Jacob]

I would go so far as to speculate that the point of Xi steering things away from that approach is *because* his goal is to consolidate power, and those approaches make that more difficult.

He is, IMO, actively sacrificing economic and social progress in return for more consolidation of power. This is *why* these systems do not work in the long run - because the Dengs eventually get replaced by the Xi's.

Or because after the authoritarian uses their power to fix the obviously screwed up system (Hitler gets those trains running on time!) as a means to consolidating power, it becomes pretty clear that getting the rains running on time was never their goal, it was just a means to their goal - which is always power and control.

I agree with everything here, though... I've been told (by someone who I believe to know what they're talking about) that the way Hitler got "the trains running on time" was by changing the tolerance on lateness. So, in fact the regularity of the trains didn't change - only the definition (and thus the reporting) of what was "on time" and what was "late" changed. Which sounds about right for a totalitarian regime.

[Admiral Yi]

I thought that was Mussolini. 

[Admiral Yi]

Surely German trains have always been on time and always will be.

[Zanza]

Surely German trains have always been on time and always will be.

No

[grumbler]

I thought that was Mussolini. 

It was, and Mussolini was just taking credit for improvements to a shambolic system that occurred before his time in power.  Not that the trains actually ran on time, but the system of the late 1920s was so much better than that of the WW1 era that they were relatively "on time."

[Iormlund]

Surely German trains have always been on time and always will be.

No

I was actually really surprised at how bad German railway punctuality was (and I guess still is) in comparison to ours.

After maybe 200 trips to or from Barcelona or Madrid I can only recall arriving late once. In Germany, however, every second train seemed to be really late. You had to take that into account when planning your flights.

[Razgovory]

I thought that was Mussolini. 

It was, and Mussolini was just taking credit for improvements to a shambolic system that occurred before his time in power.  Not that the trains actually ran on time, but the system of the late 1920s was so much better than that of the WW1 era that they were relatively "on time."

When I was in Italy the Italians seemed indifferent to time.

[Zanza]

Surely German trains have always been on time and always will be.

No

I was actually really surprised at how bad German railway punctuality was (and I guess still is) in comparison to ours.

After maybe 200 trips to or from Barcelona or Madrid I can only recall arriving late once. In Germany, however, every second train seemed to be really late. You had to take that into account when planning your flights.

Spain and most other countries built a separate network for high speed trains.

Germany reused part of the existing network (often due to Nimbyism) and the purpose-built bits are often also used for regional or cargo trains. Also there lots of stops in smaller cities on the way due to local lobbyism.

One argument you hear is that Germany is more decentralized and more densely populated than e.g. Spain or France. But  I find that unconvincing as Northern Italy or Japan are just as densely populated if not more and have well-working train networks. 

[Sheilbh]

As someone who yearns for a nationalised railway here I have been surprised (and not to my benefit) by the German trains and the price of SNCF tickets too

[Josquius]

German trains are excellent.
Not best in the world excellent but a solid Everton.
Their local service is particularly great. No beeching there.