Comment by soufron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soufron | Hacker News Reader

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The conclusion is actually quite contrary to the title, and far more interesting: the author uses that example to debunk the idea that more research leads to more innovation and more prosperity.

I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.

I'll quote this article in the future!

In his own words: "Does any of it matter? Many people believe, or assume, that great output in terms of research articles should cause economic prosperity and innovation. I have post entitled Does academic research cause economic growth? that makes the contrary point. That is, though China is catching up in terms of scientific output, this may be a consequence of their prosperity: they can now afford to have their very best minds work on producing research articles. It is much easier for rich countries to fund people so that they can publish in Nature. So being rich will allow you to catch up. But Japan shows that you can be a very rich country and choose not to produce many great research articles. In the least, this establishes that you do not need to produce many great research articles to be prosperous."

> I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.

While I agree with democracy as a whole, I think

0. A thorough understanding of the state of China is needed. In order for democracy to actually work, you need a population that is educated enough to make the right choices for the country. You also need to fight corruption first, or else people will take advantage of the democratic system. In the past 40 years there have been a lot of much higher priority things to the average Chinese citizen than having a fully democratic system. The last thing people want is another period of socioeconomic upheaval and chaos. Stability is the first priority of many. Democracy will come with time and I'm sure everyone wants it, but most people don't want to lose well-being on the road to get there.

1. Democracy isn't the biggest driver of scientific advancement. It's kind of irrelevant. Rather, you need:

- capitalism to distribute money to things that people want (China has a booming VC and startup ecosystem now)

- government funding for longer-term scientific research that has not yet identified a business model, and a system to distribute that funding to people that are worthy of it (funding is there in China; the distribution system needs improvement)

- education that trains the individual to self-learn and nurtures self-exploration rather than rote memorization (work is needed here in China and throughout Asia); education should encourage taking side projects and research seriously, if not more seriously, than classes

- good universities with skilled faculty (there are a few world-class institutions in China, but far too few good universities for China's population -- hence the competition)

Another issue is what defines progress. We have defined it thus far as GDP. But in the future we need new methods of defining progress. The world cannot just grow indefinitely, and we are hitting environmental and resource constraints in a number of ways already.

> Democracy will come with time

It is not obvious to me that this is the case.

> and I'm sure everyone wants it

Really? I doubt if Xi Jinping does.

Xi Jinping believes fervently in the idea of "one man, one vote."

He is the man, and he has the vote.

When growth stumbles as it inevitably will thing may get quite difficult for China.

I think you would agree with Deirdre N. McCloskey who, in her tome Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World[1], thoroughly thrashes out the idea that the thing that made the difference is the dignity of the middle class to be able to bring an innovation to market.

None of the items you've listed do it alone, but taken together and with the cultural idealisation of innovating and bringing to market a novel idea or product, we have been able to create the world as we know it today.

https://www.amazon.com/Bourgeois-Dignity-Economics-Explain-M...

> In order for democracy to actually work, you need a population that is educated enough to make the right choices for the country. You also need to fight corruption first, or else people will take advantage of the democratic system

I'm not sure what this means, given that the U.S. was uneducated and had massive, widespread corruption throughout the 19th century...but I've never heard anyone put forward the argument that democracy didn't work for the first 150 years of the U.S.

it really didn't. democracy was highly restricted for the first 150 years of the U.S.

Actually, that's not true in the U.S. Before the WWI, there was a strong movement (which was killed by federal government because of the WWI) to direct democracy in many U.S. states and it left with the democracy that's modern comparatively to many countries even today.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the two most democratic countries, USA (at least at local level) and Switzerland are also among the most successful ones.

The "they have to wait until they are ready" argument was always a red herring regarding democracy. It's like with any other skill, you don't learn by waiting until you're ready to become an expert, you learn by doing.

I'm not against democracy. I'm just saying, by WWI women couldn't vote, most black people couldn't vote (though the legal right was there since the 14th and 15th amendment, white terror and legal disenfranchisement effectively suppressed the black vote) , so you're talking a majority of the population disenfranchised, that's a quite restricted democracy.

Even right now, most Chinese wouldn't jealous US so called democracy regarding what happened here in the past decade.

The most powerful Chinese propaganda is that which hits the mark.

Propaganda has the same nature all over the world: Let the people believe what they were allowed to believe

So I often just say I dont know, if I was asked to comment on anything. Because I really did not know much to form a valid point.

I advise you to do the same.

Maybe by 'democracy' you mean 'intelligent social organization'.

At the end of the day we don't need that much tech to have a great civilization and 'how to do it' is not rocket science.

Eating shellfish, having a glass of wine with a beautiful woman on the cost of the Med recently made me realize that someone could have had this very nice pleasure 2000 years ago.

If people act intelligently and responsibly both in life, in work and in governance, there's no reason any country can't be fairly advanced.

Especially since the dawn of the industrial revolution - we have surpluses of almost everything.

Especially since mass information/media the knowledge for how to do this is widespread.

If individual actors act intelligently then they can make generally a high standard of living for themselves in whatever region.

For about 100 years now most people have not had to work on farms to establish the food base, and are freed up to do all sorts of other things, so it's a matter how how to efficiently deploy them.

wow so shellfish and beautiful women are the hallmarks of civilization. amazing. Guess we should prioritze plastic surgery as a society, capitalism does that pretty well I guess.

For a straight middle aged dude, sitting by the side of the Med on perfect day eating sea-food, drinking great wine in the company of a beautiful and interesting woman ... is pretty near the height of civilization, yes.

interesting is an afterthought. None of that has anything to do with civilization, aside from I suppose the lack of complete and utter destruction of the local ecology.

It has to do with civ. in that with enough civ. a lot more of us have enough food and free time to have a little leisure time. It might be only working 5 or 6 days a week, it might be we survived heavy industrialization into the post period where we clean the air and remove dangerous chemicals from pollution.

Also the height of human experience.

The beauty and serenity of perfect weather, a perfect taste, a perfect smile - the moment. This is civilization, just not so much in industrial or even hard intellectual terms.

Slaughtering your opponent in a no holds barred contest of strength is also the height of human experience. Human experience is completely orthogonal to civilization. Civilization is found primarily in libraries and databases - civilization is an intellectual tradition.

If that's the argument it's fallacious. China and USA is not an apples to apples comparison. China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get everyone a refrigerator, while the USA is struggling with the "what now?" question of advanced nations. All the easy stuff is behind us and there is nobody for us to just copy.

>> All the easy stuff is behind us and there is nobody for us to just copy.

Healthcare? Education?

At what point does the economy serve the people instead of people serving the economy?

> China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get everyone a refrigerator

Not sure if you meant that literally but I've been to some pretty poor places in China and they do have refrigerators...

The larger point still stands. China needs a high rate of grow just to be able to catch up and afford things taken for granted in the developed world.

In an example related to the parent, China's cold chains while rapidly improving are well behind what would be acceptable in the developed world:

> While between 85 percent and 100 percent of fruit and vegetables sold in the U.S. are transported in refrigerated conditions, in China, only 20 percent of those perishables are shipped in such a manner, resulting in a high spoilage rate of up to 40 percent. In the U.S., that rate is closer to 5 percent.

http://www.livingstonintl.com/freight-transportation-updates...

Yeah, but they're new, and there's still a culture of food preservation that we lost here at some point.

US fish buying: Buy a pleasant-looking filet off a bed of ice, get it into refrigeration asap

China fish buying: Bring a plastic bag, put live fish in bag of water, transfer to a short-term tank at home. It's actually superior, you can't get any fresher than "I killed this fish 5 seconds ago".

And then there's all the salted food around spring festival. Plain cabbage has never been so appealing.

A fresh fish killed and put on ice is a lot fresher tasting than a half-dead fish limp but alive in a home fish tank.

I’ve been to some places where they don’t have refrigerators. Well, it was 5000 meters up in Tibetan territory and they didn’t exactly need them.

There was never "easy stuff". Thinking of "developed" versus "non-developed" nations is setting up "developed" nations as a place of stagnation and no improvements. That maybe have happened in the hippy controlled west since the 1970's, but their generation is on the wain. Tech progress outside of computing is making a comeback. I think some people are now trying, with a lot of hard work, to get the tech of atoms improving again. Elon Musk being the most high profile example.

This is the fallacy of looking at a first or second order derivative to say something is better. Also, assuming that the derivitive will stay constant (at china’s rate of growth, they will quickly be richer than the USA....isn’t something many will take seriously).

China has 3x the population, so they ought to end up with 3x the GDP in the end. Per capita is the question.

Everything being equal, sure. China is still in danger of hitting the middle income trap. They’ve tapped out almost all of the easy growth, now to make it to a high income country, it gets harder, growth is already tapering off obviously.

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