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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I’ve changed my mind on dictators. Name one asian country that became prosperous without a phase where it was ruled by a highly authoritarian ruler?

Even in the west, the civil institutions that underpin democracy were mostly created under “enlightened despots” (or so I learned in AP Euro). You probably need a dictator to break the familial and clan ties and organizer the country around individuals interacting with the civil organs of the state.

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Post-WWII Japan did not have a dictator, which was its period of greatest rise in prosperity.

Douglas MacArthur though.

MacArthur was there till 1952 and was tasked with rebuilding, establishing a viable democratic government, then exiting. The majority of growth came after him.

Compare to Mao, Stalin, and other dictators of the era.

McArthur did way more than that, including things like land reform, welfare programs, censoring media, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_for_the_Alli.... In some ways, he was a “good authoritarian” like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore.

Japan was like several european countries in having a monarch in the 19th-early 20th century who developed a modern centralized state, and then having war lead to democracy in the 20th century. Then you had McArthur rule as a dictator for seven years during which time he imposed major government reforms, including land reform and welfare reform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_for_the_Alli.... After the end of occupation, a single party, LDP, held power for almost 40 years, from 1955-1993.

Isn't the rebuttal that these states merely were able to kickstart the import substitution process and could not produce endogenous economic progress without a developed country to borrow memes from?

I don’t think that’s a rebuttal but instead an orthogonal point. Lots of countries are stuck in dysfunctional situations where they can’t even copy progress from developed countries because of corruption, civil unrest, etc. A dictator can help cut through that.

That really just means dictatorships are a common form of government in Asia IMHO. Progress is orthogonal to the form of government, I think.

India is the biggest democracy in the world. Bangladesh was a functional democracy for a good stretch until last year. At least on paper, Afghanistan and Iraq were democracies.

Afghanistan was almost never a democracy tho. It was mostly monarchies until 1973.. then a totalitarian state from 1978-ish until 1989… then mostly in civil war until 1996.. when it was again mostly a totalitarian state.. then it got invaded by the US in 2001.. until 2021 when it got again under a totalitarian state.

Some say the Catholic Church broke the familial and clan ties in Europe by putting its considerable influence towards stopping cousin marriage.

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