I love that they won and I love the hope and expectation surrounding their victory but MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
There's definitely a chance of failure here.
There's definitely a chance of failure here.
Just as we should keep in mind that brainy academic types can get carried away in theoretical flights of fancy, we should also acknowledge that 'common sense people' are not composed exclusively of experienced and unselfish pragmatists, but also wilfully ignorant and cynical anti-intellectual types.
It must be like a pit fight, but with connections and half truths
The large blocks need to be able to move forward in legislation but the more uglier and tumultuous the backroom dealing are (within legal bounds) the healthier the democracy is.
Most of the electorate doesn't really understand it, constantly clamoring for one or the other to be the only guiding principle, but you need both - and one has to find a way even when they appear completely irreducible. Democracy is beautiful in a very messy way, a bit like nature.
Basically, academic tenure is opposite from democracy.
Living easier, richer, safer lives than 99.99% of all humans who have ever existed?
Different countries are very different.
You probably can name "the usual grifters" in your domicile but don't expect the same patterns to be transferrable to different regions.
Sometimes pathologies are portable like the the authoritarian state capture toolkit but even there _who are you doing it with_ can be quite different even though _how you are doing it_ may seem familiar.
Also by any metric the general unspecific list of countries "east and west" has lots of variance in life expectancy, happiness, poverty, literacy etc.
So I can only read this as pointless general venting or faux cynicism.
From what I observed of my time in academia, I don't see any reason for academics to do any better than other groups. Like everywhere, the starry-eyed, altruistic ones always lose the fight against the political sharks.
It is not always obvious how to lay ground work over a decade ... or four of them.
It isn't even mostly about fixing problems. But how to make government act as an expedient rather than as an impediment.
I was thinking the same.
This can either go incredibly well or it can go incredibly wrong.
It very much is, but I don't believe it is the skill of "solving problems" or "making society better".
Politics is about getting elected. Convincing the people that it's all the others' fault, that you know better, that you will save the world. And then when they get elected... we naively expect them to solve problems. But we selected them for their capacity at being selected, not their capacity at understanding the big problems society is facing...
There's a lot under the umbrella of "politics" that happens after you get elected. If you want to accomplish anything after you get elected (heck, even if it's just personal enrichment) you have to be somewhat skilled at getting others to work with you, one way or another. As a politician you can have flawless convictions and be right and well-informed about all your decisions, but at the end of the day you're just one vote (to use legislators as an example) and it does nothing if you can't convince or work with others.
The whole "you are just one vote" doesn't really apply there. As the 30th legislator on your party list, you show up and vote as you are told. And in systems like the one in the US, barring rare moments, it's also not all that different. The card that your party will abandon you, and that if you want a position of any importance you have to play ball means many a junior congressperson just votes as they are told, and spends time fundraising.
In such political systems where you essentially must vote the party line, what makes an individual "effective" (ie. what constitutes being "good" at your role)? I'd say it comes down to all kinds of political soft skills, ie. forging the right alliances, convincing the right people to change course, understanding motivations of others, etc.
All of these are generally called "politics", and are things that happen very much after you're elected.
Getting elected is table stakes and shows you have the soft skills needed to organise, campaign and convince. Which is the minimum you need to get disparate groups of humans to pull in the same direction and make progress in advancing the country.
Theres no consolation if you get experts to plan solutions to problems but 1) the people you need to implement the plans have their own opinions or priorities and 2) the public want focus in some other priority and are start rioting if they don't feel heard.
You need schmoozers as much as you need tacticians.
I don't currently have any data that says otherwise and the counterfactual remains unexplored (but it will be with this parliament!), but things that people do and say to get elected often are things that if implemented...would not solve the problems the populace that elected is having.
I don't think we need schmoozers, we need people who understand the problems of their populace and have the structural power to implement their solutions. We shall see if they need more than this, but this would be the first exploration of the counterfactual.
People who have their "own" priorities don't end up upsetting the apple cart when we make success in implementing those solutions the same as their success (which if we are effective problem solvers, should be possible. See Deng Xiaoping)
A lot of the problem can be attributed to voters accepting the blame game, overly simplistic solutions, and expedient absolutist views over debating a plurality of options.
I'm not saying that the political system isn't to blame here. At least where I live, it is structured in such a way that winner takes all and loyalty to the party is more heavily rewarded than representing the constituent. But, again, that is a system that we in some sense designed.
I also don’t understand why the Pan American Highway or rail from Nome, Alaska to the tip of South America never got built. Nor can I understand why Oak Ridge, Tennessee Thorium Research Center and further development was left to rot. The Chinese are very close to throwing element 90 in our face.
They've been elected during a very special events. They know what's expected of them. Looks like compared to the previous powers this lot at least gives the country a fighting chance.
Seeing how many politicians are utterly corrupt and ignorant cunts certainly a parliament full of people who understand the importance of facts and capable of logical thinking is not worse than career politicians mostly skilled in the game for their team, nothing else.
I hope more people will realize that voting for uknown politicians that offers empty promises for artificially made problems means givig up our responsibility and at the end, make things worse as we see in current democratic countries.
Imposing it top down requires oppression. Imposing or pressuring this huge layer from the bottom requires a continuously updated base so you can squeeze from the top and the bottom to enact the changes needed quickly.
It's impossible for leaders at the top, to personally vet the members of a village or city council for example.
I think I've never seen any of such concatenation of events and organization to have ever happened.
Having highly educated people in parliament is one thing; actually governing a country is another. Political leadership requires negotiation, compromise, institutional knowledge, and the ability to execute decisions.
I'm curious to see how Serbia handles the transition from academic expertise to actual governance, especially without a conventional party leadership structure.
The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!
The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts? A great manager would be great, but these are similarly rare (rarer than good experts in a field).
And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.
The same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.
As compared to what? A working group of 80 uneducated idiots?
If democracy doesn't work if you put smart, educated people in control then it doesn't work, period and we need to pay better attention to whatevere China is doing.
It also partially explains why they pursue are open to multiple solutions to a problem. And it certainly explains why they looked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that thorium research and built two thorium reactors and will probably build many more because guess what?
They figured out how to make it work and apparently solved that alloy molten salt problem, it took about 10-15 years but they are on schedule. to deploy many more reactors after 2029.
They also switched or are are in the process of switching from lithium batteries to sodium ion batteries which is something else they didn’t have to do, they could hung on to lithium through 2040 milking, but instead they are moving on, which is also something that can happen when you have a bunch of engineers involved in the decision-making as opposed to those finance/MBA people who have a tendency to want to milk people for as long as possible.
https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/china-emerg...
To protest in most places in Australia you need a government permit.
In the long term, the US is far more likely to turn into China than not.
This is why people hate IT nerds.