![]() This came back to bite Putin severely when even tougher sanctions were levied when he invaded Ukraine this year unable to buy parts and machinery from Europe and the U.S., Russia is finding it very difficult to replace the materiel it’s losing on the battlefield.īut the incompetence of Putin’s regime goes far beyond import dependence and ill-advised wars. But whereas the USSR made a mighty effort to stay self-sufficient in industrial goods, and mostly succeeded, Putin’s Russia exported oil and imported the technological goods - machine tools, mining equipment, computer chips, etc. levied on Russia after Putin started the Ukraine war in 2014, but…well, that was Putin’s decision too.Īnd more generally, turning yourself into a petrostate is just a bad strategy of national development - the same mistake the USSR made in the 70s. Some of the flatlining since 2008 has been due to the sanctions that the U.S. In retrospect, though, much of this was due to a historic one-off rise in oil prices. and Russia’s living standards certainly grew, at least up until 2008: For the first decade and a half of his rule, he was seen as a successful leader, pulling Russia up from the abyss of post-Soviet economic chaos. They’re simply not making the trains run on time. Vladimir Putin certainly fits this mold, as do Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.īut like their Italian fascist predecessor, the Mussolinoids of the 2020s don’t seem to be able to match their rhetoric with substance. I’ve taken to calling these leaders “ Mussolinoids ”, since they all seem to share a tendency to thump their chests and promise a return to past greatness. The last two decades have seen a resurgence of dictatorial, authoritarian, and even totalitarian governance around the world, with some of the new regimes emerging via “populist” movements in democratic countries. Another is the simple evidence of our eyes. This puts somewhat of a damper on the common trope that China’s autocracy allowed it to race ahead of India’s democracy.įraud is one reason to doubt the legend of authoritarian competence. Martinez finds that India’s growth, in contrast, has been only modestly exaggerated. Even if the reality is somewhere in between, it implies that China’s growth, while undeniably impressive, is less of a singular achievement than many believe. By official statistics, China’s GDP almost quintupled over the last two decades Martinez, using satellite data, estimates that it less than tripled. Martinez finds that one of the worst offenders is China. In other words, democracies tend to be pretty truthful in their economic statistics, while authoritarian countries tend to vastly overstate their economic performance. ![]() Source: Martinez (2022) via The Economist The Economist has an excellent writeup on this paper, so I’ll just repost one of their beautiful graphs: In a recent paper, Luis Martinez looked at satellite data on night lights - a proxy for economic activity - and found that authoritarian countries (as measured by Freedom House’s rankings) tend to have a much bigger discrepancy between reported GDP figures and observed light output. And this is actually very typical, because dictators lie constantly. Mussolini actually didn’t make the trains run on time - he just built some big fancy train stations, while the trains still ran late. But I want to push back on the notion of authoritarian effectiveness in two concrete ways.įirst, I’d like to note that much of the notion of authoritarian competence is built on simple myth-making. ![]() I would certainly never claim that only democracies can govern effectively - Park Chung-hee, Deng Xiaoping, and Lee Kuan Yew certainly put that notion to rest. I’m not prepared to render a verdict on whether and when democracies or autocracies are more effective at governance (there is a very long academic literature on this, but few solid conclusions). When people tell you that “Mussolini made the trains run on time”, this is what they mean. The selling point of authoritarian rule has always been that dictators, oligarchs, and strongmen are competent and purposeful - that democracies dither while authoritarians act. But even though this vision hasn’t yet emerged, the authoritarians of the world are already making a pretty good case for liberal democracy simply by being incredibly incompetent. A week ago, I wrote that the supporters of liberal democracy need to offer the world a concrete vision of the kind of future they want to create. ![]()
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