> Could you give some counter examples to these non-democracies
Given that outside of Greece, the Roman republic, Italian city-states, and a few other exceptions - every single one of thousands of regimes was non-democratic for thousands of years, it seems like those are anomalous and your comment is shot through with historical survivorship bias.
> Could you give some counter examples to these non-democracies that went from 0 to very powerful
I'm also just pretty unconvinced by these examples. I would have agreed if you had said, dictatorships tend to be much more militarily aggressive and expansionary, but I disagree that that results in quality of life improvement.
I don't think any of those examples lifted anywhere close to the same proportion of their population out of poverty. China lifted 880 million out of poverty.
> it seems like those are anomalous and your comment is shot through with historical survivorship bias.
Fair point. Maybe. Maybe not. What I mean is: it's hard to compare the outcome of democracies and non-democracies, because in my view the only country that has ever existed to come close to the concept of democracy in the history of humanity is Switzerland. And even that one has plenty of non-democratic aspects. Sample size: 1...
Other countries don't come close IMO. I don't agree that your examples where anything close enough to democracy. Not even Greece (where only the upper caste of society was allowed to vote, forget slaves etc).
And that's not even considering the fact that we essentially have sample size 0 if we want to compare large true democracies to large totalitarian states.
> but I disagree that that results in quality of life improvement.
Improvement compared to what? Tribal societies? Anarchy? Democracy? It is a fact that many societies that fell into dictatorship had an undeniable improvement in quality of life for the masses (compared to whatever previous society they had), but then also a massive decrease in quality of life eventually (or the other way around or in cycles, etc). And it can happen relatively quickly within years/decades. That was kind of my previous point: totalitarian regimes are efficient in ramping up, but such a system has no way to be stable, because the entire power pyramid depends on 1 person at the top (and a whoooooole lot of manipulative butt-licking corruption down the chain). Nice competent person = instant nice society. Evil/crazy/sick person (possibly the same person that started out nice) = instant hell.
> I don't think any of those examples lifted anywhere close to the same proportion of their population out of poverty. China lifted 880 million out of poverty.
China, the very same political/military system, also got those same people into poverty in the first place in a matter of years/decades (killing up to some 60 million people in the process) through Mao. Again, my point exactly: totalitarian regimes are good at ramping up quickly and messing up equally quickly.
They've quickly gone into poverty before, they can do it again. There's only 1 person between China being "great" and China being nothing in a matter of years/decades. And that's the point I was trying to make before.
I'm not going to spend an extensive amount of time responding to a dead comment chain, but just wanted to chime in and say:
> China, the very same political/military system, also got those same people into poverty in the first place in a matter of years/decades (killing up to some 60 million people in the process) through Mao
This is just very not true. You're saying there were tons of people making over $2/hr pre-CCP, they then got pushed into poverty by Mao, and all of the poverty gains since then are just raising out the people who got pushed down.
There is absolutely no empirical evidence for that assertion.
Given that outside of Greece, the Roman republic, Italian city-states, and a few other exceptions - every single one of thousands of regimes was non-democratic for thousands of years, it seems like those are anomalous and your comment is shot through with historical survivorship bias.
> Could you give some counter examples to these non-democracies that went from 0 to very powerful
I'm also just pretty unconvinced by these examples. I would have agreed if you had said, dictatorships tend to be much more militarily aggressive and expansionary, but I disagree that that results in quality of life improvement.
I don't think any of those examples lifted anywhere close to the same proportion of their population out of poverty. China lifted 880 million out of poverty.