• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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    11 year ago

    It’s really instructive to contrast the approach that China and the west take to democracy. Western system is basically a talent show where the political candidate that can sell the best story to the public gets elected.

    Yet, it’s a fallacy to think that politicians are somehow qualified to make decisions about economics, infrastructure, and a myriad other topics they legislate on. A politician doesn’t know any more about topics such as civil planning than any other citizen.

    One of the core problems with the western political system is that it conflates identifying what the problems are with how to solve these problems. It makes sense to vote on the former but not on the latter. Most problems we face are complex and require expert knowledge and understanding to solve effectively. It makes little sense to vote on how to solve these problems or have politicians decide this. However, this doesn’t preclude having a democratic process since it’s easy for people to identify problems when they affect them. This is the kind of populism we need where regular people are able to drive the political process in their favor.

    Going back to the example of civil planning, let’s take city traffic as an example. Everyone knows that Toronto has unacceptable traffic congestion. This is a problem everyone can agree on existing. There are many ways to approach this problem. Toronto can build more subways, expand the highway system, add more buses, put in LRT lines, etc. Knowing which solution or combination of thereof is correct is a hard problem. Unless you’re a civil engineer then you’re unlikely to know what is the best approach for tackling the problem effectively regardless of whether you’re a truck driver or the political elite.

    Yet, western politicians propose platforms that drum up this solution or that, and then the voters expected to vote on that using their layman understanding of the problem. This is clearly not an effective way to run things.

    A much better system is to democratically identify the problems by having people vote on what they perceive to be their most pressing issues. Once public feedback is collected then issues can be ranked by priority, and expert groups can be created to come up with potential solutions to these problems.

    Chinese approach allows to have democratic input on what problems should be addressed while leveraging experts in the field to actually solve these problems effectively.

    Finally, there needs to be long term commitment to implementing the solutions. This is another area where the western system fails as the new government can reverse initiatives of the previous government. Once again, Chinese system, where there is a stable government, facilitates such long term commitments.