Tag: democracy

Unpleasant Prediction

I hope Tyler Cowen is wrong about this, but…

In Asia, the most likely future candidate for this problem [economic regression] is Taiwan, where real wages were largely stagnant from 2000 to 2011. In 2012, Taiwan’s trend was even more disturbing: Its economy grew 1.3 percent, but real wages fell 1.6 percent, both adjusted for inflation. Taiwanese capital has flowed into China, creating a new class of Taiwanese millionaires but hollowing out the country’s manufacturing base as capital was reallocated to the mainland.

There is an anti-democratic camp in Taiwan which blames the introduction of democracy itself for the country's problems – insinuating that Taiwan would be better off under a KMT autocracy or martial law. This appears to be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as the experience of South Korea plainly shows:

South Korea's GDP (nominal) growth from 1960 to 2007. A drastic increase in GDP coincides with the introduction of democracy in that country.

(Graph of South Korea's nominal GDP from Wikimedia.org)

Two Asian countries (Taiwan and South Korea) both democratized at roughly the same time, and yet their economic paths after democratization were very different. To my mind, the chief difference between the two is that South Korea didn't leave its own industry to wither on the vine while flooding Communist China with investment capital.

Taiwan, unfortunately, did.

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We Will Never Be Brothers

A poem by a young Ukrainian woman about the "fraternity" of Ukraine & Russia.

This is the best of the two translations I've seen:

We will never be brothers
Neither countrymen, nor blood brothers.
You don’t have the freedom breath –
We can’t be even stepbrothers.
You have called yourselves “elder brothers” –
We would like to be younger brothers, but not yours.
There’re so many of you, but you all are faceless.
You are huge, but we are great.
You press… you trudge,
You will choke on your envy.
You don’t know what freedom means,
You all are encased in chains from childhood up.
Silence is golden in your home,
And we burn Molotov cocktails,
Yes, there’s warm blood in our hearts,
What sort of blind “relatives” are you for us?
We all have fearless eyes,
We are dangerous without any weapons.
We grew up and became courageous
We all are at the shooters’ gunpoint.
We were forced to our knees by the hangmen –
But we revolted and corrected everything.
The rats are hiding and praying for nothing –
They will wash themselves with their blood.
You have new instructions –
And there’re revolt lights here.
You have your Tsar, but we have Democracy.
We will never be brothers.

"What is this doing on a blog mostly about Taiwan?" you might ask…

Aren’t You Forgetting Something?

Taiwan's China Post wrote a pretty good editorial about the trapped Chilean miners a while back, and concluded on this note:

…the Chilean miners' first steps above ground gave us a timely reminder of what can be achieved when there is optimism, ingenuity and an unerring faith in the human spirit.

None of which can be gainsayed, but the editors seem to have missed one key ingredient to the miners' survival:

D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y.

We know now that pretty much ALL of their decisions were made democratically.  This approach wasn't a panacea – in the coming months, we'll hear more about personal conflicts that occured and even about physical altercations.  But at some point, the miners realized that the best way to minimize the MAJOR frictions existing within their little society was to put matters to the vote.

For them, democracy represented not merely an idealistic dream but a practical neccessity for their own survival.

So yes, "optimism, ingenuity and faith in the human spirit" all had their roles to play in the outcome.  But ponder for a moment how different the conclusion might have been had a small, self-appointed elite resorted to coercion and violence to lord it over the others, all the while cynically trumpeting their own "benevolence".