The entire thing sounds like a more "efficient" version of what some people try to implement "manually" in the West. It's not just "high-status and influential positions". Speakers get disinvited from conferences. Comedians get no-confidence vote when considered for gigs in colleges. Professors get fired. Random people are targeted by stink campaigns on Twitter and fired as well. And this is just the stuff that happens in the open.
Every government is on a power trip. It’s not specific to any one implementation.
The organizations that push things like this self-select for power hungry people who see the majority of people not as peers but as subjects to be ruled over.
It works the same everywhere. This is not a European thing.
This study was conducted in China, which has a very different government structure compared to much of the West (or pretty much anywhere), so I fail to see how this can be applied to Western democracies (where the article was published).
Works quite nice in Iceland. The people working in institutions work as usual employees. Just the legislative is not based on the power of a few who can be easily corrupted when there are no consequences for bad decisions basically.
To become filthy rich by only doing well with words on dinner parties and public speeches is harder there. A challenge on the other hand is to educate and inform citizens enough to make good decisions and maybe not delegate their voting power to the first demagogic radical around.
If their governance model was so good, they wouldn't have to oppress their population so much. The fact that Western governments are adopting some of the same techniques is a sign that either technology makes it too easy/cheap to implement these systems without thinking, or that Western governments are becoming less representative and thus need to rely on systems of oppression more to maintain their grip on power.
To give some possible examples of what I mean by "less representative", let me suggest that growing wealth inequality makes the poor realise they are not being heard by the rich; that communication technology allow niche ideas to spread causing the balkanisation of reality (which causes cracks that governments can't easily paper over); and that in some countries the voting system doesn't allow the healthy evolution of parties to respond to the new realities (exacerbating "future shock").
Shocking but not overly surprising. However, I can't really imagine something like this happening in any western democracy other than the US (and maybe the UK).
Serious question, are there locales with a consistently good track record on this? I have only seen news stories of when it goes wrong and it's difficult to calibrate %s for each region. Like the US is often good for rule of law, but there are a lot of notable counter examples. In this article, around the UK, it's difficult to get a sense of how often this sort of thing is happening especially relative to other western places.
I suspect that virtually every country does this sort of thing regularly and the incentives to stop have got to be much more severe than tourism and conference hostings, there is just too long of a road from that to domestic voter outrage to actually endanger lawmakers jobs. We have to get people to care about it through arguing I think.
What do you mean “in other countries”? That’s exactly how it is here in the US as well, just slightly more indirectly, in the form of “campaign donations” and “do nothing” six figure “jobs” after the official’s term ends.
The standard argument is that it turns out appointed elites doing this works fairly well (they quite often block bad legislation), in principle partly because they don't have to pander directly to the electorate. I don't think it's an optimal system, but I can't deny it does have some advantages of this sort.
The concern with changing it is that you could simply make things worse, even if on the surface more meritocratic. For instance, if it just ended up filled with the same career politicians as the commons and just agreed with everything they said. Of course it could end up better as well, in principle, but I'm not sure the government could be trusted to implement things that way.
You’d be surprised how few representative democracies suffer from the same whiplash inducing pendulum effect the US suffers from.
In most western nations the top civil servant and all those below them are non-partisan career civil servants that keep the ship running at all times and have better employment protections than the average employee (which already requires for cause in those countries).
A new Minister’s (Secretary in US parlance) role is mainly that of someone who plots a course and the civil servants in the ministry try to follow it.
As a side note, the concept or “government shutdown” is also entirely foreign in those countries, if not outright ridiculous.
"But this can also be seen in more subtle and insidious form in the way in which Brexit, for example, was campaigned for in terms of gut feelings and emotions rather than expert statistics and predictions."
Be interesting to know if Americans are jealous of a system where unelected appointees are the only people allowed to propose laws in secret and make ex-cathedra pronouncements for 700 million people together with an unelected (aside from the local crony vote) president who in turn appoints without consultation, the most powerful bureaucrat in Europe.
hey thats what the US or any other western government do as well, lets not forget the convenient let's pass these pork filled bills while the plebians are watching their soccer world cup, super bowl etc.that happens EVERYTIME...really democratic too, considering the pork in these bills consist of things the people do not actually want such as making encrypted chats illegal or forcing people to get the jab or lose their jobs makes you wonder where these politicians are getting their ideas from ...
It seems to work pretty well in places like for example France.
Have you seen what happens when a politician tries to take away a single sick day or reduce their already-world-leading maternity leave? .. millions march in the streets for days and you can bet your bottom dollar come election time the responsible politician is swiftly voted out.
Those people care about what is happening in their country and how it impacts them. They know it's more important than football and cheap beer.
Americans have forgotten how to participate in Democracy.
Well, that futarchy replaces hired experts with a panel of future bets. Future bets aren't very reliable, but well, it's something that could be tried - who knows, it may work.
Anyway, on this context you are just begging the question. There's no novelty in there for the democratic process, just for the technocratical one.
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