Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects.

The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.

> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.

one thing I've come to respect about the Chinese is that while they make huge decisions that sometimes have disastrous consequences, they don't make the same mistakes twice.

At this point they have fed information from their environmental impacts into reforesting entire mountains and improving air quality.

They went in on Evs. not just subsidies but recognizing that you need an entire supply chain. so while americans bitch constantly about the failing power grid and how we can't switch to evs cuz it would be disastrous, the chinese built renewable energy projects and a massive DC transmission line accross the entire country. This is also a big part of why they can provide AI services for way less than america can.

I used to believe that but having seen repeatedly what happens when small decentralised groups get to decide (cf. HOAs in the US, housing cooperatives in Sweden), it's clear that there are too many nutters in society that seek power for power's sake and adding 20 levels of decentralized decision-making only means we'll have NIMBYs everywhere for anything new.

Having seen government work from the inside, what we need is clearer processes and _more_ centralisation - computers today enable the processing of amazing amounts of data in an extremely short time. Why do we need fourteen regional authorities to handle forms filed in triplicate?

That is exactly the point, though. Centralization starts to offer real advantages because the cost of complexity has increased significantly in decentralized Western societies. Yes, centralization can be inefficient, but it also makes decision-making much easier.

Public opinion in Western societies has become far more fragmented and heterogeneous, largely because of the internet. There is much more internal disagreement and constant contestation. I think that is a strong example of a factor that significantly increases the cost of complexity.

In a way, that is why we are now trying to emulate certain aspects of centralization. The United States does a relatively good job at this, and I am not making a judgment on whether that is positive or negative. But here in the European Union, we are so decentralized that we often struggle to reach agreement on major issues.

It's the classic issue that centralisation moves the efficiency of an organisation toward the efficiency-level of the top of the organisation, for both the good and bad. From a risk management perspective, I'd argue that's generally not worth the risk, even though it can look astounding in good periods.

I think "centralisation" is accurate but imprecise. Specifically, the professional class of financiers managed to capture government under Reagan, meaning that, in practical terms, we are largely governed by Jamie Dimon and his cohorts.

More precisely, our elected governments are governed by the financial class.

I am not suggesting that capital markets should not exist or that they should behave as governments compel them to; I just want the people who operate capital markets to be accountable to the people through the proxy of law and regulation. It should be an administrative profession, like accountancy.

>Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.

"In the last 70 years" does a lot of work in your argument, as it includes a full blown revolution, counter-revolution, eras of political turmoil etc. How about the last 20-30 or so years after things stabilized there?

Also, isn't the point of the parent that it's OK to have "plenty of failed projects", as the question that starts this thread is about our inability to run political experiments. Obviously some of them will fail - that's what experiments are made to test, not guaranteed success.

Centralization is an information problem. You can't make good centralized decisions if you don't have good information to base this on. China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality. But it has the problem to a much lesser degree than the USSR, because surveillance technology and data management are improving.

> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects.

Failures are everywhere, even the OP acknowledged that. I think the more important question is what a system does with those failures and how well it can learn from them and improve. (And if course, what does "improve" even mean? What are the targets that the system optimizes for?)

So my question would be, could China learn from those failed projects and improve its policies? How many disastrous decisions were there in the last 5 years in contrast to 70 years ago?

China is not as hyper centralized as you think, the regions have quite a bit of power over policy as long as they deliver results. Some things are centralized, maybe to many in China. But for things like High Speed rail, such centralization is not bad. Not everything needs centralization but some kind of centralized decision making is need for grand decisions.

The US does this hilariously wrong. Like giving each state money for public metro system and then each state implements a unique incompatible solution that really only differs slightly from the alternative. In a competitive private market that fine, industry standards can emerge. But in terms of metro system that a country only builds very rarely having the system be the same between metros makes a lot of sense.

Its not like these are experimental concepts that nobody in the world knew about already.

What disasters, particularly relatively modern ones?

This reads as massive cope because China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty [1][2] and the transformation of the ordinary lives of Chinese people is almost unbelievable. More cope here is "yeah but that's Tier 1 cities". But look at rural life in small villages. Even 20 years ago people were still drawing water from wells and didn't have indoor plumbing.

Now? High speed internet on smartphones, modern houses, indoor plumbing, reliable electricity, electric vehicles, etc.

What we have in the West is a captured system of parasitic wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich where society and infrastructure is crumbling. My prediction is that the 21st century is going to show the central planning (in China) is going to produce far better outcomes for the vast majority of people.

[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

[2]: https://amro-asia.org/an-exemplary-journey-in-eradicating-po...