Tom was on BBC World Have Your Say today
Monday, October 12, 2009 at 2:21PM Sorry we didn't let you know in advance. It was such short notice, I didn't even get a post up.
Here's the associated post: Has China become the world's best problem-solver?
And here's the mp3 to stream or download.
Tom had three points of speaking (first one pretty good, second one weak, and third one best), and he wasn't able to chime in at the end.
So he put this on the show's blog:
What I would have said if I had gotten one last comment in during the broadcast:
Single-party states are great for early development, or extensive growth (throwing more resources at problems), but they tend to vastly underperform to democracies once you enter the higher-order territory of intensive growth (more innovation-based). Why? More personal freedom equals more ideas equals more competition, and that beats a bunch of guys on top sitting around the table trying to solve complex problems on their own.
So it's all a matter of the complexity of where you're at in development: if you're still all about more more more infrastructure, steel production, manufacturing etc., then a single-party state can do quite well. But it can't keep up once you move into more complex development. Prime example? USSR.
My point: don't extrapolate China's "superior" model beyond its modest roots. China won't make it to 2035 as a single party state, unless it stays as relatively poor as it is today, with hundreds of millions of its citizens living on less than $2/day. If it develops the rest of its population like it has on the coast, then that'll be one big, demanding middle-class unlikely to stand for single-party rule-just like what happened in Japan and South Korea and Indonesia and is close to happening in Malaysia.
So, sure, the China model can work for Africa in the near term, but the long term? There you'd have to show me a large rich country with a single party state, and none exist.
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