A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth
This goes to a little-appreciated fact about democracy - the evidence suggests that while there is a common perception that democracy has failed in any given year, and that any given instance of incompetence will surely sink us all this time. But over time it consistently turns out that democracies are making consistently better decisions than the authoritarians. Similar to how liberty usually gets much better results but high-status people refuse to accept that the plebs can make decisions for themselves.I think people just can't handle the complexity of distributed decision making, so are consistently biased to believe that small, centralised & appointed authorities make better decisions than the hive mind. Similarly to how everyone knows how a kingdom works, but people get hazy really quickly on how the successes of the worlds many parliamentary or republican systems of government actually function.Dictators cannot manage multiple constraints simultaneously. Democracy is just better at resource allocation. Insofar as somewhere like China remains ahead of somewhere like India, I think it depends on the ability of the CCP to simulate a typical democracy internally. Once groupthink takes hold, without a release valve to turn over the people, I don't see how a government recovers.