And what this means in turn is that those countries which try to rely on authoritarian methods alone are likely doomed to fall even further behind those which have more open systems and allow for greater creativity – perhaps one of the reasons that authoritarians in many countries confuse re-industrialization with development. The former is easier for them to talk about and of course control, but it is of declining importance in terms of the breakthroughs that are required to make genuine development possible.To put it bluntly, dictators can build (or rebuild) factories but they can’t achieve breakthroughs in information technology by the same methods.
Instead, they are likely to repeat the inherently self-contradictory outcome that was captured brilliantly in an old Soviet anecdote about scientists supposedly marching through Red Square on May Day with a sign reading “the Soviet microchip, the largest microchip in the world.”The authoritarians can build models of Silicon Valley as Moscow has tried to do; but their creations won’t be able to create what those in other democratic countries do.
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