Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Lunch with Jared Diamond

FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond: "But Diamond rejects the notion that his work can be read as advocating authoritarian central planning. “When people talk about the greater efficiency of dictatorships, they are forgetting that a dictatorship is no more likely than a democracy to make a wise decision,” he says. The Chinese government moved quickly to ban lead in petrol, but it also virtually abolished education during a phase of the Cultural Revolution, he says. A democracy could never do that."

Why is it that the first thought lots of people have is to give the government more power? That tends to not work in the long run. But sometimes I wonder what the Romans were thinking as Rome fell.

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