It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
I laughed out loud at this — my dad is a retired Uni professor, so I know exactly what you are talking about — but I'd point out that the "student list" has around 140 seats in the parliament, so 80 academics hopefully still has another 60 common sense people who are not all about being right all the time, and who bring other perspectives too.
"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!
I mean the whole point of democratic system _is_ you want rotating cliques and infighting. Because defaulting to consensus isn't really that democratic.
The large blocks need to be able to move forward in legislation but the more uglier and tumultuous the backroom dealing are (within legal bounds) the healthier the democracy is.
I believe this is also what colours our views of the general academic infighting — academics are rarely rotated out except in the lower ranks, so it's a different type of skillset of building long-term alliances that drives their progression through the academic field and available careers in a particular institution (not even talking about "academic points" through publishing in recognized journals, which is a different discussion altogether — even with that criteria satisfied, to move to the next rank of professorship, you need to be elected by your colleagues).
Basically, academic tenure is opposite from democracy.
Survivor is the opposite of how real human societies work - especially the tribal ones that thes show is aping. Real tribal societies are stable forever, and they are almost entirely related people (especially if we're talking about smaller tribes). You're reputation for helpfulness is crucial in any such society, so the kind of backroom dealing and betrayals the show is known for are almost entirely out of the question: if you are found out as a schemer, you don't get to go home to your real family, you risk being ostracized for the rest of your life.
The tension between effectiveness (cohesive decisions swiftly implemented) and representation (complex reduction of utterly disparate points of view to a workable compromise) is the main force at the core of democracy.
Most of the electorate doesn't really understand it, constantly clamoring for one or the other to be the only guiding principle, but you need both - and one has to find a way even when they appear completely irreducible. Democracy is beautiful in a very messy way, a bit like nature.
The usual grifters have had their chance in most Western governments. Lawyers, landlords, the gentry, etc… I am skeptical but the present bunch that is usually very well represented in most western/eastern governments have had plenty of time and opportunity and look where we are at now.
This is very general and I don't see the point honestly.
Different countries are very different.
You probably can name "the usual grifters" in your domicile but don't expect the same patterns to be transferrable to different regions.
Sometimes pathologies are portable like the the authoritarian state capture toolkit but even there _who are you doing it with_ can be quite different even though _how you are doing it_ may seem familiar.
Also by any metric the general unspecific list of countries "east and west" has lots of variance in life expectancy, happiness, poverty, literacy etc.
So I can only read this as pointless general venting or faux cynicism.
Maybe they will fail, maybe they will do very well - time will tell. Even if they fail badly, it still can't be as bad as an authoritarian rule, right?
Having spent a significant time in academia, the problem is you are never judged on what works, but on what idea you can take credit for. Now this is not great for innovation, but it is disasterous for keeping things running.
There’s a chance of failure in any human endeavor. but I am sick of lawyers, bankers, landlords, lobbyists and various other grifters hanging on currently in most western governments no one can say that they haven’t had their chance. There needs to be a wider variety of professions involved at/in the legislative branch.
which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!
Seems pretty obvious to me that it's not going to be 80 academics debating everything under the sun, but instead dedicated groups focusing on their expertise area...
> MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
As compared to what? A working group of 80 uneducated idiots?
If democracy doesn't work if you put smart, educated people in control then it doesn't work, period and we need to pay better attention to whatevere China is doing.
China has more engineers involved in their government. Who tend to be more clear- thinking let’s solve the problem at hand. Which explains why they have so many infrastructure projects going on across their country.
It also partially explains why they pursue are open to multiple solutions to a problem. And it certainly explains why they looked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that thorium research and built two thorium reactors and will probably build many more because guess what?
They figured out how to make it work and apparently solved that alloy molten salt problem, it took about 10-15 years but they are on schedule. to deploy many more reactors after 2029.
They also switched or are are in the process of switching from lithium batteries to sodium ion batteries which is something else they didn’t have to do, they could hung on to lithium through 2040 milking, but instead they are moving on, which is also something that can happen when you have a bunch of engineers involved in the decision-making as opposed to those finance/MBA people who have a tendency to want to milk people for as long as possible.
In which country? The US is an aggressive total surveillance state that executes people in the street and gives out 30 year sentences for people who didn't even show up at a protest, the UK jails grannies for holding up Palestinian flags, and Canada something something something something truckers something something.
In the long term, the US is far more likely to turn into China than not.
The real question is, would their capable decision making survive in a democracy, where russian propaganda through American billionaire's media tell voters what to think and more importantly what to fear?
Maybe. Politics is a skill, and not everyone has a knack for it. It’s dirty, requires compromise, and a willingness to work with your opponents. Or, well, at least it used to.
It very much is, but I don't believe it is the skill of "solving problems" or "making society better".
Politics is about getting elected. Convincing the people that it's all the others' fault, that you know better, that you will save the world. And then when they get elected... we naively expect them to solve problems. But we selected them for their capacity at being selected, not their capacity at understanding the big problems society is facing...
Getting elected is table stakes and shows you have the soft skills needed to organise, campaign and convince. Which is the minimum you need to get disparate groups of humans to pull in the same direction and make progress in advancing the country.
Theres no consolation if you get experts to plan solutions to problems but 1) the people you need to implement the plans have their own opinions or priorities and 2) the public want focus in some other priority and are start rioting if they don't feel heard.
You need schmoozers as much as you need tacticians.
There are two largely non-overlapping skillsets when it comes to politics and governance.
The soft skills being effective means you can get elected, that does not mean they are good at governing (and is often a detriment to having good solutions and governance).
I don't currently have any data that says otherwise and the counterfactual remains unexplored (but it will be with this parliament!), but things that people do and say to get elected often are things that if implemented...would not solve the problems the populace that elected is having.
I don't think we need schmoozers, we need people who understand the problems of their populace and have the structural power to implement their solutions. We shall see if they need more than this, but this would be the first exploration of the counterfactual.
People who have their "own" priorities don't end up upsetting the apple cart when we make success in implementing those solutions the same as their success (which if we are effective problem solvers, should be possible. See Deng Xiaoping)
A lot of the problem can be attributed to voters accepting the blame game, overly simplistic solutions, and expedient absolutist views over debating a plurality of options.
I'm not saying that the political system isn't to blame here. At least where I live, it is structured in such a way that winner takes all and loyalty to the party is more heavily rewarded than representing the constituent. But, again, that is a system that we in some sense designed.
Absolutely. the first time I found out the Chinese have quite a few engineers involved in government. I said that explains all the infrastructure being built. Mind you no human endeavors are perfect. But there was a time in the United States not too long ago where there was more of a can do attitude, I don’t understand why high-speed rail is not a thing.
I also don’t understand why the Pan American Highway or rail from Nome, Alaska to the tip of South America never got built. Nor can I understand why Oak Ridge, Tennessee Thorium Research Center and further development was left to rot. The Chinese are very close to throwing element 90 in our face.
There's a lot under the umbrella of "politics" that happens after you get elected. If you want to accomplish anything after you get elected (heck, even if it's just personal enrichment) you have to be somewhat skilled at getting others to work with you, one way or another. As a politician you can have flawless convictions and be right and well-informed about all your decisions, but at the end of the day you're just one vote (to use legislators as an example) and it does nothing if you can't convince or work with others.
It depends on the political system. In many a parliamentary system, voting differently than what you are told means you will not be in the party list ever again, so for the day to day, there's very little convincing effort when you have the majority. And especially in systems where there is very little legal money in politics, the carrot is just ability to get access for not-so-legal money. So party leadership is a matter of having enough businessmen friends, and having will to power in a rather unclean word.
The whole "you are just one vote" doesn't really apply there. As the 30th legislator on your party list, you show up and vote as you are told. And in systems like the one in the US, barring rare moments, it's also not all that different. The card that your party will abandon you, and that if you want a position of any importance you have to play ball means many a junior congressperson just votes as they are told, and spends time fundraising.
I think you're basically proving my point? (My point being: politics isn't just "getting elected".)
In such political systems where you essentially must vote the party line, what makes an individual "effective" (ie. what constitutes being "good" at your role)? I'd say it comes down to all kinds of political soft skills, ie. forging the right alliances, convincing the right people to change course, understanding motivations of others, etc.
All of these are generally called "politics", and are things that happen very much after you're elected.
Yes. That’s kind of the point. The words aren’t that far apart in etymology either. By Latin definitions the most popular (liked by the general public) candidate will be the democratically chosen (rule by the people) one.
And in many others they’re small czars of their own kingdoms. However it’s always nice to refresh parliaments with new educated people, with new progressive political movements, shatter old alliances and practices.
Competence of democratic politicians is to be liked and get most votes. Usually it means to be without values.
I hope more people will realize that voting for uknown politicians that offers empty promises for artificially made problems means givig up our responsibility and at the end, make things worse as we see in current democratic countries.
I think he means polticians lying, being trecherous, compromising until nothing gets done and no ones career is hurt, etc is a skill. It would be better for the people if people with these skills were not in public office. Anything that takes away from being a servant to the constituents and become self-service needs to be removed from Politics.
I would assume PhD holding people are smart enough to understand their limitations and strengths.
They've been elected during a very special events. They know what's expected of them. Looks like compared to the previous powers this lot at least gives the country a fighting chance.
Ehhh, that's the flaw in the logic. Holding a PhD doesn't necessarily make you better at anything other than strictly the topic of the PhD (and sometimes not even that), maybe only following arbitrary orders from senior figures.
Holding a PhD at the very least means you can spend a sustained long amount of time on (potentially) intractable problems and try to arrive at solutions for them. That's a good skill to have when...you've been elected to solve problems.
I'm not sure if it used to be like that, but the skill required to politicians now is to get themselves elected, and that largely means the ability to lie well
Management is basically 99% people's relations/network. It doesn't matter how good the technical implementations are at the top, if they don't have the knowledge and capacity to enforce it downstream from middle layer to the base. There's so much people involved whose interests are farmed by your competitors.
Imposing it top down requires oppression. Imposing or pressuring this huge layer from the bottom requires a continuously updated base so you can squeeze from the top and the bottom to enact the changes needed quickly.
It's impossible for leaders at the top, to personally vet the members of a village or city council for example.
I think I've never seen any of such concatenation of events and organization to have ever happened.
I believe this is the usual tension that's present even in private companies: are professional managers better than field experts at managing work?
The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!
The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better
than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts? A great manager would be great, but these are similarly rare (rarer than good experts in a field).
And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.
The same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.
This is an interesting experiment, although I wouldn't call it a technocracy just yet. Italy had technocratic governments under Mario Monti and, to a lesser extent, Mario Draghi, with mixed results.
Having highly educated people in parliament is one thing; actually governing a country is another. Political leadership requires negotiation, compromise, institutional knowledge, and the ability to execute decisions.
I'm curious to see how Serbia handles the transition from academic expertise to actual governance, especially without a conventional party leadership structure.
Amateur politician have good intentions but are not very effective. It's hard to get consensus when everyone has their own opinion. Professional politician have the background to get somethings done but yes they have thier own issues. My suspicion is that the new group might get a few items thru. Things that have been burning in the majorities minds but after that there won't be much done. It very hard to get people to agree, specifically intelectuals that think they are always right and can put up a good argument.
The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
On the federal level yes but that only reduced the autonomy that the cantons had, it didn't introduce a fundamentally different system of government, most decisions were still taken on the local level.
The system we had in the US pre New Deal was much more like Switzerland. Decentralization works just fine out of the box. The problem is that human instinct tends towards power which requires more centralization to accumulate.
Yes and no. The US presidency is very different than the way it's reported on, but it is true that the executive branch is being more assertive to make up for the disfunction of the legislation. We're doing that intentionally and for good reason, to demonstrate to China that the US can act with speed as one small part of the overall deterrent against World War 3. The US is almost always hugely misunderstood, because there isn't any other country in the world that actually works exactly like the US does.
No one knows how the US works anymore because the current administration doesn't follow laws and just makes it all up as they go along. It turns out the court system is too slow to matter: illegal tariffs just move to new illegal justifications when the patently absurd ones are tossed out after more than a year of using tariffs to drive inflation and stroke Trump's ego.
> The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That's correlation, not causation. Switzerland made enormous amounts of money from its banking secrecy system over many decades until the US pressured it to end it. And the trends are not looking good for Switzerland based on data. We'll see how stable it remains as the cost of living keeps rising, real wages decline, and unemployment goes up.
If you provide wealth and a good lifestyle to your citizens, then almost any system will be stable.
The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor (they were vehemently opposed to the idea of putting so much power in the hands of one individual).
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
The Roman Republic was incredibly decentralized with more people working for the administration of the city of Rome than for the Roman state itself at the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Extreme executive power existed, but not at the level of the imperial administration. Provincial governors had near absolute power and generals had control over their armies to a degree well beyond what any general today has. They were basically private mercenaries with the generals, not the state, being in charge of payroll for the soldiers. Local territories had near 100% control of their own affairs so long as they did not do anything to interfere with the tribute flowing to Rome.
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)
Didn't the U.S. have all those problems, despite having a president?
There was an assertion made in an ancestor comment that a committee without a leader can't function, but that doesn't seem proven by those problems in Roman history under their Senate, since the U.S. with a president had the same kinds of problems.
I assume other factors are at play, oligarchs for example. And I question the downside risk of having a strong presidency, cult of personality for example.
Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
The constitution will necessitate a certain structure so it's not like "it can't work". It is working and then at some point soon the structure will be reified and some will be given more power and different portfolios than others.
I mean ... most countries are run by some sort of committee hierarchy / supervisor chain. Having consulted at many different levels of govt. over here in Europe, I can tell you there are way more committee decisions than Executive directives.
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
Yeah, the thing that really strikes me is that their movement _did not exist_ in the last election. Went from scratch to power in three years. Whatever you want to say about their politics or their ability to lead...sure. But that's an incredible thing to do.
> Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end.
In Germany the focus is usually on the parties and not the figurehead for over 70 years now.
US government organizations such as USAID and the CIA-adjacent National Endowment for "Democracy" backed this movement to the tune of millions of dollars, funding "civil society groups" and other NGOs. Yet supposedly it is spontaneous and grassroots, and we wonder how its governance will be decided.
What anti-intellectual horse shit. Carney has a PhD in economics, for one. But there are many: Tomáš Masaryk, Manmohan Singh, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Lagos, Mary Robinson, Lee Teng-hui, Tsai Ing-wen, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Claudia Sheinbaum.
All these people have been been at the forefront of b ringin freedom, democracy, and well being to their populations. If anything, the "fun facts" show that academics can make great leaders.
Wilson isn't even bottom ten on the lists I could find. He got the US through WWI and helped establish the league of nations. His other accomplishments include the ftc, federal reserve, antitrust law, the farm act, US income tax, a precursor to the new deal and he lowered tariffs.
Wikipedia says he's generally regarded as above average, and the most successful progressive until the New Deal. He was certainly much better than any president the US has had in the last 73 years. JFK is arguable both ways - no one after that is.
Here's a survey of stack rankings of US presidents:
The worst score Woodrow Wilson gets across all the rankings in the survey is 15. The best rating a post-Regan republican gets is 18. If we ignore Regan (still rated much worse than Wilson on average), we have to go all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower to find a Republican whose best score is better than Wilson's worst score.
The Democrats fare better. Truman and FDR clearly ranked better. If we ignore them, the next democrat is... Woodrow Wilson. Put another way, of the last 20 presidents, Wilson is ranked 3 or 4.
On the other hand, Trump is a Doctor of Business and a Doctor of Laws according the Liberty University. Surely, the poster meant Trump. They're a great school. The best schools.
> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Diverse? Over-educated university graduates is possibly the least diverse set of thinkers one could hope to find.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Lord help up. This is going to be demonstration of hubris and an exercise in arrogance.
When people use the term, it is obviously not a reference to just "knowing things" but rather 1) the distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world (and I say that as an academic), and 2) hyperspecialization to the point one loses the big picture, a problem in education today.
I knew one or two profs like that when I was studying, but the vast majority of people in academia are just regular people with families and interests outside of academia. It's kinda disheartening to see the anti-intellectual bent this discussion has taken.
I've worked and known many, many academics in my life. I'm sorry, but if you think this is anti-intellectual, then there are some basic things you don't understand about people.
Academics really are naive and out of touch people. In a weird sort of way, being an academic means sacrificing your personal growth for either a) a deep love of their area of research or b) love of teaching. This means that the wider life skills one gains as an adult, they never get. They get to avoid consequences for being wrong but at quite a price. One of the worst things I have seen are what happens to academics who leave for the private sector later in their career. When they can't make it in the private sector, it is pretty crushing to many of them.
That being said, one of the prices of being an academics is being very "out of touch" with the rest of society. And that will take away your ability to read political situations or govern things well. Academics injecting themselves into such situations will almost always be disastrous as a result. Its just a consequence of how academia works. It doesn't have to be that way, but unless academia changes profoundly, it will be.
As an OP here, I'd like to mention that I don't agree with this characterization at all. When I said academics are divorced from the real world, I was speaking of them largely conforming to particular demographics that make them a bit blind to broader trends in electoral politics and culture.
Academics do just fine picking up "adult life skills". Only a small minority of academics find academic employment from their mid-thirties or so on, so everyone moves to other sectors for the rest of their lives. It is not as if they are just hapless misfits or on the dole for the rest of their lives.
> but the vast majority of people in academia are just regular people with families and interests outside of academia
If most people realized that, we would have much less problems: academics are often shrouded in an aura of virtue and wisdom they don't deserve in the least. Like what you see in this thread, that their narrow (or worse, illusory) knowledge will somehow help them being good rulers/leaders.
People use the term to manage their cognitive dissonance. They do not want to put the work in to become educated, and do not want to admit that this puts them at distinct disadvantage in many ways that matter.
> distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world
It is absurd claim. Academia is part of real world. It is not an isolated island cut off from everything else.
It is no more divorced from real world then any other group of people. No more divorced then rural farmer are divorced from it, businessmen are divorced from it, sports fans are divorced from it. They are all having limits of understanding other groups.
Tech workers as likely more divorced from average person even.
The problem is not in that they are divorced from the real world. The problem is in the model that science get financial support, which leads to the existence of filtering that eliminates from the science anyone who is not far-left loyal dog and supporter of the "current thing".
A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but better than a master of one because he has broad, intersectional knowledge. Academia is designed for specialization and the more you specialize in something the more you lose the forest for the trees.
Everything looks like a nail if you are a hammer and all that.
While the extreme "master of one" exists, most academics I know have cross-cutting interests.
We also shouldn't forget that the vast majority of politicians today are lawyers by education. To whatever degree your assumption holds, it is true of the status quo today as well. Even in that case, having a more diverse set of "masters of one" would be an improvement.
I was only addressing what "overeducated" refers to. Politicians of western democracies I know of have the problem that each leader is afraid to surround himself with people more capable than themselves, for the people around him are competitors for his position.
Unfortunately, eventually one of the people selected for being less capable get to be at the top and continue the whole play again, getting rid of anyone that is not less capable than themselves.
This is one disadvantage democracies have over monarchies, for a king can surround himself with more capable people all he wants as they are not direct competitors.
Academic credentials and knowledge have very little correlation. A master electrician knows things. So does an airline pilot in charge of hundreds of lives. Yet neither has letters after their name.
Yeah, there's plenty of high-profile academic politicians in Europe with debatable legacies including Thatcher and Merkel. Time will tell.
A quick search suggests the economists associated with this movement are fairly 'mainstream' institutionalists of the type that's popular with government these days in the west. I don't think there will be big changes soon beyond dealing with corruption/nepotism.
Later on, I imagine they will push for faster EU integration on possibly slightly worse terms. Serbia may become marginally less independent in terms of fiscal policy at least and the markets might become even more exposed/beholden to foreign capital. This process has been in motion for years now and I don't expect the student movement to care - the upsides are broadly popular with younger people globally. Personally, I think it is deeply ironic that in the age of tariffs and huge government spending by the superpowers, small countries like Serbia are still signing up to be bound by the 'free market' consensus which is rapidly disintegrating globally.
Thatcher was a scientist, but no more an academic than most politicians.
She had a honors bachelors degree. An Oxford MA is awarded three years later on application, and is not an earned master’s degree.
Unusually for a politician, it was a science degree (chemistry), and she worked in a lab at school and after school briefly, but she got a law degree later, which is a typical politician thing.
If that bachelor’s degree was in humanities, like almost all elected officials, no one would refer to her as an academic.
In contrast, Merkel earned a PhD, and some of these newly elected Serbian reps are long-time professors.
> Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
Are you sure? After the covid and position of the scientific community on it's origin it is evident that most scientist are ready to do the exact things that corrupt career politicians are doing, but for free, purely for the love of the game.
Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain: law, civics, economics, political science, or similar. On the other hand it’s a common failure mode of STEM people in particular to assume their expertise can be directly applied to more "human" fields and indeed to dismiss those fields as unscientific hand-waving.
> Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain
They don't have "domains", they are career politicians. It is nice when a politician has some experience in the topic they're legislating on but the system works by having generalists who bow in whatever direction winds are blowing the most money from.
It is not possible to be an effective career politician by having firm principles or technical expertise. It requires a near total dedication to politicking. If they happen to have knowledge of a topic it is coincidence because the number of political topics is large and the number of politicians is comparatively small.
Yes, many US politicians have a JD. That helps them become 'smart' politicians, that is to become corrupt while being legal. That legal training helps what to say, how to keep layers between them and the money, etc.
Can you remind me why Yvette Cooper [1], who's been trained as an Economist, is Secretary for Health and Social Care, after being Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary?
Literally the first name I clicked on from the UK government.
But saying the conclusion seems out of touch, but it's not necessarily limited to STEM formatted people. Everyone and their dogs think they have the most apt representation and whoever disagree ever miss information or the ability to act accordingly.
Have politicians ever been voted en masse for their ability to navigate the domain they will be deployed to work on? It's a combination of popularity and (stated) opinion overlap.
Maybe they are just less experienced in politics. I wonder if their education includes much about the problems they need to solve for society in that country. On the plus side a PhD is good at research and can probably get up to speed damn quick and read a lot. As long as they don't have the hubris!
Honestly, its not the hubris. Politicians are a pretty arrogant group of people. Its the lack of life experience and lessons learned from negative consequences that they lack. The hubris just makes it more galling and thus makes for better sound bites.
Politics also require quite a bit of emotional intelligence and charisma and ability to get diverse people to come to the table for compromises. Academic achievements are orthogonal to all these.
Best case would be multi-talented persons who have both IQ and EQ and good character. Just IQ is not enough.
Definitely not my experience in academia, mostly small mini czardoms who can't stand and won't speak to their competitors. Often engaged in ancient blood feuds with the person two doors down. Add a dash of corruption in publishing and citing each others works while excluding those they disagree with etc.
IMO that's applied Sayre's Law though. And my explanation for that is that the more niche (and therefore fragile) an academic topic gets, the more defensive people are.
I've heard stories of friends working in (say) such a niche part of fluid dynamics that there's two professors and a few dozen PhDs in the entire world who get it, and the professors refuse to work with anyone who ever cited the other in one of their papers.
On the other hand, I've worked as a programmer for molecular neurobiologists who were working on multi-million dollar research projects mapping out all cell types of the brain using single-cell RNA sequencing, and collaboration seemed much more common there.
The stakes don't get much higher than running the country you're from.
EDIT: Also, the city of Groningen elected a city council of young students and put a 24 year old in charge of the city’s traffic and urban development policy. We still brag about being one of he most bike-friendly cities in the country that was the result.
Well, you can have certain differences of opinion as long as they're "acceptable" opinions. Academia ousts those who don't fit into its culture. Tenure is the only way you can express your real opinion without reprisal, though you may still be socially outcast for having the "wrong" opinion - and those who make it this far are predominantly products of that same culture - their opinions align with their peers on what is deemed acceptable. The anointed.
It is still quite tribal, with whole mutually hostile clans that stem from a particular professor or workplace. Plus the economy of academy tends to be quite zero-sum.
Also, the US academy specifically cares about your race a lot.
Some character traits that are useful to academics are useful to politicians; others are kinda the opposite of what politicians need.
Intelligence? Problem solving? Understanding statistics? Speaking in front of rooms full of people? Communicating complex ideas clearly? Useful for both jobs.
But an academic can be bookish, shy or haughty. Pursuing your own ideas is actively encouraged. There are arguments - but the main audience for the debates are other academics. They needn't collaborate on research with anyone they don't want to, and when they do collaborate everyone has the same destination in mind even if they disagree about the route to get there. When dealing with students, they've all chosen to be there, passed exams and paid money. The work is mostly low-medium stakes, with time to get important things right. And of course they have excellent job security.
Politicians, though? Gotta love campaigning and talking to voters. Gotta all get together behind the party's national platform. Even colleagues in your party are rivals because everyone wants the top job. 'Debates' all about playing to the audience and getting 3-second soundbites for social media, not engaging with the substance of arguments. No choice in who you collaborate with, including people with deep-seated disagreements about things like tax, debt, spending. Gotta represent voters many of whom hate you. Do well at the job and high stakes things you didn't even do get blamed on you, like train crashes and oil markets getting expensive. Oh, and every 4-5 years you're fired and get to re-apply for your job.
Maybe so, but most politicians need to get votes. Not all of them go as far as GWB-style "the kind of guy you could have a beer with" but they all know there's no benefit to being contemptuous of any popular entertainment.
An academic can be an ivory tower type who thinks sports matches, superhero movies, social media and star musicians are a waste of time.
But politicians who think the Superbowl is a waste of time, that star wars is for children, and that Taylor Swift's music sucks pretty quickly figures out sharing those opinions loses far more votes than it gains.
While in absolute terms things can almost always get worse.
Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.
So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.
And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.
For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".
> * Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of.
> [snip]
I don't know how large the HN reader base is, but at the time of writing there are 309 comments on this story. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the HN reader base is quite likely significantly larger than 309 people, presumably by several orders of magnitude. As such, the vast majority of readers ("overwhelmingly intellectuals") have indeed decided not to make a any judgement on this thing they don't know all the details of.
I also want to see them succeed. After sitting in meetings with some of the world's brightest software engineers over the last 20 years and observing progress come to a stand-still because of their (in)decisions, I am very skeptical. It beats a corrupt government any day though.
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
Definitely a risk, but politicians are professionals at being overly confident. With this selection (there are not only PhDs, and not only academics), there is actually a chance of... actually trying to understand the problems?
That directly contradicts the Dunning-Kruger effect. In my own experience, academics are much less likely to be overconfident and are actually quite happy to admit they don't know something. The overconfident STEM people that you are talking about are in my experience engineers with bachelor's or masters degrees. Maybe biased by the online communities I frequent, but computer engineers are typically the worst IMO.
Comparing this parliament with a vipers den of the lying career politicians we have in the UK (exposed again during the last budget announcement) I'd say Serbia is unlikely to have it worse.
Being ruled by the career politicians is NOT an advantage, and the innumerable examples from all around the world will prove that.
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
I hope it works out for them. In my home country students overthrow the government and put a Nobel Prize winning economist in charge. Now GDP growth has collapsed and the security situation has become precarious.
I’m also reminded of Ashraf Ghani, the last President of Afghanistan, who was a professor and wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” He ended up fleeing the country like a coward as it collapsed.
It’s notable that students played a major role in the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended up putting the Ayatollah in power. In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?
There are several examples of positive student-led revolutions. In the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the student-led protest organizations were the driving force for change. [1]
The mass protests that toppled the military regime in South Korea in 1987 was also led in large part by students and faculty members, who later became prominent leaders. [2]
This has also happened twice in Serbia now. Milošević was defeated in 2000 thanks in large part to Otpor, a student-led organization [2].
Are you actually from former Czechoslovakia? Because I've lived there during those years and it wasn't as much student-led, just generally young people-led. Some of them were students, many were not. Of course CIA had its share of working but that is to be expected, literally their primary mission.
The only reason it wasn't ended quickly by army in bloodshed (and army leaders all declared that they stand fully behind government and tanks were ready) was that ruling party politicians at power were not hardcore fanatics and understood it would be often fathers fighting against sons, or childhood friends against each other... civil war. It was allowed to happen from above, however non-romantic this reality is. It was also happening in times when iron curtain was visibly falling apart all around including Soviet union, 5 years before it would be crushed like nothing.
Its fine to have romantic view on the world, but for better understanding of the actual world out there and humans living in it, where we come from and where we go this isn't very helpful.
>There are several examples of positive student-led revolutions.
Um… there are lots of counter-examples. Among others… famously Mao’s extremely deadly color revolution was student led. As was Castro, as was the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
“Student led” revolution if you have ever read about the failures of communism is a red flag.
This is unnecessary whataboutism. The assertion I was addressing was "student-led revolutions have never produced a long-term positive outcome", not "all student-led revolutions have produced a long-term positive outcome".
Although not quite the archetypical example of what people think of when hearing "student-led revolution", since you already mention Afghanistan, it's worth pointing out that "Taliban" literally means "students".
> In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?
Huh, now that you mention it, what is actually going on with the “cockroach movement” in India? It seems like you only ever find out about the driving force behind a movement 5 years after the fact when all the truth is laid bare, for better or worse.
If I were paranoid, I'd say it's a color revolution intended to derail India's current trajectory of economic growth, like happened with Bangladesh in 2024.
GDP is linked to stability, an economist can't alter that, it just takes time post-revolution. Having the army run the country would improve security and stability and GDP, but then you've got the army running the country, which perhaps hasn't been going so well for another nearby country, the one that probably causes the security anxieties I imagine.
What you are actually saying is that propaganda well works on dumb young people… which is not at all the point you were trying to make I’m fairly sure.
I feel most comments in this thread do not really understand what Vućiċ regime was.
Google Aleksandar Vućiċ Voja Nevolja meat grinder…
Vučiċ is successor of people that assassinated Zoran Ðinďić, a Serbian prime minister. Basically drugs and arms dealers from either mafia, secret service or special forces.
Even if this government ends up being corrupt the level of moral lows they would need to hit to reach previous regime is staggering.
So people justifiably think it can’t get worse… but that only the time will tell…
I am from Serbia, a student, and supported the movement from the start, and I hope it works, but there are a few risks
I think it's inevitable that the "leaders" will just appear from the student list, then the student list gets destroyed, those leaders form their own parties and we'll elect another radical idiot who's not from the student list
Even now a few days after winning the election, you already have people from the SL who have a "brand", and who get idolized
Also people in our country are accustomed to corruption in our country, and if the new government starts beating down the corruption, the people will start hating the new government
I think maybe a similar thing in Albania. Lots of people deep-down wanting to emulate the same power structures that oppress them. Cycles of abuse. The ones who don’t leave.
This is more or less what happened in Serbia. As we know from the outside, professors were selected and approached by students to be put on a list, it was not the other way around.
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just as vulnerable to these things.
I hope so so much that the current level of corruption will get down. They have been given an immense task. I wish them all the best. The world will be watching.
Serbia has been basically ruled by gangsters for the last several decades. So no, I don't think the academic environment has people like who the Serbian government has to deal with.
I've seen posts of yours on other threads, and all I have to say to you is that you keep on pretending that only the politicians you don't like are the corrupt ones; this is very naive.
I never said they were equally corrupt. What I notice quite often, especially from people that are the most partisan, is that they will add things you never said because they think they are arguing with an imaginary person constructed in their head.
I never mentioned any particular politicians and was making a general observation that if you haven't had to deal with unsavoury characters, dishonest actors and quasi-crooks, you will lack the experience of how to deal with them. These people exist in all walks of life.
The person I was replying to was playing team sports, which I find tiresome, because every post about everything has to become about Trump or whoever the current villain of the week is. It is quite frankly moronic.
There are a lot of assumptions in that general observation, right?
Not just that you need experience in order to deal with these unsavoury/dishonest/crook characters.
But that you even need to deal/compromise with them at all, that doing so would lead to a better outcome ...etc.
And also not to mix up the other meaning of "dealing with".
The biggest thing that the Student movement rallied around was dealing with previous government and various public and private sector corruption that it instigated/facilitated - in the bringing them to justice/rule of law sense.
"Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today."
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
Not exactly academics but as they were mentioned somewhere in this thread, physicians follow this same sort of path. It's actually a lot less uncertain than academia, it's almost impossible to screw up if you're a mediocre but somewhat bright "good" student. There were people I met in medical school who basically never had to take decisions in their life (which is sort of crazy as they take decisions about the lives of others).
In all honesty almost all exams are gamed by studying question patterns, studying previous years' papers, etc. There's nothing wrong in that whatsoever.
BUT it is such a toned down, dwarfed down version of what a holistic education should look like. It probably looks like that in undergrad CalTech Physics, maybe. Not much in most places.
People outside think it's so high and holy to be a PhD. It's not for most people.
Most people also go to academia because they can't find other jobs.
Things in Humanities are much worse than STEM, as there are much more subjectivity, favouritism, nepotism, groupism involved.
'Research' nowadays in most fields and institutions is nothing like whatever grand vision people tend to have: Faraday or Bell Labs, Maxwell or Bohr, Feynman or Bletchly Park.
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
The US was founded originally with a much narrower electorate in mind. John Adams essentially argued that people who didn't own property were too dependent on other people to be trusted with important decisions that affected the future of the country.
I think this populist race to the bottom you are describing is a symptom of voting simply being a button to press to enrich your own specific financial interests. This happens on both the left and right of the aisle.
I don't really know how to reconcile this in the current system. Elected representatives seem to be more concerned with career-making and personal enrichment than actually advocating for the people they are supposed to represent.
I'm not advocating for stripping rights, but I am a little bothered that perhaps Adams had a point. As an outsider to Serbian politics, it seems like an academic movement is perhaps an attempt at a nuanced solution to this problem.
Silicon Valley is worse than average because they're mostly techies and techies are people that on average love things more than people and have low empathy. They also lean isolationist/libertarian and are the perfect victims for "bootstraps" mentality.
I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.
You need to spend a lot of time publishing, studying etc to become an academic it's not a highly social pursuit. In fact techies in order to achieve anything mostly have to operate in a team and it's not the zero sum ruthless game of academic careerism (only so many tenured spots available).
Also the output of tech companies is ideally something tangible not just the careerist publish or perish mindset of academics. Academics are not exactly principled either they will go to exactly where the funding/grants are.
I'd probably be fine with the average opinion of silicon valley workers. Even accounting for the overabundance of priveliged white men that leads to a libertarian/fascist undercurrent. It's the sociopaths that rise to the top by fucking everyone else over that are a problem.
Society hated techies until we started getting ridiculous amounts of money and women figured out that they could marry a techie and instantly go up the social hierarchy. Now that this isn't happening anymore, society is back to hating techies. Tech always attracted people who were in some ways social outcasts - I've spent my formative years being bullied and now I'm supposed to love the society? I pay taxes to maintain public infrastructure while normies vandalize and misuse it when bored and I'm supposed to love that? Truly baffling.
> low empathy
Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.
> "bootstraps" mentality
The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.
Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
I'm sure you can cherry pick overseas examples, but if you look at the progress of the US in the 1900's there's a clear pattern:
When intellectuals were in charge, or at least given authority by the politicians, things got much better. When they weren't, things got much worse. Examples include the Great Depression and (fast forwarding to the 2000's) the financial crisis, COVID (Trump fired the disease response team that stopped SARS-v1, and that would have been the early response to COVID before it left China.) He also ignored nearly-universal warnings from economists that his policies would cause the inflation that Biden was later blamed for.
On the intellectual side, we have things like the New Deal, the Apollo Program, well-run public education that led the US to be a superpower (and has now been gutted), etc, etc.
I think somehting a lot of the top comments seem to miss is, ok sure there are risks, but the existing system isn't working, so why not? Like the regular politicians (in Serbia and beyond) aren't: immune to politicking, getting too deep into a rathole, spinning in circles with planning and bureaucracy, and especially to corruption etc.
The idea that as students or young people they're uniquely going to fail, WHEN IT WAS ALREADY A FAILED SYSTEM doesn't make sense to me, it seems like just poo-pooing?
I guess, a lot of it seems to just be reactionary thought to any change at all eh?
which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
These new batch of people are not randomly selected; they are thought of as more suitable to rule due to their being academics and scientific/technical experts, rather than lifetime politicians. Same as the old politicians who were cut from a certain cloth.
The cloth is now different, but a cloth it remains.
I would love to be governed by 500 average Joes and Janes, chosen at random, for a mandatory 4 years of (political) conscription.
But eventually they will themselves vote to abolish this in favour of career politics. It is one of those cursed problems there are no valid solutions to.
To be fair even if that worked out somehow they would be dominated by the professional bureaucrats running the civil service and other day to day government activities. Effectively it would turn into a technocracy with some degree of oversight.
It's extraordinary they managed to form a list in 2025 and defeat the super corrupt, super established incumbent. A huge win for Serbia and democracies everywhere.
I'm a bit skeptic on all those professors and PhDs being a boon, though. In Portugal, we've been ruled by PhDs since 1926, if not before. Most ministers are professors, many of them independent. Results haven't been good. I hope Serbia proves us wrong.
I dunno man. Having worked with organisations that exist purely to coordinate academics and doctors in the medical field made up of a committee of the same folks...I only have concern. Smart as they maybe in their fields...academics are usually poor at management, logistics, empathy and organisation.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
All groups of human organization are bad and inefficient and incompetent. Just have to pick between ones better than others. And this is better than self dealing entrenched politicians. When this one is bad they can vote them out too
In India at one point AAP had raised hopes. But they couldn’t work as a team. Let us hope Serbia shows the way for others. If they get some good advisors it might help. AAP infighting felt to me like infighting of French revolutionaries though it was not that bloody.
At least student movement succeeded in an authoritarian / totalitarian country. The movement was a dangerous move and can be fatal. Please remember that in 1989, Chinese students and workers protested in Tienanmen Square, and got massacred and failed.
At least this parliament is elected by people, not manipulated by a corrupted authoritarian / totalitarian party or such.
At least Serbia society can get a chance to rest or recovery after a lot of destruction happened.
Maybe it might lead to Serbia turning it around. The fewer lawyers, lobbyists, professional politicians, landlords, real estate people and bankers, who have had their chance around the world running various governments, to no avail in many cases. A wider variety of professions in the legislative body is needed and it can’t hurt anymore than what has gone on in the last 80 years.
I understand China has a large number of engineers. Involved in their government in comparison to the United States…
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
Politicians are lacking in EQ, not IQ. Higher IQs would make things slightly better while higher EQ leads to much better outcomes. Ideally, yeah, both are needed.
Most politicians are high EQ. They're also mostly power hungry sociopaths.
All the worst people I've dealt with in my career were high EQ. Many were extremely successful and did significant, lasting damage to their employers and coworkers. Some were even violent, yet somehow got away with it.
What's unique in this scenario (I'm from Serbia) is that these elected guys didn't form a political movement, they weren't actively involved.
What happened is that students created a list of 250 people and vetted them.
So far they did an absolutely amazing job. There are LOT of potentially malicious actors from academia but so far looks like they did a good job at excluding them.
So those 250 people (not all of them are academics, only like half or so, maybe less) were chosen by students and they accepted.
So far, the whole movement and those people from the list haven't made a single mistake; and that's why they got 53% in election. And not ordinary election, these ones were marked by almost complete media blackout and outright lies (e.g. media claiming students are beating women, to give you an idea of what kind of lies).
Anyway, of course, we'll see.
The biggest focus right now for pretty much everyone is putting people in handcuffs, and I don't imagine much of ideological differences on that topic.
I wish them all the success. This may threaten many governments. Youth and citizens around the world will watch how this government will perform. Hope.
I feel governments are made of people who barely know anything. It is getting worse. From the US to European nations, India to Australia. Make deals with powerful people, get a seat, serve the powerful. That is modern democracy.
There are plenty of dumb ones but I actually get the feeling that most high level politicans are somewhat good at sorting information to find the relevant points, its just that making policy often forces you to act in a way, whether for party or national reasons that make you look not very smart.
> Rather than stand themselves, the students pulled together a slate of trusted figures—not just academics, but also farmers, lawyers, artists, teachers, and a former basketball player.
I came here to say that it's not "just academics", as many of the comments here seem to imply.
>> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
I have much more faith in an electrical engineer than the rest of the academics. Especially sociologist and economists.
Are we still doing this thing where we attribute success in one area to completely different fields? You may as well elect Opus 5.5, seen as it is already superhuman at certain tasks.
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Pardon, i may be naive, but shouldn't a stable democratic parliament be somewhat a representation of the citizens who elected them? Do more than half of all serbians have a Ph.D.? I fear this "revolution" isn't what you think it is..
It should be a representation on some dimensions of the people that elect them, but on others it generally should not.
For example a country with multiple significant ethnic groups should probably have a parliament with a similar ethnic split. A country with a significant rural population and a significant urban population should probably have a similar split in parliament.
Within those groups people are going to vote for their best people for the job. That's generally going to be from among the smarter and/or more educated in their group.
That results in a parliament that is not representative along those dimensions.
This was the problem of another East European country, right post 1989, who elected what they called "a government of technocrats". Soon thereafter those newly elected learned/already knew how to steal, even better than their communist predecessors, while figuring out that they had to keep an appearance of democracy. It's been almost 40 years, and things are still broken. But "democratic".
I suppose that “the impact of the new government will be brief but striking.” That’s how it always ends in situations like this.
If scientific intellect were that successful in politics and governance, then academic cliques would be in power all over the world. And every governor would have a Ph.D.
The more honest and highly educated people gather in one room to decide important issues, the harder the fight will be. And the more sad the outcome.
Science has more or less figured out the causes of such processes, but so far it cannot offer a recipe for sustainable governance. Dictatorship works most effectively, but only for a short period and then stagnates. Autocracy is theoretically better, but depends heavily on specific individuals. Oligarchy is, as a rule, the agony of transitional periods. Democracy in its classical form is complete rubbish; in the form of a masked plutocracy — well, it’s something in between, on par with autocracy. There was some hope for technocracy, but it seems to be failing because the technocrats aren’t really the real ones.
side benefit of a war killed over 100k and displaced 4m people is the population is generally younger and more open to changes.
Israel in contrast is in forever war but much less deaths, hence is stuck with this 77yr old leader forever. USA sort of same boat.
Not saying we should do genocide in USA or Israel to push for change, but in generally I see human live longer is no good, especially the tech to make human live longer usually benefit people in power first (people in Russia and China see this first, but the western now see this haunting them too)
I’ve lived for so long now that I’m cynical to many forms of government. What I currently think works best is a group of well educated brainy people, but that are led by some sort of strongman that makes all the final decisions. Seems to have worked for China and over the last decade in India. The US currently seems to have a strongman president but it’s missing the other crucial element of educated experts in his administration.
Ah yes. China used to have 100% technocrats in their leadership 30 years ago. No one with a law degree in sight. Nowadays it is less, but they still have quite a few.
It’s interesting that Boris Tadić, the former president of Serbia (part of the previous regime, who lost to Vučić 14 years ago) echoes the same type of pronouncements about politicians and the commenters here on HN, and I do not mean this in a particularly laudatory sense. Just recently he was sending messages about how political experience, political vision and the like are key. How to be a political leader one needs this or that, or how Serbia requires this or that type of engagement with future technologies to remain relevant, comparing the student movement to blockchain (yes, really). This (incredibly vain and pompous) man doubtlessly has the most political experience in Serbia right now, and sits in several boards of Chinese and other multinationals, with other consulting roles, pretty much proving the bankability of his political talents. And yet that’s the person behind a series of political decisions and circumstances which inaugurated the previous regime.
Also, looking around the globe at professional politicians once also lauded for their political talent, like Macron, or Merkel, I’m really not seeing their policies paying off in spades, nor their "political vision" proving particularly beneficial to their citizenry at the moment. In all three cases, it seems, seasoned politicians made capital errors in judgement which are now causing resentment, almost unprecedented political realignments and upheaval across these nations. People are incredibly quick to judge the potential behaviour of a future political formation - yet Western democracies are by and large falling apart, as a result of career politicians’ actions, inactions, stupidity and avarice? As people speak more and more loudly on certain issues, like Palestine, these same politicians are comfortable ignoring them. Where is the scepticism for them, or the viability of this guild-like way of structuring the political sphere as the way forward? We are living the consequences of having career politicians lead, do we like it so much we cannot conceive of anything better?
Anyway, if you look into the local press in Serbia and especially enclaves like Twitter, there’s a wonderful symmetry: the EU champions are terrified the student movement has already shown "concerning" right leanings, they’re busy counting how many EU flags the students have draped themselves in while marching, and aren’t happy. The right is deeply worried about how the "globalist, NGO, pro-EU camarilla" is already deeply embedded in the student movement (they went to Brussels, after all!) and is perhaps even planting their candidates into the mix to sell out the country’s interests to the globalists. I am being slightly ironic here, but I have nothing but contempt for this thinking on both sides. Winning the election required the participation and support from both these camps’ voting blocks, which tells you how bad the situation truly was, since sworn enemies were forced to cooperate with a political unknown just for the chance to win against the existing political regime.
In a sense, only a political unknown could have won, as all pre-existing political factions, (mostly comprised of these praised seasoned politicians, many of them three decades into their careers) would not or could not muster the strength or wherewithal to work with one another. No nationalist would ever cooperate with a globalist pro-EU green party, even if it cost them their country, democracy, and those same national interests they hold sacrosanct. Likewise, no progressive citizen party saving democratic principles would ever work with what they view as backward retrograde nationalist movements threatening to plunge the country back into the type of rhetoric and milieu as existed during the wars of the nineties. Also, at some point the decades-long careers of many politicians was perfect cannon fodder for the regime’s propaganda machine, gleefully cataloguing their past sins and outright inventing them if the need arose. After a while, political experience morphs into evidence of one’s political parasitism.
It took a decentralised student movement which could not be targeted and besmirched, to engage the non-voting public and voters on both sides of the political spectrum. Part of the reason why all parties which took part in this election were swept away (except for the students and the outgoing regime) was because of failing to recognise the political moment. This election, in my view, was a single-issue election - the workings of democracy and stopping corruption and the further decay of institutions. This is what the political movement will be judged on, and what will determine its political future. The citizenry, at this juncture, is willing to table discussions on foreign policy for the sake of internal affairs and weeding out corruption. Most foreign powers and press corps, sadly, are interested primarily in the foreign policy implications of this new movement, and seem like they couldn’t care less if Serbian citizenry lives in caves, favelas, or in a thriving democracy.
Many things are still unclear, such as the exact relationship between the Parliament and Government, once formed, and the direct democracy practiced by the student movement. It is unclear how effective it will prove, or how they will select their allies and collaborators, as it’s perfectly obvious that the movement cannot simply replace the totality of public administration. Regardless, the new regime will enjoy a broad latitude and a measure of good will among the citizenry not seen in a generation. It needs to use that to good effect. If it fails to deliver, they will be ridiculed and attacked by members of both internal factions, and will more than likely splinter, and usher in a return of Vučić, who - lest we forget - is now the only opposition party in Parliament, with a sizeable number of representatives, and plenty of corrosive residuals and slush funds and media operations still at his disposal. Lest we also forget, with 700k party members, it is a powerful organisation even without the corruptive backend of the state apparatus.
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
The regular state (at least in the US) is that the majority are actively hostile to the technocracy, and would fail a 3rd grade science test. The best of them might actually be able to pass bachelor-level science tests and sometimes pay lip service to scientific advisors. They're never more than about 25% of congress.
So, it'd be a big step up if we had leaders that understood basic elementary school stuff stuff like bleach injections are not medicine (vs Trump), or that draining the California delta would be an ecological disaster (vs Newsom - https://stopthetunnels.org/).
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Any system no matter how well intentioned will outlast its usefulness and eventually dies. I think the key is to see it in the moment and immediate future — Serbia's Gen Z's GDP/GINI/what-have-you is a good yardstick to measure that. So its kind of weird to say we believe because every time something like this is tried it really is different and whatever you/I believe in _never_ lasts even our lifespans.
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child.
Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
Singapore is the opposite of the ivory tower rule. Most high-ranking officials hold either a master's or a professional degree. You wouldn’t find many PhDs with no prior executive experience.
Politicians are very well compensated there. And part of their pay is linked to how well they perform.
Prime minister gets 3 million per year for example.
thing with Mugabe n his government - those guys were mostly just lawyers and other PHDs in things social studies etc
they grew up on communist rhetoric, got support from communist countries - so their main ideology had already failed in the real world. so accumulating degrees without practical experience is a recipe for failure as seen in most african countries.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
How were the Nazis technocrats? The core of the Nazi party were weirdo political extremists and violently nationalistic army veterans. The only example I can think of which matches your idea of an 'extraordinarily capable technocratic leader' is Speer, and like his military counterpart Rommel, his reputation has been somewhat laundered and propagandised both during and after the war.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
The latter, maybe? The former, I'm not so sure. However we don't have many examples of competent organisations trying to enact genocide to compare against. (Fortunately.)
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was
less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people
in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would
ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from
richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and
they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich.
Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single
one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded.
France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape,
so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
Being able to freely and easily trade with the EU, and not wanting to be controlled by Russia, are probably the most important two reasons to join the EU!
It does not pay into EU budget - it contributes to and participates in specific programs and projects. The treaties are rather sectoral agreements which are always under the threat of swiss direct democracy. Bilaterals III has not yet been approved neither by the referendum nor the parliament - while it will likely pass the opposition is every significant.
To me, an unspoken truth about politics is that it is extremely boring. Not governing, that is interesting. Doing politics. It's not clear from the article how involved the Students plan to remain once the government is formed, but I suspect a return to conventional politics lies ahead, for better or for worse.
Now, here's a challenge for you: name an elected government that's the polar opposite. The greatest by assemblage of premium-grade idiots to have ever managed by any civilisation. I know - it's a very hard question.
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Pretty cringe, and if what I've seen at the top of university faculties is any indication, it's gonna be a shitshow. There's something to be said for at the very least the common working class man having a direct say in things, if not the deciding say in the things.
There's no modern historical indication that more degrees results in better governance.
Meh getting them elected is one thing can they overcome the institutions and the bureaucracy stuffed with corrupt friends and former politicians that’s completely different.
They need to translate the election victory into
tangible improvements and results. Otherwise
voters in Serbia would not see any difference to
the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought
Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently
Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of
Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed
out that Peter is just a younger face but the same
Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein
network is not only much bigger than known, but has different
actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can
not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically -
and logistically - no sense at all.
I mean this specific example seems like a far cry from how horrible the Orban regime was. It’s basically ultra-conservative posturing. And Magyar being super conservative was known ahead of the vote. Granted I am no expert in Hungarian politics, but from this single example it seems a bit intense to call him Orban 2.0.
And I also don’t think you can compare Magyar pre- and post election to the new Serbian elected government at all. But I do agree actually producing enough noticeable change until the next election will be hard for both. It just takes time to unfuck countries.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
Proper up to the point. No way he is giving up built in advantages right wing has in Hungary - like rural voters votes having way more power then city voters.
Sure but that’s a far cry from the “Magyar is just another Orbán style despot” vibe that this thread started with. It just means Hungary is Little America.
> Many of the new representatives have zero experience in politics. But their unparalleled professional expertise should be helpful in reforming Serbia,
So non career politicians.
This is essentially a technocratic government that is left leaning. Just because they are academics, researchers, doctors, engineers and sociologists does not mean they cannot go corrupt themselves (it will). The EU itself is heavily corrupt as well.
We have also seen how corrupt a technocratic right government can get in the US. It will be no different to a left leaning one once money and promises are involved.
To give an analogy of what this is, this is like electing effective altruists from Anthropic with the difference being that they are using your money (taxes) instead of theirs and giving lots of promises for your vote.
If they are serious, they need to pass the world toughest anti-corruption laws while also significantly growing their own economy or borrowing economic policies from the least corrupt nations in the world such as Singapore and to exceed them.
> Student List has promised to fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law.
While these are good promises, the problem is that this is the first lie that they have already made.
They better do all four of them without angering the electorate otherwise they can’t be trusted.
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
You cannot setup a team of dozens of people to run an important sector of the whole country by having them apply for positions. Not even companies hire that way, most companies hire based on recommendations and contacts. You don't have time for this, they need to form a government in a month or so. Six months in people already get antsy if enough is getting done, you'd be going through the third round of interviews.
Not every country has a spoil system, there's probably no need to change anyone in the institutions (except those very close to Vučić in dangerous positions)
This is true, but doesn't contradict my statement. As I said, I am looking forward to this and am in fact not that pessimistic. But in the end you need actual people, and these need to be found.
I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.
The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.
Only one Serbian university barely qualifies to international rankings. Education from these institutions is not what you think it is. I'm not arguing against Serbia in particular, this applies to most Eastern and Central European countries.
Nobody takes seriously those gaming metrics. University rankings are based on how many researchers, you can get to pretend they are teaching at your University...based on the extortionate funds you get from students more interested in partying at their AlphaPis.
All this while said Researchers offload the real work the students are paying for... to TAs.
Notorious cronyism, nepotism, and outright corruption is the real deal. Not these losers from global top 200. The first step is admitting that you are not that smart neither educated as you want others to see you.
But that's precisely the point of the article: that after "countrywide student protests" this group has managed to unseat "13 years of populist authoritarian rule by Aleksandar Vučić".
I'm not saying they will succeed, but they have been explicitly voted to fight the corruption you speak of.
That definitely happened with Serbian students in year 2000 - proven (as much as it can be) link between CIA & Co, and the funding and training of the Otpor movement, B92 TV station ...etc.
So far there's been no indication that this time it's been anything but an actual grassroot movement.
Also - having Vučić around was probably better for basically everyone except people living in Serbia.
No one outside had enough interest to see him gone - hence no abroad supported the students. And he's been fucking up lives of people in Serbia long and bad enough to cause an uprising.
While I'm no longer a student, nor living in Serbia anymore. Still having there both older and younger family/cousins that are students and were part the protests - I had a bit of a glance of internal functioning.
It was literally kids/students from a city where rallies/protests were happening - self organizing food and accommodation for other students coming in from other cities.
Other people and business also pitched in with bringing out food/water/etc to the streets for students/protestors.
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
Idk which period you're referring to, but for a long time, the Politburo was nothing but Stalin's mouth piece, as was the Central Committee and the rest of the Party, ad they ruled through very hard repression. That puts a long-lasting kind of mark on a society that you can't engineer yourself out of. So I'd argue it's not much of an argument.
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
US government-funded pro-opposition outlet BIRN through its Media Ownership Monitor Serbia project admits the central Student List media channels - N1 and Nova S - were created by former US director of the CIA David Petraeus via KKR and former US Ambassador to Serbia Cameron Munter;
The parent United Group was acquired and the media platforms built up from 2013-2014 onward as the center of opposition media in Serbia opposing Serbia’s existing leadership and institutions, and playing a central role in both “student protests” last year and the “Student List” movement this year;
United Group was only recently (earlier this year) acquired by Alpac Capital, but KKR still maintains an undisclosed amount of shares
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;
When “leaderless” and “decentralized” protests are praised in the Western media, scroll down in the article where they eventually admit who the leaders and organizations are behind them, perform a simple internet search to identify the key people and investments making them possible to determine whether a movement is indigenous or the product of foreign interference;
Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones.
Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
On the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
Exactly. My fellow countrymen fucked my country (Brexit). Foreign meddling didn't help, but it also didn't hinder to the point of changing the outcome.
It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
According to the government's own report, it did not. The meddling was insubstantial
Do you wonder why there even was a referendum?
Compare 1997: Sir Jammy Fishpaste hates Europe, spends millions of his own money promoting his Referendum Party, gets nowhere. Because it's "cool Britannia" and the common man is doing well for himself. People think he's a nutter and all he achieves is keeping 4-11 Tories out of power by sapping their votes
But the 2008 crash wrecks the country. UKIP builds a voter base over years, and gets an enormous share of the vote. That's a warning shot for the Tories, whose voters UKIP are sapping. They only just squeaked through a hung parliament with a Libdem coalition. Hence Gambling Dave offers a referendum to bring Europe haters back to his party so he can remain in power.
Those percentage points were already in place before Russia even got going.
The Russia report? It says that they didn't seek to assess Russia's impact?
Farage was basically a Putin asset, for years; I don't doubt that a lot of the sentiment was there before any influence, but to my recollection the influence was obvious and very heavy
Yep, working class people's lives have sucked after 2008, though it was a continuation of a longer trend and is still continuing. (And COVID made it worse. All us tech people sitting comfortable in our home office while mass wealth transfer happened out of blue collar pockets...)
Worth remembering... Anti-globalization and anti-liberalization were slogans and policies of the socialist left in the late 90s and 2000s. Battle of Seattle, Occupy, etc. Voices marginalized and mocked by the neo-liberal centrist "left" (not left) in the Democratic party, Labour party, mainstream European govt's, Canadian Liberal party, etc. Manufacturing jobs were dumped overseas, union membership declined, middle class incomes plummeted, 2008 drained people's financial well being, while housing prices skyrocketed etc. And same "moderate" forces also went to war in the middle east, etc. etc.
Obama ran on left populist slogans but actually governed from the neo-liberal centrist right.
Actual socialist left voices and formerly moderate social democratic policies generally had no voice or power in government anywhere, Corbyn was run out of the room, Bernie isolated, etc.
So it's no surprise that the right and far right saw the vacancy and exploited it. The rise of Trump, of UK Reform, etc. ties directly into this sense of hopelessness and anger people had.
Now the "conservative" right -- which was formerly pushing liberalization the strongest -- talks in angry tones about "globalism" instead of "globalization", and it's caught up with anti-Semitic dog whistles, national chauvinism, etc. etc. That shit sells.
Sure jan, the country with an all time low in trust for institutions and academia ruled by an strongman-loving, education-bashing fascist is secretly funding meritocracies around the world…
The US is famous for never intervening into other countries' politics. Other famous examples of no intervention in the area is their total non-involvement in Ukraine with Euromaidan protests for example!
Conspiracy would be saying that the US orchestrated the existence of the Student's list and created protests from thin air. Realism is that the US is very happy about any political destabilization that could favor their interest and will provide unofficial support wherever it's convenient for them.
The shiny-brained parliament started with a decision to revoke the license from Alta bank. This one was the most popular bank of Russian relocants, because only this one allowed to transfer money from the Russian banks.
As a result - a lot of people now have their accounts blocked, and the promise was left, to start the insurance payouts, so I believe it was said "your money are completely safe".
Closing of the bank was a low-hanging fruit decision, which everybody liked, because Alta bank was under dictator Vucic's protection, presumably the corruption schemes took place, and so on.
In fact, thousands of Russian relocants have been left with blocked accounts and with no money. On Monday, hundreds of those people will siege the 1 or 2 Serbian bank branches in attempt to open the account there. Other banks there are European - Raif, OTP, etc, so they're not allowed for Russians.
Interesting, that the brainiest parliament in the world started with a very populist decision, so it's the degradation from the very beginning. These brilliant minds better would've been stayed in science, rather than getting into politics.
This has nothing to do with the elections, do you think that the newly elected majority takes control immediately? Election results have yet to finalise (53 polling stations will vote again tomorrow due to irregularities), the new parliamentarians are yet to be sworn in.
It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
I love that they won and I love the hope and expectation surrounding their victory but MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
There's definitely a chance of failure here.
I laughed out loud at this — my dad is a retired Uni professor, so I know exactly what you are talking about — but I'd point out that the "student list" has around 140 seats in the parliament, so 80 academics hopefully still has another 60 common sense people who are not all about being right all the time, and who bring other perspectives too.
Umm, you might want to read a but on the (new) opposition, ex 12+ years of total unchecked control.
I didn't, but I saw a friend go into a week long alcohol session because he wanted to leave academics and couldn't take it anymore...
It must be like a pit fight, but with connections and half truths
"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!
I mean the whole point of democratic system _is_ you want rotating cliques and infighting. Because defaulting to consensus isn't really that democratic.
The large blocks need to be able to move forward in legislation but the more uglier and tumultuous the backroom dealing are (within legal bounds) the healthier the democracy is.
I believe this is also what colours our views of the general academic infighting — academics are rarely rotated out except in the lower ranks, so it's a different type of skillset of building long-term alliances that drives their progression through the academic field and available careers in a particular institution (not even talking about "academic points" through publishing in recognized journals, which is a different discussion altogether — even with that criteria satisfied, to move to the next rank of professorship, you need to be elected by your colleagues).
Basically, academic tenure is opposite from democracy.
Potentially, but it might also be how humans work. See any season of survivor.
Survivor is the opposite of how real human societies work - especially the tribal ones that thes show is aping. Real tribal societies are stable forever, and they are almost entirely related people (especially if we're talking about smaller tribes). You're reputation for helpfulness is crucial in any such society, so the kind of backroom dealing and betrayals the show is known for are almost entirely out of the question: if you are found out as a schemer, you don't get to go home to your real family, you risk being ostracized for the rest of your life.
The tension between effectiveness (cohesive decisions swiftly implemented) and representation (complex reduction of utterly disparate points of view to a workable compromise) is the main force at the core of democracy.
Most of the electorate doesn't really understand it, constantly clamoring for one or the other to be the only guiding principle, but you need both - and one has to find a way even when they appear completely irreducible. Democracy is beautiful in a very messy way, a bit like nature.
The usual grifters have had their chance in most Western governments. Lawyers, landlords, the gentry, etc… I am skeptical but the present bunch that is usually very well represented in most western/eastern governments have had plenty of time and opportunity and look where we are at now.
This is very general and I don't see the point honestly.
Different countries are very different.
You probably can name "the usual grifters" in your domicile but don't expect the same patterns to be transferrable to different regions.
Sometimes pathologies are portable like the the authoritarian state capture toolkit but even there _who are you doing it with_ can be quite different even though _how you are doing it_ may seem familiar.
Also by any metric the general unspecific list of countries "east and west" has lots of variance in life expectancy, happiness, poverty, literacy etc.
So I can only read this as pointless general venting or faux cynicism.
> and look where we are at now.
Living easier, richer, safer lives than 99.99% of all humans who have ever existed?
Maybe they will fail, maybe they will do very well - time will tell. Even if they fail badly, it still can't be as bad as an authoritarian rule, right?
Having spent a significant time in academia, the problem is you are never judged on what works, but on what idea you can take credit for. Now this is not great for innovation, but it is disasterous for keeping things running.
There’s a chance of failure in any human endeavor. but I am sick of lawyers, bankers, landlords, lobbyists and various other grifters hanging on currently in most western governments no one can say that they haven’t had their chance. There needs to be a wider variety of professions involved at/in the legislative branch.
which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!
"Winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."
They need historians and political scientists, and maybe some politicians, to constantly remind them not to allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
It is not always obvious how to lay ground work over a decade ... or four of them.
It isn't even mostly about fixing problems. But how to make government act as an expedient rather than as an impediment.
Seems pretty obvious to me that it's not going to be 80 academics debating everything under the sun, but instead dedicated groups focusing on their expertise area...
> There's definitely a chance of failure here.
I was thinking the same.
This can either go incredibly well or it can go incredibly wrong.
A group of 80 academics sounds like the level of dysfunction that can only be superseded by a group of 80 politicians.
Liable to get hoodwinked by "academic publisher" types.
> MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
As compared to what? A working group of 80 uneducated idiots?
If democracy doesn't work if you put smart, educated people in control then it doesn't work, period and we need to pay better attention to whatevere China is doing.
China has more engineers involved in their government. Who tend to be more clear- thinking let’s solve the problem at hand. Which explains why they have so many infrastructure projects going on across their country.
It also partially explains why they pursue are open to multiple solutions to a problem. And it certainly explains why they looked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that thorium research and built two thorium reactors and will probably build many more because guess what?
They figured out how to make it work and apparently solved that alloy molten salt problem, it took about 10-15 years but they are on schedule. to deploy many more reactors after 2029.
They also switched or are are in the process of switching from lithium batteries to sodium ion batteries which is something else they didn’t have to do, they could hung on to lithium through 2040 milking, but instead they are moving on, which is also something that can happen when you have a bunch of engineers involved in the decision-making as opposed to those finance/MBA people who have a tendency to want to milk people for as long as possible.
https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/china-emerg...
Good luck protesting when that government of engineers does something you don’t like
In which country? The US is an aggressive total surveillance state that executes people in the street and gives out 30 year sentences for people who didn't even show up at a protest, the UK jails grannies for holding up Palestinian flags, and Canada something something something something truckers something something.
In the long term, the US is far more likely to turn into China than not.
Yeah, because protesting billionaire bought laws has such a wonderul track record in the West that there are scarcely any left.
To protest in most places in Australia you need a government permit.
The real question is, would their capable decision making survive in a democracy, where russian propaganda through American billionaire's media tell voters what to think and more importantly what to fear?
> A working group of 80 uneducated idiots
This is why people hate IT nerds.
Because a working group of 80 career politicians is more effective?
Maybe. Politics is a skill, and not everyone has a knack for it. It’s dirty, requires compromise, and a willingness to work with your opponents. Or, well, at least it used to.
> Politics is a skill
It very much is, but I don't believe it is the skill of "solving problems" or "making society better".
Politics is about getting elected. Convincing the people that it's all the others' fault, that you know better, that you will save the world. And then when they get elected... we naively expect them to solve problems. But we selected them for their capacity at being selected, not their capacity at understanding the big problems society is facing...
CHA is not a dump stat.
Getting elected is table stakes and shows you have the soft skills needed to organise, campaign and convince. Which is the minimum you need to get disparate groups of humans to pull in the same direction and make progress in advancing the country.
Theres no consolation if you get experts to plan solutions to problems but 1) the people you need to implement the plans have their own opinions or priorities and 2) the public want focus in some other priority and are start rioting if they don't feel heard.
You need schmoozers as much as you need tacticians.
There are two largely non-overlapping skillsets when it comes to politics and governance. The soft skills being effective means you can get elected, that does not mean they are good at governing (and is often a detriment to having good solutions and governance).
I don't currently have any data that says otherwise and the counterfactual remains unexplored (but it will be with this parliament!), but things that people do and say to get elected often are things that if implemented...would not solve the problems the populace that elected is having.
I don't think we need schmoozers, we need people who understand the problems of their populace and have the structural power to implement their solutions. We shall see if they need more than this, but this would be the first exploration of the counterfactual.
People who have their "own" priorities don't end up upsetting the apple cart when we make success in implementing those solutions the same as their success (which if we are effective problem solvers, should be possible. See Deng Xiaoping)
The schmoozers/lobbyists aren’t working currently in America we need problem solvers and clear thinking.
That is an overly cynical view.
A lot of the problem can be attributed to voters accepting the blame game, overly simplistic solutions, and expedient absolutist views over debating a plurality of options.
I'm not saying that the political system isn't to blame here. At least where I live, it is structured in such a way that winner takes all and loyalty to the party is more heavily rewarded than representing the constituent. But, again, that is a system that we in some sense designed.
Absolutely. the first time I found out the Chinese have quite a few engineers involved in government. I said that explains all the infrastructure being built. Mind you no human endeavors are perfect. But there was a time in the United States not too long ago where there was more of a can do attitude, I don’t understand why high-speed rail is not a thing.
I also don’t understand why the Pan American Highway or rail from Nome, Alaska to the tip of South America never got built. Nor can I understand why Oak Ridge, Tennessee Thorium Research Center and further development was left to rot. The Chinese are very close to throwing element 90 in our face.
> Politics is about getting elected
There's a lot under the umbrella of "politics" that happens after you get elected. If you want to accomplish anything after you get elected (heck, even if it's just personal enrichment) you have to be somewhat skilled at getting others to work with you, one way or another. As a politician you can have flawless convictions and be right and well-informed about all your decisions, but at the end of the day you're just one vote (to use legislators as an example) and it does nothing if you can't convince or work with others.
It depends on the political system. In many a parliamentary system, voting differently than what you are told means you will not be in the party list ever again, so for the day to day, there's very little convincing effort when you have the majority. And especially in systems where there is very little legal money in politics, the carrot is just ability to get access for not-so-legal money. So party leadership is a matter of having enough businessmen friends, and having will to power in a rather unclean word.
The whole "you are just one vote" doesn't really apply there. As the 30th legislator on your party list, you show up and vote as you are told. And in systems like the one in the US, barring rare moments, it's also not all that different. The card that your party will abandon you, and that if you want a position of any importance you have to play ball means many a junior congressperson just votes as they are told, and spends time fundraising.
I think you're basically proving my point? (My point being: politics isn't just "getting elected".)
In such political systems where you essentially must vote the party line, what makes an individual "effective" (ie. what constitutes being "good" at your role)? I'd say it comes down to all kinds of political soft skills, ie. forging the right alliances, convincing the right people to change course, understanding motivations of others, etc.
All of these are generally called "politics", and are things that happen very much after you're elected.
Democracy is a popularity contest
Yes. That’s kind of the point. The words aren’t that far apart in etymology either. By Latin definitions the most popular (liked by the general public) candidate will be the democratically chosen (rule by the people) one.
Yes but the hope is we can make the popularity center on the solutions and ability to execute them.
great comment, poetic and to the point
In some clusters, senior academics are exactly like that.
And in many others they’re small czars of their own kingdoms. However it’s always nice to refresh parliaments with new educated people, with new progressive political movements, shatter old alliances and practices.
That's an understatement...
Competence of democratic politicians is to be liked and get most votes. Usually it means to be without values.
I hope more people will realize that voting for uknown politicians that offers empty promises for artificially made problems means givig up our responsibility and at the end, make things worse as we see in current democratic countries.
As opposed to voting for Vucic here? T
In my lifetime, it has been a skill of procrastination. and milking the public…
The “skill” of career politicians is mostly loyalty and appointing people based on loyalty is the worst criteria.
We'd be living in a better world if politics was a skill and our politicians were good at it.
I think he means polticians lying, being trecherous, compromising until nothing gets done and no ones career is hurt, etc is a skill. It would be better for the people if people with these skills were not in public office. Anything that takes away from being a servant to the constituents and become self-service needs to be removed from Politics.
I would assume PhD holding people are smart enough to understand their limitations and strengths.
They've been elected during a very special events. They know what's expected of them. Looks like compared to the previous powers this lot at least gives the country a fighting chance.
Ehhh, that's the flaw in the logic. Holding a PhD doesn't necessarily make you better at anything other than strictly the topic of the PhD (and sometimes not even that), maybe only following arbitrary orders from senior figures.
Holding a PhD at the very least means you can spend a sustained long amount of time on (potentially) intractable problems and try to arrive at solutions for them. That's a good skill to have when...you've been elected to solve problems.
Clearly you’ve never been to a faculty meeting :)
One could even say politics is also a science.
I'm not sure if it used to be like that, but the skill required to politicians now is to get themselves elected, and that largely means the ability to lie well
Management is basically 99% people's relations/network. It doesn't matter how good the technical implementations are at the top, if they don't have the knowledge and capacity to enforce it downstream from middle layer to the base. There's so much people involved whose interests are farmed by your competitors.
Imposing it top down requires oppression. Imposing or pressuring this huge layer from the bottom requires a continuously updated base so you can squeeze from the top and the bottom to enact the changes needed quickly.
It's impossible for leaders at the top, to personally vet the members of a village or city council for example.
I think I've never seen any of such concatenation of events and organization to have ever happened.
I believe this is the usual tension that's present even in private companies: are professional managers better than field experts at managing work?
The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!
The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts? A great manager would be great, but these are similarly rare (rarer than good experts in a field).
And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.
The same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.
Before you ask, Gyúcsány was better
This is an interesting experiment, although I wouldn't call it a technocracy just yet. Italy had technocratic governments under Mario Monti and, to a lesser extent, Mario Draghi, with mixed results.
Having highly educated people in parliament is one thing; actually governing a country is another. Political leadership requires negotiation, compromise, institutional knowledge, and the ability to execute decisions.
I'm curious to see how Serbia handles the transition from academic expertise to actual governance, especially without a conventional party leadership structure.
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Amateur politician have good intentions but are not very effective. It's hard to get consensus when everyone has their own opinion. Professional politician have the background to get somethings done but yes they have thier own issues. My suspicion is that the new group might get a few items thru. Things that have been burning in the majorities minds but after that there won't be much done. It very hard to get people to agree, specifically intelectuals that think they are always right and can put up a good argument.
It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee
The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
The system was introduced around 170 years ago and it was done very suddenly after a civil-religious war won by protestant liberals.
On the federal level yes but that only reduced the autonomy that the cantons had, it didn't introduce a fundamentally different system of government, most decisions were still taken on the local level.
The system we had in the US pre New Deal was much more like Switzerland. Decentralization works just fine out of the box. The problem is that human instinct tends towards power which requires more centralization to accumulate.
The US has not failed yet, only grown unpleasant for certain groups of people.
Yes and no. The US presidency is very different than the way it's reported on, but it is true that the executive branch is being more assertive to make up for the disfunction of the legislation. We're doing that intentionally and for good reason, to demonstrate to China that the US can act with speed as one small part of the overall deterrent against World War 3. The US is almost always hugely misunderstood, because there isn't any other country in the world that actually works exactly like the US does.
No one knows how the US works anymore because the current administration doesn't follow laws and just makes it all up as they go along. It turns out the court system is too slow to matter: illegal tariffs just move to new illegal justifications when the patently absurd ones are tossed out after more than a year of using tariffs to drive inflation and stroke Trump's ego.
> The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That's correlation, not causation. Switzerland made enormous amounts of money from its banking secrecy system over many decades until the US pressured it to end it. And the trends are not looking good for Switzerland based on data. We'll see how stable it remains as the cost of living keeps rising, real wages decline, and unemployment goes up.
If you provide wealth and a good lifestyle to your citizens, then almost any system will be stable.
The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor (they were vehemently opposed to the idea of putting so much power in the hands of one individual).
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
The Roman Republic was incredibly decentralized with more people working for the administration of the city of Rome than for the Roman state itself at the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Extreme executive power existed, but not at the level of the imperial administration. Provincial governors had near absolute power and generals had control over their armies to a degree well beyond what any general today has. They were basically private mercenaries with the generals, not the state, being in charge of payroll for the soldiers. Local territories had near 100% control of their own affairs so long as they did not do anything to interfere with the tribute flowing to Rome.
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)
Civil war. Social upheavals. Gridlock. Oligarchs.
Didn't the U.S. have all those problems, despite having a president?
There was an assertion made in an ancestor comment that a committee without a leader can't function, but that doesn't seem proven by those problems in Roman history under their Senate, since the U.S. with a president had the same kinds of problems.
I assume other factors are at play, oligarchs for example. And I question the downside risk of having a strong presidency, cult of personality for example.
I agree that the term "just fine" is subjective.
Sulla even managed to resign and survive, which I think is even more impressive.
And they won't, system in Serbia is still the same - they will form ministries and prime minister leading them.
They will choose who will that be by a committee, but after that they have to function as usual.
Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
Switzerland effectively runs via committee
"effectively" is doing some heavy work in this sentence
The constitution will necessitate a certain structure so it's not like "it can't work". It is working and then at some point soon the structure will be reified and some will be given more power and different portfolios than others.
A country is not a business. The goals are different. The levers and constraints are different.
I mean ... most countries are run by some sort of committee hierarchy / supervisor chain. Having consulted at many different levels of govt. over here in Europe, I can tell you there are way more committee decisions than Executive directives.
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
Also, see the Tomato guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUBdX1d3ok
> It was an amazing achievement
Yeah, the thing that really strikes me is that their movement _did not exist_ in the last election. Went from scratch to power in three years. Whatever you want to say about their politics or their ability to lead...sure. But that's an incredible thing to do.
> Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end.
In Germany the focus is usually on the parties and not the figurehead for over 70 years now.
edit: for the election
US government organizations such as USAID and the CIA-adjacent National Endowment for "Democracy" backed this movement to the tune of millions of dollars, funding "civil society groups" and other NGOs. Yet supposedly it is spontaneous and grassroots, and we wonder how its governance will be decided.
This is the standard claim by the Vucic regime and his media, still haven't seen any evidence. Please share if you have any.
Any sources?
$10M+ US funding of "Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance" https://www.wheremytaxesgo.com/foreign-aid/serbia/
$500K+ NED funding listed here: https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Europe-Grant-...
$2.9M USAID->CRTA https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72016923CA00002_0...
$10M USAID->Trag Foundation (Inspire2Action) https://2021-2025.state.gov/reports/2024-investment-climate-...
The Russians paying him.
Source: The Russians paying me.
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Fun fact: The US has only had one academic hold the presidency. He is also considered to be the worst US president in history.
Academics don't have a great track record in politics or governance pretty much anywhere at anytime in history.
Considered by whom - you?
Most surveys, either of experts or the public, rank Wilson above average.
Worst are generally Buchanan, Johnson, Harding and of course Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...
What anti-intellectual horse shit. Carney has a PhD in economics, for one. But there are many: Tomáš Masaryk, Manmohan Singh, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Lagos, Mary Robinson, Lee Teng-hui, Tsai Ing-wen, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Claudia Sheinbaum.
All these people have been been at the forefront of b ringin freedom, democracy, and well being to their populations. If anything, the "fun facts" show that academics can make great leaders.
You made that conclusion using one person?
I didn't know Trump held an academic appointment. (Other than John G. Trump, I mean.)
He means Woodrow Wilson.
well aware
Wilson isn't even bottom ten on the lists I could find. He got the US through WWI and helped establish the league of nations. His other accomplishments include the ftc, federal reserve, antitrust law, the farm act, US income tax, a precursor to the new deal and he lowered tariffs.
Wikipedia says he's generally regarded as above average, and the most successful progressive until the New Deal. He was certainly much better than any president the US has had in the last 73 years. JFK is arguable both ways - no one after that is.
Here's a survey of stack rankings of US presidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...
The worst score Woodrow Wilson gets across all the rankings in the survey is 15. The best rating a post-Regan republican gets is 18. If we ignore Regan (still rated much worse than Wilson on average), we have to go all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower to find a Republican whose best score is better than Wilson's worst score.
The Democrats fare better. Truman and FDR clearly ranked better. If we ignore them, the next democrat is... Woodrow Wilson. Put another way, of the last 20 presidents, Wilson is ranked 3 or 4.
On the other hand, Trump is a Doctor of Business and a Doctor of Laws according the Liberty University. Surely, the poster meant Trump. They're a great school. The best schools.
Sure, b/c all over history it shows students always know what for and why they protest... /s
> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Diverse? Over-educated university graduates is possibly the least diverse set of thinkers one could hope to find.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Lord help up. This is going to be demonstration of hubris and an exercise in arrogance.
Whatever it is going to be it will hardly be worse than what we had for past 14 years of SNS / Vučić dictatorship.
It's always funny to me when people say "overeducated", as if knowing things is only good up to a point. If you know too much, you suddenly turn bad.
When people use the term, it is obviously not a reference to just "knowing things" but rather 1) the distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world (and I say that as an academic), and 2) hyperspecialization to the point one loses the big picture, a problem in education today.
I knew one or two profs like that when I was studying, but the vast majority of people in academia are just regular people with families and interests outside of academia. It's kinda disheartening to see the anti-intellectual bent this discussion has taken.
I've worked and known many, many academics in my life. I'm sorry, but if you think this is anti-intellectual, then there are some basic things you don't understand about people.
Academics really are naive and out of touch people. In a weird sort of way, being an academic means sacrificing your personal growth for either a) a deep love of their area of research or b) love of teaching. This means that the wider life skills one gains as an adult, they never get. They get to avoid consequences for being wrong but at quite a price. One of the worst things I have seen are what happens to academics who leave for the private sector later in their career. When they can't make it in the private sector, it is pretty crushing to many of them.
That being said, one of the prices of being an academics is being very "out of touch" with the rest of society. And that will take away your ability to read political situations or govern things well. Academics injecting themselves into such situations will almost always be disastrous as a result. Its just a consequence of how academia works. It doesn't have to be that way, but unless academia changes profoundly, it will be.
As an OP here, I'd like to mention that I don't agree with this characterization at all. When I said academics are divorced from the real world, I was speaking of them largely conforming to particular demographics that make them a bit blind to broader trends in electoral politics and culture.
Academics do just fine picking up "adult life skills". Only a small minority of academics find academic employment from their mid-thirties or so on, so everyone moves to other sectors for the rest of their lives. It is not as if they are just hapless misfits or on the dole for the rest of their lives.
> there are some basic things you don't understand about people.
> Academics really are naive and out of touch people
That's a hilarious juxtaposition of sentences.
> but the vast majority of people in academia are just regular people with families and interests outside of academia
If most people realized that, we would have much less problems: academics are often shrouded in an aura of virtue and wisdom they don't deserve in the least. Like what you see in this thread, that their narrow (or worse, illusory) knowledge will somehow help them being good rulers/leaders.
People use the term to manage their cognitive dissonance. They do not want to put the work in to become educated, and do not want to admit that this puts them at distinct disadvantage in many ways that matter.
Yes, this was, obviously my intended usage.
Not the wet lettuce straw man usage posited by the other comment.
> distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world
It is absurd claim. Academia is part of real world. It is not an isolated island cut off from everything else.
It is no more divorced from real world then any other group of people. No more divorced then rural farmer are divorced from it, businessmen are divorced from it, sports fans are divorced from it. They are all having limits of understanding other groups.
Tech workers as likely more divorced from average person even.
That is true.
The problem is not in that they are divorced from the real world. The problem is in the model that science get financial support, which leads to the existence of filtering that eliminates from the science anyone who is not far-left loyal dog and supporter of the "current thing".
> far-left loyal dog
Is this how a 60-day old account has negative karma?
Maybe the problem is that your ideas don't withstand any academic scrutiny, since they aren't based on sound research or well-reasoned arguments.
A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but better than a master of one because he has broad, intersectional knowledge. Academia is designed for specialization and the more you specialize in something the more you lose the forest for the trees.
Everything looks like a nail if you are a hammer and all that.
https://www.oglaf.com/labyrinth/
While the extreme "master of one" exists, most academics I know have cross-cutting interests.
We also shouldn't forget that the vast majority of politicians today are lawyers by education. To whatever degree your assumption holds, it is true of the status quo today as well. Even in that case, having a more diverse set of "masters of one" would be an improvement.
I was only addressing what "overeducated" refers to. Politicians of western democracies I know of have the problem that each leader is afraid to surround himself with people more capable than themselves, for the people around him are competitors for his position.
Unfortunately, eventually one of the people selected for being less capable get to be at the top and continue the whole play again, getting rid of anyone that is not less capable than themselves.
This is one disadvantage democracies have over monarchies, for a king can surround himself with more capable people all he wants as they are not direct competitors.
Slight correction (can't edit): law education is most common for politicians in Western countries, but not the majority.
For the US, 32% of the house and 47% of the senate holds a law degree.
Academic credentials and knowledge have very little correlation. A master electrician knows things. So does an airline pilot in charge of hundreds of lives. Yet neither has letters after their name.
Aren’t the letters after their names essentially signifying their level of understanding on a subject?
Just like “Master” before electrician or “Captain” or “PIC” for airline pilots.
Yeah, there's plenty of high-profile academic politicians in Europe with debatable legacies including Thatcher and Merkel. Time will tell.
A quick search suggests the economists associated with this movement are fairly 'mainstream' institutionalists of the type that's popular with government these days in the west. I don't think there will be big changes soon beyond dealing with corruption/nepotism.
Later on, I imagine they will push for faster EU integration on possibly slightly worse terms. Serbia may become marginally less independent in terms of fiscal policy at least and the markets might become even more exposed/beholden to foreign capital. This process has been in motion for years now and I don't expect the student movement to care - the upsides are broadly popular with younger people globally. Personally, I think it is deeply ironic that in the age of tariffs and huge government spending by the superpowers, small countries like Serbia are still signing up to be bound by the 'free market' consensus which is rapidly disintegrating globally.
Thatcher was a scientist, but no more an academic than most politicians.
She had a honors bachelors degree. An Oxford MA is awarded three years later on application, and is not an earned master’s degree. Unusually for a politician, it was a science degree (chemistry), and she worked in a lab at school and after school briefly, but she got a law degree later, which is a typical politician thing.
If that bachelor’s degree was in humanities, like almost all elected officials, no one would refer to her as an academic.
In contrast, Merkel earned a PhD, and some of these newly elected Serbian reps are long-time professors.
Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
> Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
Are you sure? After the covid and position of the scientific community on it's origin it is evident that most scientist are ready to do the exact things that corrupt career politicians are doing, but for free, purely for the love of the game.
Alternative? The corrupt career politicians in the US mostly hold JDs.
There are more ardent second amendment supporters among tenured professors in US universities than you think.
Average professional politician is a psychopath fighting for power no matter what.
At least these guys might be honest about their hubris and arrogance and won't smile to you while slaughtering your future or robbing your family.
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Why are russian bots always so easy to spot?
Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain: law, civics, economics, political science, or similar. On the other hand it’s a common failure mode of STEM people in particular to assume their expertise can be directly applied to more "human" fields and indeed to dismiss those fields as unscientific hand-waving.
> Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain
They don't have "domains", they are career politicians. It is nice when a politician has some experience in the topic they're legislating on but the system works by having generalists who bow in whatever direction winds are blowing the most money from.
It is not possible to be an effective career politician by having firm principles or technical expertise. It requires a near total dedication to politicking. If they happen to have knowledge of a topic it is coincidence because the number of political topics is large and the number of politicians is comparatively small.
My point was that politics IS their domain, as evinced by the examples I gave.
That would be news to me. Which country are you referring to?
i mean even in the US politicans frequently have a JD? Whether you consider that a valid credential in this case for 'law background' is another thing
Yes, many US politicians have a JD. That helps them become 'smart' politicians, that is to become corrupt while being legal. That legal training helps what to say, how to keep layers between them and the money, etc.
Can you remind me why Yvette Cooper [1], who's been trained as an Economist, is Secretary for Health and Social Care, after being Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary?
Literally the first name I clicked on from the UK government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvette_Cooper
That one is pretty easy.
Running NHS (or any other health care system) is literally an economics problem.
Economics is a lot more than just money.
But saying the conclusion seems out of touch, but it's not necessarily limited to STEM formatted people. Everyone and their dogs think they have the most apt representation and whoever disagree ever miss information or the ability to act accordingly.
Have politicians ever been voted en masse for their ability to navigate the domain they will be deployed to work on? It's a combination of popularity and (stated) opinion overlap.
Maybe they are just less experienced in politics. I wonder if their education includes much about the problems they need to solve for society in that country. On the plus side a PhD is good at research and can probably get up to speed damn quick and read a lot. As long as they don't have the hubris!
Honestly, its not the hubris. Politicians are a pretty arrogant group of people. Its the lack of life experience and lessons learned from negative consequences that they lack. The hubris just makes it more galling and thus makes for better sound bites.
Politics also require quite a bit of emotional intelligence and charisma and ability to get diverse people to come to the table for compromises. Academic achievements are orthogonal to all these.
Best case would be multi-talented persons who have both IQ and EQ and good character. Just IQ is not enough.
You think you navigate a career in academia without working through different opinions, collaboration etc.?
Definitely not my experience in academia, mostly small mini czardoms who can't stand and won't speak to their competitors. Often engaged in ancient blood feuds with the person two doors down. Add a dash of corruption in publishing and citing each others works while excluding those they disagree with etc.
IMO that's applied Sayre's Law though. And my explanation for that is that the more niche (and therefore fragile) an academic topic gets, the more defensive people are.
I've heard stories of friends working in (say) such a niche part of fluid dynamics that there's two professors and a few dozen PhDs in the entire world who get it, and the professors refuse to work with anyone who ever cited the other in one of their papers.
On the other hand, I've worked as a programmer for molecular neurobiologists who were working on multi-million dollar research projects mapping out all cell types of the brain using single-cell RNA sequencing, and collaboration seemed much more common there.
The stakes don't get much higher than running the country you're from.
EDIT: Also, the city of Groningen elected a city council of young students and put a 24 year old in charge of the city’s traffic and urban development policy. We still brag about being one of he most bike-friendly cities in the country that was the result.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...
Yep that’s a great summary of what my wife, a professor, tells me about every day.
Well, you can have certain differences of opinion as long as they're "acceptable" opinions. Academia ousts those who don't fit into its culture. Tenure is the only way you can express your real opinion without reprisal, though you may still be socially outcast for having the "wrong" opinion - and those who make it this far are predominantly products of that same culture - their opinions align with their peers on what is deemed acceptable. The anointed.
Academia actually involves a lot of politics... just not the kind that says it's all the immigrants' fault.
It is still quite tribal, with whole mutually hostile clans that stem from a particular professor or workplace. Plus the economy of academy tends to be quite zero-sum.
Also, the US academy specifically cares about your race a lot.
It's more the kind of deciding how to spend other people's money.
Both government and academia know how to navigate this well - by avoiding accountability.
And in business the first move is to create a juridical fiction to endorse accountability instead of the people driving it.
Apart bare nude citizen and end of chain operator, there are not much people not playing such a dodge game it seems.
The two are strongly correlated.
Intelligence is a tool - one that can be put to use against any problem. "Get diverse people to come to the table for compromises" is no exception.
Some character traits that are useful to academics are useful to politicians; others are kinda the opposite of what politicians need.
Intelligence? Problem solving? Understanding statistics? Speaking in front of rooms full of people? Communicating complex ideas clearly? Useful for both jobs.
But an academic can be bookish, shy or haughty. Pursuing your own ideas is actively encouraged. There are arguments - but the main audience for the debates are other academics. They needn't collaborate on research with anyone they don't want to, and when they do collaborate everyone has the same destination in mind even if they disagree about the route to get there. When dealing with students, they've all chosen to be there, passed exams and paid money. The work is mostly low-medium stakes, with time to get important things right. And of course they have excellent job security.
Politicians, though? Gotta love campaigning and talking to voters. Gotta all get together behind the party's national platform. Even colleagues in your party are rivals because everyone wants the top job. 'Debates' all about playing to the audience and getting 3-second soundbites for social media, not engaging with the substance of arguments. No choice in who you collaborate with, including people with deep-seated disagreements about things like tax, debt, spending. Gotta represent voters many of whom hate you. Do well at the job and high stakes things you didn't even do get blamed on you, like train crashes and oil markets getting expensive. Oh, and every 4-5 years you're fired and get to re-apply for your job.
> academic can be bookish, shy or haughty.
There's no shortage of haughty politicians either.
Maybe so, but most politicians need to get votes. Not all of them go as far as GWB-style "the kind of guy you could have a beer with" but they all know there's no benefit to being contemptuous of any popular entertainment.
An academic can be an ivory tower type who thinks sports matches, superhero movies, social media and star musicians are a waste of time.
But politicians who think the Superbowl is a waste of time, that star wars is for children, and that Taylor Swift's music sucks pretty quickly figures out sharing those opinions loses far more votes than it gains.
I think we have people who are highly intelligent and still unable to navigate social situations. Neurodivergents are not uncommon in academics.
> Knowing nothing about it this particular movement
It's a pity this disclaimer cannot be made to serve as a header for about 99% of the comments here today, because, holy shit...
You can take what you see here and extrapolate. HN is overwhelmingly "intellectuals" - many academics, though not all. We can see:
* Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of.
* There's not much agreement - mostly people disagreeing with each other.
* Everyone's opinion is important - they're smart so obviously, they're always right.
* Unrelated politics - my pet issue must be talked about.
* Anything is better - it's impossible for things to get worse.
* I disagree with this opinion so it must be a Russian bot.
Anyway, I wonder what will happen if you get together a bunch of intellectuals in government.
While in absolute terms things can almost always get worse.
Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.
So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.
And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.
For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".
> * Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of. > [snip]
I don't know how large the HN reader base is, but at the time of writing there are 309 comments on this story. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the HN reader base is quite likely significantly larger than 309 people, presumably by several orders of magnitude. As such, the vast majority of readers ("overwhelmingly intellectuals") have indeed decided not to make a any judgement on this thing they don't know all the details of.
I also want to see them succeed. After sitting in meetings with some of the world's brightest software engineers over the last 20 years and observing progress come to a stand-still because of their (in)decisions, I am very skeptical. It beats a corrupt government any day though.
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
> That the PHDs will be overly confident
Definitely a risk, but politicians are professionals at being overly confident. With this selection (there are not only PhDs, and not only academics), there is actually a chance of... actually trying to understand the problems?
I bet we wouldn't hear about it when it fails. At least not from science.com
That directly contradicts the Dunning-Kruger effect. In my own experience, academics are much less likely to be overconfident and are actually quite happy to admit they don't know something. The overconfident STEM people that you are talking about are in my experience engineers with bachelor's or masters degrees. Maybe biased by the online communities I frequent, but computer engineers are typically the worst IMO.
There's a bittersweet naiveté to those thinking PhD government will do a better job. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
Epistemic trespassing
if you know human history you already know how it will end up
Comparing this parliament with a vipers den of the lying career politicians we have in the UK (exposed again during the last budget announcement) I'd say Serbia is unlikely to have it worse.
Being ruled by the career politicians is NOT an advantage, and the innumerable examples from all around the world will prove that.
Humble politicians loose elections and negotiations.
Better than the absolute idiots who are running the US into the ground now
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
We should only let the dumbest and least capable of deception or hubris run our governments, then.
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I hope it works out for them. In my home country students overthrow the government and put a Nobel Prize winning economist in charge. Now GDP growth has collapsed and the security situation has become precarious.
I’m also reminded of Ashraf Ghani, the last President of Afghanistan, who was a professor and wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” He ended up fleeing the country like a coward as it collapsed.
It’s notable that students played a major role in the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended up putting the Ayatollah in power. In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?
There are several examples of positive student-led revolutions. In the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the student-led protest organizations were the driving force for change. [1]
The mass protests that toppled the military regime in South Korea in 1987 was also led in large part by students and faculty members, who later became prominent leaders. [2]
This has also happened twice in Serbia now. Milošević was defeated in 2000 thanks in large part to Otpor, a student-led organization [2].
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8363827.stm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Democratic_Struggle#Stude...
[3] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/bringing-down-dictator#1
Are you actually from former Czechoslovakia? Because I've lived there during those years and it wasn't as much student-led, just generally young people-led. Some of them were students, many were not. Of course CIA had its share of working but that is to be expected, literally their primary mission.
The only reason it wasn't ended quickly by army in bloodshed (and army leaders all declared that they stand fully behind government and tanks were ready) was that ruling party politicians at power were not hardcore fanatics and understood it would be often fathers fighting against sons, or childhood friends against each other... civil war. It was allowed to happen from above, however non-romantic this reality is. It was also happening in times when iron curtain was visibly falling apart all around including Soviet union, 5 years before it would be crushed like nothing.
Its fine to have romantic view on the world, but for better understanding of the actual world out there and humans living in it, where we come from and where we go this isn't very helpful.
>There are several examples of positive student-led revolutions.
Um… there are lots of counter-examples. Among others… famously Mao’s extremely deadly color revolution was student led. As was Castro, as was the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
“Student led” revolution if you have ever read about the failures of communism is a red flag.
This is unnecessary whataboutism. The assertion I was addressing was "student-led revolutions have never produced a long-term positive outcome", not "all student-led revolutions have produced a long-term positive outcome".
The claim is several are good, I can’t think of as many that I can they are not only bad, but fucking awful as responsible for the murder of millions.
Directly comparable things are not a whataboutism. You just don’t like it.
Although not quite the archetypical example of what people think of when hearing "student-led revolution", since you already mention Afghanistan, it's worth pointing out that "Taliban" literally means "students".
> In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?
Huh, now that you mention it, what is actually going on with the “cockroach movement” in India? It seems like you only ever find out about the driving force behind a movement 5 years after the fact when all the truth is laid bare, for better or worse.
If I were paranoid, I'd say it's a color revolution intended to derail India's current trajectory of economic growth, like happened with Bangladesh in 2024.
There is no Nobel Prize for economics: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/
Alfred Nobel did not name economics in his will and it only started to be given out 70 years later by a bank in memory of Nobel.
Putting a single person in charge will always corrupt them
I think he’s talking about Bangladesh and Muhammad Yunus which is an economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize, not an economy related award
GDP is linked to stability, an economist can't alter that, it just takes time post-revolution. Having the army run the country would improve security and stability and GDP, but then you've got the army running the country, which perhaps hasn't been going so well for another nearby country, the one that probably causes the security anxieties I imagine.
The Iranian revolution is more complex than that.
Student protests toppled communism in Czechoslovakia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution
"Students" played a big role in what happened in 2013-2014 in the Ukraine.
What you are actually saying is that propaganda well works on dumb young people… which is not at all the point you were trying to make I’m fairly sure.
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It was until they got invaded by a failed state.
I feel most comments in this thread do not really understand what Vućiċ regime was.
Google Aleksandar Vućiċ Voja Nevolja meat grinder…
Vučiċ is successor of people that assassinated Zoran Ðinďić, a Serbian prime minister. Basically drugs and arms dealers from either mafia, secret service or special forces.
Even if this government ends up being corrupt the level of moral lows they would need to hit to reach previous regime is staggering.
So people justifiably think it can’t get worse… but that only the time will tell…
I am from Serbia, a student, and supported the movement from the start, and I hope it works, but there are a few risks
I think it's inevitable that the "leaders" will just appear from the student list, then the student list gets destroyed, those leaders form their own parties and we'll elect another radical idiot who's not from the student list
Even now a few days after winning the election, you already have people from the SL who have a "brand", and who get idolized
Also people in our country are accustomed to corruption in our country, and if the new government starts beating down the corruption, the people will start hating the new government
I think maybe a similar thing in Albania. Lots of people deep-down wanting to emulate the same power structures that oppress them. Cycles of abuse. The ones who don’t leave.
>Cycles of abuse. The ones who don’t leave.
My form of government is conscripted politicians that don’t want to do it.
Anyone that wants it, needs to be kept far away from it.
This is more or less what happened in Serbia. As we know from the outside, professors were selected and approached by students to be put on a list, it was not the other way around.
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just as vulnerable to these things.
I hope so so much that the current level of corruption will get down. They have been given an immense task. I wish them all the best. The world will be watching.
US Fingerprints on Serbia's "Student List" & Why it Doesn't Make Vucic Automatically the "Good Guy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5F1vfgA6XI
I wonder why hasn't Google banned this guy's channel.
They are more vulnerable because they are not used to dealing with these types of people.
Academic environment has plenty of those.
Serbia has been basically ruled by gangsters for the last several decades. So no, I don't think the academic environment has people like who the Serbian government has to deal with.
More vulnerable then Vucic, Vance, Trump, Orban, Bolsnaro, Paxton, ...
I've seen posts of yours on other threads, and all I have to say to you is that you keep on pretending that only the politicians you don't like are the corrupt ones; this is very naive.
It is equally naïve to pretend all politicians of all alignments are equally corrupt.
I never said they were equally corrupt. What I notice quite often, especially from people that are the most partisan, is that they will add things you never said because they think they are arguing with an imaginary person constructed in their head.
I never mentioned any particular politicians and was making a general observation that if you haven't had to deal with unsavoury characters, dishonest actors and quasi-crooks, you will lack the experience of how to deal with them. These people exist in all walks of life.
The person I was replying to was playing team sports, which I find tiresome, because every post about everything has to become about Trump or whoever the current villain of the week is. It is quite frankly moronic.
There are a lot of assumptions in that general observation, right?
Not just that you need experience in order to deal with these unsavoury/dishonest/crook characters.
But that you even need to deal/compromise with them at all, that doing so would lead to a better outcome ...etc.
And also not to mix up the other meaning of "dealing with".
The biggest thing that the Student movement rallied around was dealing with previous government and various public and private sector corruption that it instigated/facilitated - in the bringing them to justice/rule of law sense.
You JUST claimed they are more vulnerable to corruption. By the beginning of the thread.
The whole thread started with you pointing at specific group and claiming they are nore vulnerable to corruption.
Ok King of sophistication. Mr Worldly himself. Everyone is naive in your presence oh lord
They are waaaay more corrupt. They also have morality completely at odds to mine.
"Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today."
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Hopefully the Serbian youths learned from them.
Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
Not exactly academics but as they were mentioned somewhere in this thread, physicians follow this same sort of path. It's actually a lot less uncertain than academia, it's almost impossible to screw up if you're a mediocre but somewhat bright "good" student. There were people I met in medical school who basically never had to take decisions in their life (which is sort of crazy as they take decisions about the lives of others).
In all honesty almost all exams are gamed by studying question patterns, studying previous years' papers, etc. There's nothing wrong in that whatsoever.
BUT it is such a toned down, dwarfed down version of what a holistic education should look like. It probably looks like that in undergrad CalTech Physics, maybe. Not much in most places.
People outside think it's so high and holy to be a PhD. It's not for most people.
Most people also go to academia because they can't find other jobs.
Things in Humanities are much worse than STEM, as there are much more subjectivity, favouritism, nepotism, groupism involved.
'Research' nowadays in most fields and institutions is nothing like whatever grand vision people tend to have: Faraday or Bell Labs, Maxwell or Bohr, Feynman or Bletchly Park.
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
Maximilien Robespierre was an intellectual.
The US was founded originally with a much narrower electorate in mind. John Adams essentially argued that people who didn't own property were too dependent on other people to be trusted with important decisions that affected the future of the country.
I think this populist race to the bottom you are describing is a symptom of voting simply being a button to press to enrich your own specific financial interests. This happens on both the left and right of the aisle.
I don't really know how to reconcile this in the current system. Elected representatives seem to be more concerned with career-making and personal enrichment than actually advocating for the people they are supposed to represent.
I'm not advocating for stripping rights, but I am a little bothered that perhaps Adams had a point. As an outsider to Serbian politics, it seems like an academic movement is perhaps an attempt at a nuanced solution to this problem.
"Populist" is whatever the other side wants. "Nuanced and complex" is my side. My point is, "muh boomers" is a pretty populist reddit-brained take.
Silicon Valley is worse than average because they're mostly techies and techies are people that on average love things more than people and have low empathy. They also lean isolationist/libertarian and are the perfect victims for "bootstraps" mentality.
I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.
You need to spend a lot of time publishing, studying etc to become an academic it's not a highly social pursuit. In fact techies in order to achieve anything mostly have to operate in a team and it's not the zero sum ruthless game of academic careerism (only so many tenured spots available).
Also the output of tech companies is ideally something tangible not just the careerist publish or perish mindset of academics. Academics are not exactly principled either they will go to exactly where the funding/grants are.
I'd probably be fine with the average opinion of silicon valley workers. Even accounting for the overabundance of priveliged white men that leads to a libertarian/fascist undercurrent. It's the sociopaths that rise to the top by fucking everyone else over that are a problem.
> love things more than people
Society hated techies until we started getting ridiculous amounts of money and women figured out that they could marry a techie and instantly go up the social hierarchy. Now that this isn't happening anymore, society is back to hating techies. Tech always attracted people who were in some ways social outcasts - I've spent my formative years being bullied and now I'm supposed to love the society? I pay taxes to maintain public infrastructure while normies vandalize and misuse it when bored and I'm supposed to love that? Truly baffling.
> low empathy
Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.
> "bootstraps" mentality
The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.
The 5 star movement was exactly the opposite of a group of highly educated people, I don't how you came to think of them
fair enough, the analogy for me is in the age ^^
I think it was more older than young people; but it's true that initially there were a lot of young people, sadly.
It was the first Putin-supported party in Italy
> youths learned
Ha! <knee slap> <snort!> Good one!
All youths do is learning... is it so bad to hope that a bunch of doctors learned the right things? :)
Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
I'm sure you can cherry pick overseas examples, but if you look at the progress of the US in the 1900's there's a clear pattern:
When intellectuals were in charge, or at least given authority by the politicians, things got much better. When they weren't, things got much worse. Examples include the Great Depression and (fast forwarding to the 2000's) the financial crisis, COVID (Trump fired the disease response team that stopped SARS-v1, and that would have been the early response to COVID before it left China.) He also ignored nearly-universal warnings from economists that his policies would cause the inflation that Biden was later blamed for.
On the intellectual side, we have things like the New Deal, the Apollo Program, well-run public education that led the US to be a superpower (and has now been gutted), etc, etc.
This feels like an ex post explanation for 20th century history.
For example, the Great Depression. Hoover was a literal textbook author, but is widely blamed.
The only real professor was Wilson, but he had similar failings to what people in this thread are worried about.
I think somehting a lot of the top comments seem to miss is, ok sure there are risks, but the existing system isn't working, so why not? Like the regular politicians (in Serbia and beyond) aren't: immune to politicking, getting too deep into a rathole, spinning in circles with planning and bureaucracy, and especially to corruption etc.
The idea that as students or young people they're uniquely going to fail, WHEN IT WAS ALREADY A FAILED SYSTEM doesn't make sense to me, it seems like just poo-pooing?
I guess, a lot of it seems to just be reactionary thought to any change at all eh?
which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
You comment is a bit unclear as to its point.
These new batch of people are not randomly selected; they are thought of as more suitable to rule due to their being academics and scientific/technical experts, rather than lifetime politicians. Same as the old politicians who were cut from a certain cloth.
The cloth is now different, but a cloth it remains.
"Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it." - Plato
If only there was a law to uphold this.
I would love to be governed by 500 average Joes and Janes, chosen at random, for a mandatory 4 years of (political) conscription.
But eventually they will themselves vote to abolish this in favour of career politics. It is one of those cursed problems there are no valid solutions to.
Just have a monarchy that only exists to enforce that one rule.
> If only there was a law to uphold this.
To be fair even if that worked out somehow they would be dominated by the professional bureaucrats running the civil service and other day to day government activities. Effectively it would turn into a technocracy with some degree of oversight.
It's extraordinary they managed to form a list in 2025 and defeat the super corrupt, super established incumbent. A huge win for Serbia and democracies everywhere.
I'm a bit skeptic on all those professors and PhDs being a boon, though. In Portugal, we've been ruled by PhDs since 1926, if not before. Most ministers are professors, many of them independent. Results haven't been good. I hope Serbia proves us wrong.
I dunno man. Having worked with organisations that exist purely to coordinate academics and doctors in the medical field made up of a committee of the same folks...I only have concern. Smart as they maybe in their fields...academics are usually poor at management, logistics, empathy and organisation.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
All groups of human organization are bad and inefficient and incompetent. Just have to pick between ones better than others. And this is better than self dealing entrenched politicians. When this one is bad they can vote them out too
In India at one point AAP had raised hopes. But they couldn’t work as a team. Let us hope Serbia shows the way for others. If they get some good advisors it might help. AAP infighting felt to me like infighting of French revolutionaries though it was not that bloody.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988).
At least student movement succeeded in an authoritarian / totalitarian country. The movement was a dangerous move and can be fatal. Please remember that in 1989, Chinese students and workers protested in Tienanmen Square, and got massacred and failed.
At least this parliament is elected by people, not manipulated by a corrupted authoritarian / totalitarian party or such.
At least Serbia society can get a chance to rest or recovery after a lot of destruction happened.
Wish them the best.
Im so hyped to see how this goes!
Power to the people man!
I'm really excited for this to be successful and stay in place.
It's going to end up being something quite unique perhaps in a ways similar to Switzerland's unique democracy.
You are equating power to the people with power to the intelligentsia which means you are in for a huge surprise.
Maybe it might lead to Serbia turning it around. The fewer lawyers, lobbyists, professional politicians, landlords, real estate people and bankers, who have had their chance around the world running various governments, to no avail in many cases. A wider variety of professions in the legislative body is needed and it can’t hurt anymore than what has gone on in the last 80 years.
I understand China has a large number of engineers. Involved in their government in comparison to the United States…
It is a courageous experiment, I wish them the best.
I hope they are confident enough to reach out to people who can help them in matters where not smarts but experience is needed.
We will see how spectacularly it will fail. But hey at least some young blood, they will probably try honestly.
Maybe for the first two weeks.
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
good thing they're stem oriented. serbia can only go up from here.
vs electing lawyers as done in other countries.
Politicians are lacking in EQ, not IQ. Higher IQs would make things slightly better while higher EQ leads to much better outcomes. Ideally, yeah, both are needed.
Most politicians are high EQ. They're also mostly power hungry sociopaths.
All the worst people I've dealt with in my career were high EQ. Many were extremely successful and did significant, lasting damage to their employers and coworkers. Some were even violent, yet somehow got away with it.
> An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Yes, very STEM oriented indeed.
Do you intend to post at least ONE comment in this thread that isn't sarcastic and deeply useless, or is your mind really set on being a troll here?
Seems correct though? "Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics". I guess medicine is a science. Political science might be engineering.
What's unique in this scenario (I'm from Serbia) is that these elected guys didn't form a political movement, they weren't actively involved.
What happened is that students created a list of 250 people and vetted them.
So far they did an absolutely amazing job. There are LOT of potentially malicious actors from academia but so far looks like they did a good job at excluding them.
So those 250 people (not all of them are academics, only like half or so, maybe less) were chosen by students and they accepted.
So far, the whole movement and those people from the list haven't made a single mistake; and that's why they got 53% in election. And not ordinary election, these ones were marked by almost complete media blackout and outright lies (e.g. media claiming students are beating women, to give you an idea of what kind of lies).
Anyway, of course, we'll see.
The biggest focus right now for pretty much everyone is putting people in handcuffs, and I don't imagine much of ideological differences on that topic.
I wish them all the success. This may threaten many governments. Youth and citizens around the world will watch how this government will perform. Hope.
I feel governments are made of people who barely know anything. It is getting worse. From the US to European nations, India to Australia. Make deals with powerful people, get a seat, serve the powerful. That is modern democracy.
There are plenty of dumb ones but I actually get the feeling that most high level politicans are somewhat good at sorting information to find the relevant points, its just that making policy often forces you to act in a way, whether for party or national reasons that make you look not very smart.
The entire world should be cleaning up the toxic lead reside generation from it's legislative bodies. It's done enough.
> Rather than stand themselves, the students pulled together a slate of trusted figures—not just academics, but also farmers, lawyers, artists, teachers, and a former basketball player.
I came here to say that it's not "just academics", as many of the comments here seem to imply.
Yeah, but it's best to get the digs in, now.. "I told you so."
And they won't be able to change anything due to the massive HR-like bureaucracy.
Ah, our old pal scientific governance. I'm very curious to find out how it will turn out this time.
>> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
I have much more faith in an electrical engineer than the rest of the academics. Especially sociologist and economists.
Are we still doing this thing where we attribute success in one area to completely different fields? You may as well elect Opus 5.5, seen as it is already superhuman at certain tasks.
would it be that worse? at least opus isn't corrupt..
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Pardon, i may be naive, but shouldn't a stable democratic parliament be somewhat a representation of the citizens who elected them? Do more than half of all serbians have a Ph.D.? I fear this "revolution" isn't what you think it is..
It should be a representation on some dimensions of the people that elect them, but on others it generally should not.
For example a country with multiple significant ethnic groups should probably have a parliament with a similar ethnic split. A country with a significant rural population and a significant urban population should probably have a similar split in parliament.
Within those groups people are going to vote for their best people for the job. That's generally going to be from among the smarter and/or more educated in their group.
That results in a parliament that is not representative along those dimensions.
This was the problem of another East European country, right post 1989, who elected what they called "a government of technocrats". Soon thereafter those newly elected learned/already knew how to steal, even better than their communist predecessors, while figuring out that they had to keep an appearance of democracy. It's been almost 40 years, and things are still broken. But "democratic".
I suppose that “the impact of the new government will be brief but striking.” That’s how it always ends in situations like this.
If scientific intellect were that successful in politics and governance, then academic cliques would be in power all over the world. And every governor would have a Ph.D.
The more honest and highly educated people gather in one room to decide important issues, the harder the fight will be. And the more sad the outcome.
Science has more or less figured out the causes of such processes, but so far it cannot offer a recipe for sustainable governance. Dictatorship works most effectively, but only for a short period and then stagnates. Autocracy is theoretically better, but depends heavily on specific individuals. Oligarchy is, as a rule, the agony of transitional periods. Democracy in its classical form is complete rubbish; in the form of a masked plutocracy — well, it’s something in between, on par with autocracy. There was some hope for technocracy, but it seems to be failing because the technocrats aren’t really the real ones.
Alas, there’s no good news for anyone.
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What's the political leaning of this movement? Isn't this what's important?
I'd hope they will attempt to establish evidence-based policies.
That's so radical these days that it is not on any political spectrum.
I agree, but there needs to be a moral (political?) framework. What are we trying to achieve morally? And that's separate from science I think.
Is it? What does that one dimensional measure even mean in today's world?
It's not a one dimensional measure, whereas academic status is.
people who don't understand politics and economy (defined as study of human behavior), it will be a crazy show
side benefit of a war killed over 100k and displaced 4m people is the population is generally younger and more open to changes.
Israel in contrast is in forever war but much less deaths, hence is stuck with this 77yr old leader forever. USA sort of same boat.
Not saying we should do genocide in USA or Israel to push for change, but in generally I see human live longer is no good, especially the tech to make human live longer usually benefit people in power first (people in Russia and China see this first, but the western now see this haunting them too)
good days are coming for my country, I am beyond happy <3
I’ve lived for so long now that I’m cynical to many forms of government. What I currently think works best is a group of well educated brainy people, but that are led by some sort of strongman that makes all the final decisions. Seems to have worked for China and over the last decade in India. The US currently seems to have a strongman president but it’s missing the other crucial element of educated experts in his administration.
Good, next, replace politicians and shitmixers with AI bots.
Many say this cannot work.
... checking notes ...
Ah yes. China used to have 100% technocrats in their leadership 30 years ago. No one with a law degree in sight. Nowadays it is less, but they still have quite a few.
It can work.
China also runs re-education camps and is directly involved in a genocide, so... yes, looking at it through just the right lens, it can work.
Not defending them, but in the US our taxes directly fund genocide. We don't get competent domestic policies in return.
For the folks out there that remember the USSR, am I the only one getting strong Правда vibes from that headline?
> Meet the world's brainiest people - The Independent
> The Brainiest Club in the World - Yale University Press
No.
The Simpsons tackled this once.
Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was the world's brainiest hedge fund.
It’s interesting that Boris Tadić, the former president of Serbia (part of the previous regime, who lost to Vučić 14 years ago) echoes the same type of pronouncements about politicians and the commenters here on HN, and I do not mean this in a particularly laudatory sense. Just recently he was sending messages about how political experience, political vision and the like are key. How to be a political leader one needs this or that, or how Serbia requires this or that type of engagement with future technologies to remain relevant, comparing the student movement to blockchain (yes, really). This (incredibly vain and pompous) man doubtlessly has the most political experience in Serbia right now, and sits in several boards of Chinese and other multinationals, with other consulting roles, pretty much proving the bankability of his political talents. And yet that’s the person behind a series of political decisions and circumstances which inaugurated the previous regime.
Also, looking around the globe at professional politicians once also lauded for their political talent, like Macron, or Merkel, I’m really not seeing their policies paying off in spades, nor their "political vision" proving particularly beneficial to their citizenry at the moment. In all three cases, it seems, seasoned politicians made capital errors in judgement which are now causing resentment, almost unprecedented political realignments and upheaval across these nations. People are incredibly quick to judge the potential behaviour of a future political formation - yet Western democracies are by and large falling apart, as a result of career politicians’ actions, inactions, stupidity and avarice? As people speak more and more loudly on certain issues, like Palestine, these same politicians are comfortable ignoring them. Where is the scepticism for them, or the viability of this guild-like way of structuring the political sphere as the way forward? We are living the consequences of having career politicians lead, do we like it so much we cannot conceive of anything better?
Anyway, if you look into the local press in Serbia and especially enclaves like Twitter, there’s a wonderful symmetry: the EU champions are terrified the student movement has already shown "concerning" right leanings, they’re busy counting how many EU flags the students have draped themselves in while marching, and aren’t happy. The right is deeply worried about how the "globalist, NGO, pro-EU camarilla" is already deeply embedded in the student movement (they went to Brussels, after all!) and is perhaps even planting their candidates into the mix to sell out the country’s interests to the globalists. I am being slightly ironic here, but I have nothing but contempt for this thinking on both sides. Winning the election required the participation and support from both these camps’ voting blocks, which tells you how bad the situation truly was, since sworn enemies were forced to cooperate with a political unknown just for the chance to win against the existing political regime.
In a sense, only a political unknown could have won, as all pre-existing political factions, (mostly comprised of these praised seasoned politicians, many of them three decades into their careers) would not or could not muster the strength or wherewithal to work with one another. No nationalist would ever cooperate with a globalist pro-EU green party, even if it cost them their country, democracy, and those same national interests they hold sacrosanct. Likewise, no progressive citizen party saving democratic principles would ever work with what they view as backward retrograde nationalist movements threatening to plunge the country back into the type of rhetoric and milieu as existed during the wars of the nineties. Also, at some point the decades-long careers of many politicians was perfect cannon fodder for the regime’s propaganda machine, gleefully cataloguing their past sins and outright inventing them if the need arose. After a while, political experience morphs into evidence of one’s political parasitism.
It took a decentralised student movement which could not be targeted and besmirched, to engage the non-voting public and voters on both sides of the political spectrum. Part of the reason why all parties which took part in this election were swept away (except for the students and the outgoing regime) was because of failing to recognise the political moment. This election, in my view, was a single-issue election - the workings of democracy and stopping corruption and the further decay of institutions. This is what the political movement will be judged on, and what will determine its political future. The citizenry, at this juncture, is willing to table discussions on foreign policy for the sake of internal affairs and weeding out corruption. Most foreign powers and press corps, sadly, are interested primarily in the foreign policy implications of this new movement, and seem like they couldn’t care less if Serbian citizenry lives in caves, favelas, or in a thriving democracy.
Many things are still unclear, such as the exact relationship between the Parliament and Government, once formed, and the direct democracy practiced by the student movement. It is unclear how effective it will prove, or how they will select their allies and collaborators, as it’s perfectly obvious that the movement cannot simply replace the totality of public administration. Regardless, the new regime will enjoy a broad latitude and a measure of good will among the citizenry not seen in a generation. It needs to use that to good effect. If it fails to deliver, they will be ridiculed and attacked by members of both internal factions, and will more than likely splinter, and usher in a return of Vučić, who - lest we forget - is now the only opposition party in Parliament, with a sizeable number of representatives, and plenty of corrosive residuals and slush funds and media operations still at his disposal. Lest we also forget, with 700k party members, it is a powerful organisation even without the corruptive backend of the state apparatus.
Wherein I predict phds do not make good politicians.
Oh in fact, there's a term for it
Out-of-Domain Appeal to Authority
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
Have you noticed how vicious the politics is in academia?
The regular state (at least in the US) is that the majority are actively hostile to the technocracy, and would fail a 3rd grade science test. The best of them might actually be able to pass bachelor-level science tests and sometimes pay lip service to scientific advisors. They're never more than about 25% of congress.
So, it'd be a big step up if we had leaders that understood basic elementary school stuff stuff like bleach injections are not medicine (vs Trump), or that draining the California delta would be an ecological disaster (vs Newsom - https://stopthetunnels.org/).
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Any system no matter how well intentioned will outlast its usefulness and eventually dies. I think the key is to see it in the moment and immediate future — Serbia's Gen Z's GDP/GINI/what-have-you is a good yardstick to measure that. So its kind of weird to say we believe because every time something like this is tried it really is different and whatever you/I believe in _never_ lasts even our lifespans.
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child. Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/the-i-d-man
the most prominent long-term technocratic/meritocratic cases (especially Singapore) rank among the least corrupt countries
Singapore is the opposite of the ivory tower rule. Most high-ranking officials hold either a master's or a professional degree. You wouldn’t find many PhDs with no prior executive experience.
Maybe low corruption is a prerequisite for successful technocratic government.
Edit: which makes sense, because technocracy leans heavily on trust (in the experts).
I mean Singapore is also a dictatorship which muddies a useful comparison, but I didn't realise it was so strong on corruption.
International observers have never found flaw with Singapore's elections, have they?
> but I didn't realise it was so strong on corruption.
That's literally a core part of the brand, isn't it?
Politicians are very well compensated there. And part of their pay is linked to how well they perform. Prime minister gets 3 million per year for example.
3 million of what?
I'd imagine not having to deal with PR to your voters would make going by merit easier, not harder
What makes you think Singaporean politicians don't have to deal with voters?
Mugabe had seven academic degrees.
The current president of Romania, Nicușor Dan, is apparently an exceptional mathematician[0] and quite useless as a politician.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta_jumping#History
thing with Mugabe n his government - those guys were mostly just lawyers and other PHDs in things social studies etc
they grew up on communist rhetoric, got support from communist countries - so their main ideology had already failed in the real world. so accumulating degrees without practical experience is a recipe for failure as seen in most african countries.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
How were the Nazis technocrats? The core of the Nazi party were weirdo political extremists and violently nationalistic army veterans. The only example I can think of which matches your idea of an 'extraordinarily capable technocratic leader' is Speer, and like his military counterpart Rommel, his reputation has been somewhat laundered and propagandised both during and after the war.
Speer was an academic failure. Also as architect, except the Nuremberg lightshow.
But he was extremely successful as manager then. Just like the ex-NAZI NASA leader then a bit later.
That was the golden time of German management.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
They were very competent at genocide and propaganda.
The latter, maybe? The former, I'm not so sure. However we don't have many examples of competent organisations trying to enact genocide to compare against. (Fortunately.)
Fascism favors loyalty over competence.
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I mean its just a practicality.
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich. Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded. France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape, so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Yes for Estonia, they were 3rd largest recipient per capita of EU aid in 2023:
https://www.euronews.com/2024/12/09/eu-budget-who-pays-the-m...
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
> Which country got rich with the EU?
Poland and the other new members in the East, probably?
Greece for sure. It is easy to forget how poor they were just 30 years ago.
Great Britain are feeling the pain of leaving so they are living the alternate reality.
Although I suspect they would have got richer anyway just being able to trade with the EU and not being controlled by Russia,
Being able to freely and easily trade with the EU, and not wanting to be controlled by Russia, are probably the most important two reasons to join the EU!
"the most important two reasons to join the EU"
You misspelled NATO
Well, being in the EU makes it a lot easier to trade with the EU.
However I broadly agree otherwise.
Switzerland is a member in EU treaties, pays into the EU budget, temporarily pegs its currency to the Euro when it has to, is surrounded by the EU.
Switzerland is the opposite of a state being "without the EU".
It does not pay into EU budget - it contributes to and participates in specific programs and projects. The treaties are rather sectoral agreements which are always under the threat of swiss direct democracy. Bilaterals III has not yet been approved neither by the referendum nor the parliament - while it will likely pass the opposition is every significant.
Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania.
>Which country got rich with the EU?
Poland? >250 billion Euros received in subsidies since joining the EU; almost any construction you walk by has the "Funded by EU" poster next to it.
I think the massive service and outsourcing industry would also not have been possible (at the current scale) without EU membership.
Poland? Baltics?
To me, an unspoken truth about politics is that it is extremely boring. Not governing, that is interesting. Doing politics. It's not clear from the article how involved the Students plan to remain once the government is formed, but I suspect a return to conventional politics lies ahead, for better or for worse.
Now, here's a challenge for you: name an elected government that's the polar opposite. The greatest by assemblage of premium-grade idiots to have ever managed by any civilisation. I know - it's a very hard question.
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Oh yes, this happened on an episode of the simpsons.
Man hacker news hates academically successful people
> a sociologist, several political scientists
How embarrassing.
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Pretty cringe, and if what I've seen at the top of university faculties is any indication, it's gonna be a shitshow. There's something to be said for at the very least the common working class man having a direct say in things, if not the deciding say in the things.
There's no modern historical indication that more degrees results in better governance.
Is that really difficult to analyse elections in a non-biased way? This article is really missing the point.
Meh getting them elected is one thing can they overcome the institutions and the bureaucracy stuffed with corrupt friends and former politicians that’s completely different.
They need to translate the election victory into tangible improvements and results. Otherwise voters in Serbia would not see any difference to the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed out that Peter is just a younger face but the same Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein network is not only much bigger than known, but has different actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically - and logistically - no sense at all.
I mean this specific example seems like a far cry from how horrible the Orban regime was. It’s basically ultra-conservative posturing. And Magyar being super conservative was known ahead of the vote. Granted I am no expert in Hungarian politics, but from this single example it seems a bit intense to call him Orban 2.0.
And I also don’t think you can compare Magyar pre- and post election to the new Serbian elected government at all. But I do agree actually producing enough noticeable change until the next election will be hard for both. It just takes time to unfuck countries.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
> with proper democratic civil liberties".
Proper up to the point. No way he is giving up built in advantages right wing has in Hungary - like rural voters votes having way more power then city voters.
Sure but that’s a far cry from the “Magyar is just another Orbán style despot” vibe that this thread started with. It just means Hungary is Little America.
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Flagged this ai slop
> Many of the new representatives have zero experience in politics. But their unparalleled professional expertise should be helpful in reforming Serbia,
So non career politicians.
This is essentially a technocratic government that is left leaning. Just because they are academics, researchers, doctors, engineers and sociologists does not mean they cannot go corrupt themselves (it will). The EU itself is heavily corrupt as well.
We have also seen how corrupt a technocratic right government can get in the US. It will be no different to a left leaning one once money and promises are involved.
To give an analogy of what this is, this is like electing effective altruists from Anthropic with the difference being that they are using your money (taxes) instead of theirs and giving lots of promises for your vote.
If they are serious, they need to pass the world toughest anti-corruption laws while also significantly growing their own economy or borrowing economic policies from the least corrupt nations in the world such as Singapore and to exceed them.
> Student List has promised to fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law.
While these are good promises, the problem is that this is the first lie that they have already made.
They better do all four of them without angering the electorate otherwise they can’t be trusted.
“All our problems will be fixed when this other group get voted in”
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
In Serbia it was rather "when this conniving bunch of corrupt criminals gets oustes".
What is even your point?
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
The idea that people apply for positions and, if they are qualified, they are accepted. At least in theory.
You cannot setup a team of dozens of people to run an important sector of the whole country by having them apply for positions. Not even companies hire that way, most companies hire based on recommendations and contacts. You don't have time for this, they need to form a government in a month or so. Six months in people already get antsy if enough is getting done, you'd be going through the third round of interviews.
Not every country has a spoil system, there's probably no need to change anyone in the institutions (except those very close to Vučić in dangerous positions)
> Not every country has a spoil system
Which is a double edged sword since then it's hard to get rid of the incompetent and corrupt people when they are deeply entrenched.
How? That doesn't mean that you can't fire people
People appointed for their closeness to a party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible
Well it depends. Usually it's far from trivial to fire civil servants in most countries.
> party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible
As I said, a doubled edged sword. A newly elected reformist government won't be very effective if they can't put new people in power.
The previous ruling party's pool was more like a sewer, so it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse than it already is.
This is true, but doesn't contradict my statement. As I said, I am looking forward to this and am in fact not that pessimistic. But in the end you need actual people, and these need to be found.
Compare also how the various pirate parties have done around the world.
I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.
The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.
Only one Serbian university barely qualifies to international rankings. Education from these institutions is not what you think it is. I'm not arguing against Serbia in particular, this applies to most Eastern and Central European countries.
Nobody takes seriously those gaming metrics. University rankings are based on how many researchers, you can get to pretend they are teaching at your University...based on the extortionate funds you get from students more interested in partying at their AlphaPis.
All this while said Researchers offload the real work the students are paying for... to TAs.
Notorious cronyism, nepotism, and outright corruption is the real deal. Not these losers from global top 200. The first step is admitting that you are not that smart neither educated as you want others to see you.
Serbia is among the most corrupt countries. I doubt that will change anything.
But that's precisely the point of the article: that after "countrywide student protests" this group has managed to unseat "13 years of populist authoritarian rule by Aleksandar Vučić".
I'm not saying they will succeed, but they have been explicitly voted to fight the corruption you speak of.
It was a yellow revolution out of the CIA handbook, as usual students were used. Calling it the 'brainiest' is just a straight propaganda.
Healthy democracies do not rely on student-led protests to overthrow the government. Someone was behind it and they got what they paid for.
https://www.amazon.com/Jakarta-Method-Washingtons-Anticommun...
That definitely happened with Serbian students in year 2000 - proven (as much as it can be) link between CIA & Co, and the funding and training of the Otpor movement, B92 TV station ...etc.
So far there's been no indication that this time it's been anything but an actual grassroot movement.
Also - having Vučić around was probably better for basically everyone except people living in Serbia.
No one outside had enough interest to see him gone - hence no abroad supported the students. And he's been fucking up lives of people in Serbia long and bad enough to cause an uprising.
While I'm no longer a student, nor living in Serbia anymore. Still having there both older and younger family/cousins that are students and were part the protests - I had a bit of a glance of internal functioning.
It was literally kids/students from a city where rallies/protests were happening - self organizing food and accommodation for other students coming in from other cities.
Other people and business also pitched in with bringing out food/water/etc to the streets for students/protestors.
What a stupid baseless comment with 0 context.
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
A bit like the engineers themselves.
The politburo in the Soviet Union was stacked with engineers and it didn't work out that well.
Idk which period you're referring to, but for a long time, the Politburo was nothing but Stalin's mouth piece, as was the Central Committee and the rest of the Party, ad they ruled through very hard repression. That puts a long-lasting kind of mark on a society that you can't engineer yourself out of. So I'd argue it's not much of an argument.
Good start, but alas they cannot become a developed European nation until they sort out their historically ingrained russophilia.
We need a country to elect an AI government and see how it goes, on the ballot this year are Claude Fable, Grok, Carbon and Astra
Well the recent experiments shows they can't make effective government for minecraft, let alone entire country
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
Did anyone listen before anyway? I feel like it's mostly about rhetorics and headlines
The article https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/09/23/ai-written-spee... has some data on this (it uses Pangram for the classification).
I am far from an ai booster but at this point I think even chatgpt 3.5 would do a better job than the current establishment
US CIA and US State Department Behind Serbia's "Student List" Media N1 and Nova S (United Group) [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300051
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5lwZU7Q5U0
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones. Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
This is false, these channels all over social media, and activist feeds,
"leaderless" is propaganda framing, you have been brainwashed
and there is follow up video
https://youtu.be/P2JKKvKX99c
Seems a very reliable and impartial YouTube channel...
This channel is literally full of pro-Russian propaganda by a random guy in Bangkok. Show us a substantial source, if there is one.
Or are you simply reproducing a regime’s narrative on here?
All substantial sources are literally right there with links in video description, and he literally points at them in video.
It is doubtful he is pro-Russian, but he is surely anti-US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNL4xoD5uMYOn the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
Exactly. My fellow countrymen fucked my country (Brexit). Foreign meddling didn't help, but it also didn't hinder to the point of changing the outcome.
It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
Well, it sure added some serious percentage to the leave
According to the government's own report, it did not. The meddling was insubstantial
Do you wonder why there even was a referendum?
Compare 1997: Sir Jammy Fishpaste hates Europe, spends millions of his own money promoting his Referendum Party, gets nowhere. Because it's "cool Britannia" and the common man is doing well for himself. People think he's a nutter and all he achieves is keeping 4-11 Tories out of power by sapping their votes
But the 2008 crash wrecks the country. UKIP builds a voter base over years, and gets an enormous share of the vote. That's a warning shot for the Tories, whose voters UKIP are sapping. They only just squeaked through a hung parliament with a Libdem coalition. Hence Gambling Dave offers a referendum to bring Europe haters back to his party so he can remain in power.
Those percentage points were already in place before Russia even got going.
The Russia report? It says that they didn't seek to assess Russia's impact?
Farage was basically a Putin asset, for years; I don't doubt that a lot of the sentiment was there before any influence, but to my recollection the influence was obvious and very heavy
Yep, working class people's lives have sucked after 2008, though it was a continuation of a longer trend and is still continuing. (And COVID made it worse. All us tech people sitting comfortable in our home office while mass wealth transfer happened out of blue collar pockets...)
Worth remembering... Anti-globalization and anti-liberalization were slogans and policies of the socialist left in the late 90s and 2000s. Battle of Seattle, Occupy, etc. Voices marginalized and mocked by the neo-liberal centrist "left" (not left) in the Democratic party, Labour party, mainstream European govt's, Canadian Liberal party, etc. Manufacturing jobs were dumped overseas, union membership declined, middle class incomes plummeted, 2008 drained people's financial well being, while housing prices skyrocketed etc. And same "moderate" forces also went to war in the middle east, etc. etc.
Obama ran on left populist slogans but actually governed from the neo-liberal centrist right.
Actual socialist left voices and formerly moderate social democratic policies generally had no voice or power in government anywhere, Corbyn was run out of the room, Bernie isolated, etc.
So it's no surprise that the right and far right saw the vacancy and exploited it. The rise of Trump, of UK Reform, etc. ties directly into this sense of hopelessness and anger people had.
Now the "conservative" right -- which was formerly pushing liberalization the strongest -- talks in angry tones about "globalism" instead of "globalization", and it's caught up with anti-Semitic dog whistles, national chauvinism, etc. etc. That shit sells.
Sure jan, the country with an all time low in trust for institutions and academia ruled by an strongman-loving, education-bashing fascist is secretly funding meritocracies around the world…
Conspiracy drivel.
The US is famous for never intervening into other countries' politics. Other famous examples of no intervention in the area is their total non-involvement in Ukraine with Euromaidan protests for example!
Conspiracy would be saying that the US orchestrated the existence of the Student's list and created protests from thin air. Realism is that the US is very happy about any political destabilization that could favor their interest and will provide unofficial support wherever it's convenient for them.
The shiny-brained parliament started with a decision to revoke the license from Alta bank. This one was the most popular bank of Russian relocants, because only this one allowed to transfer money from the Russian banks. As a result - a lot of people now have their accounts blocked, and the promise was left, to start the insurance payouts, so I believe it was said "your money are completely safe". Closing of the bank was a low-hanging fruit decision, which everybody liked, because Alta bank was under dictator Vucic's protection, presumably the corruption schemes took place, and so on. In fact, thousands of Russian relocants have been left with blocked accounts and with no money. On Monday, hundreds of those people will siege the 1 or 2 Serbian bank branches in attempt to open the account there. Other banks there are European - Raif, OTP, etc, so they're not allowed for Russians.
Interesting, that the brainiest parliament in the world started with a very populist decision, so it's the degradation from the very beginning. These brilliant minds better would've been stayed in science, rather than getting into politics.
This has nothing to do with the elections, do you think that the newly elected majority takes control immediately? Election results have yet to finalise (53 polling stations will vote again tomorrow due to irregularities), the new parliamentarians are yet to be sworn in.
I didn't know that, how nice of them to start from right thing