Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

It is pretty amusing that while China is considered a patient, long term-thinking power as opposed to Western short-term thinkers, addled elites such as Thomas Friedman dream of "being China for a day" as a short-term solution to solving our environmental problems (conveniently ignoring the actual record of China on the environment). What is especially funny is that being a Western democracy for decades is actually much better for you:

[According] a new study by my colleagues at the Legatum Institute, when it comes to delivering the best economic environment for people and families various forms of liberal capitalism still perform best.

The Legatum Prosperity Index found that all the more prosperous places – not only by income, but by quality of life, environment, education and health care – almost exclusively are democratic states. “Prosperity,” the report concludes, “is found in entrepreneurial democracies that have strong social fabrics.”

And for rulers supposedly bred to think long term (which I think is bunk), is the one-child policy working out for China?

So far, the challenge posed by aging has been relatively mild, although in Shanghai it is already sufficiently strong to have caused the municipal authorities to relax urban family planning rules and to encourage families to have a second child. In terms of the social and economic challenges it faces as a result of an aging population, Shanghai is a microcosm of many other large Chinese cities, where its solution to the problem will likely be copied in the coming years.

More generally, the accelerating aging of China’s population will dominate demographics throughout urban and rural China in the next two or three decades. As this process makes itself felt, the burden of maintaining GDP growth and providing for the economic and social needs of increasing numbers of elderly, will grow more onerous. This burden will be all the greater, given that the workforce itself will be contracting, average per capita GDP will remain quite low and the elderly will live longer. ...

[Authoritative] projections indicate that by as early as 2016 China’s working-age population will peak and thereafter experience sustained contraction. As this happens, the average age of members of the labor force will rise, generating a potentially serious tension between the reality of having to rely on an older (and less well-educated) work force and the aspiration of creating a better-educated (and younger) workforce to help fulfil China’s goal of moving up the value-added ladder and becoming a high-tech economy.

Come on you purported deep thinkers with autocrat crushes, think long term--go free market democracy.