"Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes"
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A neat little taxonomy that sounds like political science but behaves like an economist's warning label. By pairing "young" with democracy and "older" with authoritarianism, Samuelson borrows the language of life stages to smuggle in a harsher point: neither category is stable, and stability is what investors, reformers, and great powers tend to project onto Asia when it suits them.
The pivot is the repeated adjective: "fragile". It flattens the moral hierarchy people often assume - democracy as inherently resilient, autocracy as solid if ugly. Samuelson refuses both comforting stories. "Young, fragile democracies" evokes transitions that can be reversed by coups, patronage networks, ethnic conflict, or simply weak institutions. "Older, fragile authoritarian regimes" punctures the myth of the strongman state: longevity isn't legitimacy, it can be inertia, and the longer a regime suppresses feedback, the more brittle it becomes when shocks arrive.
Context matters: Samuelson lived through decolonization, the Cold War's client-state politics, and the Asian "miracle" years when growth was routinely credited to "Asian values" and disciplined autocracy. His line reads as a pushback against that easy determinism. It's also an implicit critique of Western policy fantasies - that you can forecast Asia with a regime-type label, or treat democratization as a one-way escalator.
The intent isn't to sneer at Asia; it's to caution against overconfident models. In Samuelson's framing, the region's political risk isn't an exception to development economics. It's a central variable, and the real constant is vulnerability.
The pivot is the repeated adjective: "fragile". It flattens the moral hierarchy people often assume - democracy as inherently resilient, autocracy as solid if ugly. Samuelson refuses both comforting stories. "Young, fragile democracies" evokes transitions that can be reversed by coups, patronage networks, ethnic conflict, or simply weak institutions. "Older, fragile authoritarian regimes" punctures the myth of the strongman state: longevity isn't legitimacy, it can be inertia, and the longer a regime suppresses feedback, the more brittle it becomes when shocks arrive.
Context matters: Samuelson lived through decolonization, the Cold War's client-state politics, and the Asian "miracle" years when growth was routinely credited to "Asian values" and disciplined autocracy. His line reads as a pushback against that easy determinism. It's also an implicit critique of Western policy fantasies - that you can forecast Asia with a regime-type label, or treat democratization as a one-way escalator.
The intent isn't to sneer at Asia; it's to caution against overconfident models. In Samuelson's framing, the region's political risk isn't an exception to development economics. It's a central variable, and the real constant is vulnerability.
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| Topic | Freedom |
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