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I mean, the original South Korean dictatorship was also pretty bad at managing the economy. Right wing authoritarianism is high variance at economic growth- sometimes you get Lee Kwan Yew or Paul Kagame, sometimes you get Syngman Rhee or Ngo Dinh Diem, sometimes you get a Franco who goes back and forth, occasionally you get a mediocrity like Salazar or Pinochet(whose miracle of Chile was really returning it to a pre-socialism growth trajectory).
As far as I know, the story with Spain’s economy under Franco was that as the fascist ideologues started getting replaced with conservative Catholic technocrats the economy started improving until it turned into the Spanish economic miracle. This was a predictable long term process at the end of WWII, maybe not in specifics but at least generally- everyone in 1945 knew that fascism wasn’t expanding and everyone who watched Spain knew the conservative Catholics were going to replace them eventually, even if they might not have been betting on Opus Dei(which is still happy to provide technocrats and economists to developing countries), and while the catch up economic growth might have been a curve ball it didn’t surprise anyone that they were better at managing an economy and less obsessed with autarky than fascist ideologues.
Left wing authoritarianism seems predictably very bad at managing and economy, with the rare exceptions like Deng being exceptions because they backed away from the left wing nature of their rule. Democracies seem to do OK generally unexceptionally at delivering rising standards of living, although I’ll acknowledge that there’s a few countries which have experienced extraordinary economic growth while being democracies- Poland and Japan among them. I will, however, maintain that democracies cannot go from mud huts to skyscrapers- Poland and Japan were already decent middle income countries.
Except one clearly did. Or at least log cabins to skyscrapers.
Sure, but it was at the vanguard of that transition, very close (with the exception of some stagnation during the civil war) to England and Germany. Within 25 years of the civil war ending the US was arguably the richest country in the world, maybe except for Australia which had its first resource boom in the late 19th century. The odds were much tougher for countries that didn’t industrialize in the first wave.
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