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comparisons with south-east Asia show that the significance of bureaucracies ultimately depends on the more fundamental governmental decision to force entrepreneurs to manufacture for export and then to cull firms which fail to perform adequately. Bureaucracies are only as good as the policies they implement. Above all, developing states must force their most powerful and resourceful entrepreneurs to export, typically against their will. Firms that can make money at home in a protected environment are always reluctant to compete globally. Other policies tend to be induced by this basic framework. That said, the framework was not rationalised in east Asia by policy makers, but rather copied by nineteenth-century Japan from historical example.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
INTERROGATOR: Two protons? They only sent two protons? That’s almost nothing. YE: (laughs) You also said “almost.” That’s the limit of Trisolaran power. They can only accelerate something as small as a proton to near the speed of light. So over a distance of four light-years, they can only send two protons. INTERROGATOR: At the macroscopic level, two protons are nothing. Even a single cilium on a bacterium would include several billion protons. What’s the point? YE: They’re a lock. INTERROGATOR: A lock? What are they locking? YE: They are sealing off the progress of human science. Because of the existence of these two protons, humanity will not be able to make any important scientific developments during the four and a half centuries until the arrival of the Trisolaran Fleet. Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died. INTERROGATOR: That’s … too fantastic. How can that be? YE: I don’t know. I really don’t know. In the eyes of Trisolaran civilization, we’re probably not even primitive savages. We might be mere bugs.
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
b. The imagined order shapes our desires. Most people do not wish to accept that the order governing their lives is imaginary, but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagined order, and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths. Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order’s most important defences.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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