How to keep democracies from falling behind technologically?

Question

In 4X strategy games I’ve played (like Stellaris), closed forms of government (closed oligarchy, dictatorship) seem to be overpowered when it comes to scientific output compared to the “democratic” government option. In Stellaris, the democratic space-empires inevitably fall behind the autocratic empires which have access to research edicts where the ruler(s) can decree that the country will focus its resources on technology instead of whatever the current president’s platform was when they were elected.

Of course, the game could be unbalanced, as is the struggle of making strategy games. However, the theory makes some amount of sense when you think about it. Normal people don’t really care about scientific achievement by elites off in the capital, they care about earning enough to make a living. (Think the movie Interstellar.) When we think up Nazi alternate histories, we often think of technological utopias where humans are landing on Mars by the 1970s (i.e. Man in the High Castle). In our own universe, you can argue the past 5 or 6 U.S. presidencies have all but neglected national research in favor of more immediate matters. After all, the U.S. only landed on the moon to play catch-up with the Soviets. Meanwhile autocratic China seems poised to be the world leader in AI.

In a space setting^†, what could be a way that a democratic state could consistently keep ahead of its authoritarian peers?

Assume that:

• The democracies and the autocracies have the same amount of resources. On Earth, democracies (+ the USSR) defeated Nazi Germany in WWII because they were larger. Their size also gave them access to more minds so they got the bomb faster.

• Trade is limited. On Earth everyone is on about the same level because of global trade. We can assume contact between species in space will be less comprehensive.

• Autocracies don’t persecute scientists for race or religion or whatever else aliens discriminate based on.

• “Big technology” (i.e. spaceships) is valued more than “consumer technology” (i.e. iphones)

• The autocracy is a full autocracy or a stable oligarchy, not an anocracy.

If the premise is flawed, and democracies are not intrinsically disadvantaged to autocracies, with all other factors held constant, explain why.

Possibly related mirror question: How to keep an authoritarian state from scientific stagnation?

† I only say space to imply a sparsely connected setting where the “world” isn’t tightly and thoroughly linked through trade and cultural exchange.

Answer 1

Yes, the notion that democracies are inferior is completely wrong

Autocracies might be better at a short-term scientific blitz (i.e. you know exactly what you need, and you can concentrate all resources on this task). But that's about it. In the long-ish run (decade+) a democracy will prevail.

There are a bunch of reasons:

• In a democracy, every man chooses his work. This is far, far more efficient than the state choosing for you (because you know better than the state what's best for you). Put it on a larger scale, and democracies will always develop and scientific and industrial advantage (an Autocracy will do one blitz while a democracy develops 300 projects at the same time).
• People work better (motivation-wise) at a democracy (because they choose where and what they do).
• People run (literally) from autocracies. And not just random people, but typically the better ones (the most talented, hardworking and bold). Oh, and they run to democracies.
• [Established] democracies are stable. They almost never have a significant political turmoil.

All in all, democracies work better because the people's self-interest is aligned with the states one. Your win is typically the state's win, while in an autocracy it's quite common to work against the state. This makes everything work much better.

In our world, in the end, democracies were always more technologically, industrially and economically advanced. The best example is, of course, the Cold War, but you can also look at South Korea vs North Korea, or East Germany vs West Germany etc.

The difference is that [unlike in a computer game] a state is, essentially, a bunch of people. Given the same resources and starting position, any country will only be as successful as it's people.

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As a side note, I feel that your case for autocracies is somewhat biased - you seem to look at examples like Nazi Germany or 40's-50's USSR. Those are young autocracies and are extremely unrepresentative of autocracies as a whole. Take a look at established, older, autocracies like 80's USSR or better yet, absolute monarchies in Europe (France before the revolution).

Thing is, with time, autocracies tend to get worse - the population is less enthusiastic about the ideology, the leaders grow distant and corrupt, the critical political & economical thinking disappears (no opposition). On the other hand, democracies get better - people gain belief in the system, stability creates democratic values (which target corruption), the opposition derives change and progress...

Answer 2

It isn't democracy or autocracy, it is free markets that matters

Autocracy vs. Democracy: the Space Race

Government type is fundamentally unimportant to whether or not a nation advances in 'science.' An excellent example is the space race. Both the USSR and USA came to the same conclusion, they wanted to win. In the USSR, the Politburo and/or Khruschev was able to make this decision independently. In the US, Kennedy and his advisers had to sell the nation. The results were the same either way. Both nations spend a lot of money on something that was not strictly in their national interest.

But either nation could have balked. The people of the US could have been uninterested and voted Goldwater into office in 1964; that would have killed US participation almost certainly. From the USSR's side, some other group could have signaled their opposition. For example, even if the Politburo wanted to go to the moon if Khrushchev said no, that would have killed it. On the other hand, had Khrushchev been too eager about the moon, the Politburo could have deposed him, as they eventually did.

The moral of the story is that both government forms, both with the consent of the people and without, had the capacity to direct significant resources to a project deemed important enough at the time. Therefore, over the short term, it doesn't make much of a difference what the form of government is.

Invested capital makes technology go forward

Capital must be invested to advance technology. The Apollo Program and Manhattan project were bought at the cost of a significant fraction of the national budget. But those are only two big projects, and expensive and important as they were, represent just a fraction of technological development.

Instead, most technology comes out of private capital. In the 1700s, nearly every invention worth mentioning from the Industrial Revolution came from Great Britain; the one place that had the most available private capital. But the time the developments of the Second Industrial Revolution had taken place, more nations were ready to be involved. Especially in the US and Germany, there was enough private capital that these nations claimed a big share of the developments made.

In the US, the picture of development can be seen clearly. Private fortunes in the hand of (probably evil) New York bankers were the investment seed to built Pittsburgh steel foundries, Akron tire makes, Toledo's glass makers, and Detroit's automobiles. New ways of making things abounded, because industrialists with money were on the lookout for new ideas. If you had a new way to make or cut glass, and you took it to some robber baron in Toledo, the chances were both you and him were going to make it rich. What motivation!

Compare that with the alternative. If you have a great idea for making glass more cheaply, but you don't know and can't find anyone with money to fund a plant for making it, you haven't really invented anything at all.

Conclusion

The free market allows private capital to flow to those people with good ideas, allowing their ideas to develop into advanced technology. This can happen whether the country is a laissez-faire democracy (like the US in the 1890s) or a centralized autocracy (like modern day China).

Now, whether the free market is good for all people is a different story. I'm not interested in getting into an argument about the validity of capitalism. I'm just stating, as an indisputable historical fact, that the free-er that private capital is from taxation and government regulation, the faster the pace of technological change it supports.

Answer 3

Democracies don't have to be indecisive or stagnant. They aren't necessarily top-heavy or paralyzed by conflicting special interest groups. That is a fairly recent trend on the real world stage, which will hopefully solve itself once the citizenry get tired of the endless bickering.

Democracies can be vibrant and unified, with each citizen choosing for themselves the manner in which they can best contribute to the shared societal goal. They can be goal oriented, as long as every citizen understands that the shortest path to attaining their own prosperity, is to invest themselves in what is best for their country.

In an autocracy, decision making power is sequestered to a comparatively small number of minds who rule from a distance, dictating the actions of millions on broad homogeneous paths. Any flaw in the census, in the government's attempt to categorize its citizens by strengths and talents, will lead to citizens being utilized in less than optimal ways. Without a choice, even those who are well suited to the tasks they have been assigned may resent being forced to pursue them.

The secret weapon in a democracy's arsenal is that each citizen will tend to choose for themselves an occupation which best suits their abilities, in the quest to earn highest rewards for themselves and their loved ones. The democratic rulers therefore only need to manipulate the economy such that the skills they most need, yield the highest pay. They do not have to find the single best suited mind to crack the secret of FTL. They just have to offer a big enough prize so that the competitive marketplace finds that singular genius for them.

Answer 4

If the premise is flawed, and democracies are not intrinsically disadvantaged to autocracies, with all other factors held constant, explain why

The premise is flawed in that the situation you describe has nothing, per se, to do with autocracy or democracy, but rather with the difference between the "desires" of the State and those of the population at large. In democracies, on average, this difference is low because the "ruling" layers are elected by the "ruled" layers (but note that there are lots of points - corporations, bureaucracies, monopolies... where this is not true).

The slippage between hierarchy layers determines friction, with people below working at odds with people above, and this leads to resentment, corruption, graft, nepotism, need to control, and ultimately a waste of resource; the machinery's cogs do not fit well and the whole ensemble grinds to a halt. The machine can focus more power on some sections at the expense of others, but on the long run, it will just wreck itself faster. Such a machine is good in remaining still (provided that external circumstances do not change).

You can reduce the friction in two ways: either aligning the State with the population (democracy - or an "illuminated" dictatorship; panem et circenses refers to the 'trick' of satisfying the most basic desires of the population at large). Or by aligning the population to the State, through indoctrination (and/or religion). This has never worked too well on human beings, but there's no reason it couldn't work with other species. With some modifications to the human mind, achieved through breeding and nurturing, Aldous Huxley tried to make it work in Brave New World.

But there is a more fundamental premise flaw right in the question title, that I also see reflected in some comments (that basically boil down to "but what if a democracy doesn't do the right thing in the so-and-so situation?):

How to keep democracies from falling behind technologically?

As soon as you want to "keep" democracies from, "make" democracies do, "steer" democracies towards etc., you no longer have a democracy.

By definition, a democracy will go wherever the average of people, the demos, wants it to go, not where a minority might want to go. Not even where it might really be best to go.

It is perfectly possible for a democracy to make short-sighted, long-term harmful choices. This is why it was said "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing...".

So, given a non-post-scarcity economy, the long-term good needs for enough people to realize that in a given situation technological progress or weapons research might be more desirable than health care or retirement bonuses or whatever.

Then, just as in dieting, they need to stick to the plan, gritting their teeth and enduring poor health care etc. in the short term, in exchange for a long-term advantage of technological progress, of not being enslaved by their neighbours, of not wrecking the environment and need to leave the planet, and so on; in essence, the democracy autocratizes itself in certain fields, in what is known as an Ulysses' pact.

The need for the above was recognized for example in the Roman Republic, where the dictator (he who dictates) was an established magisterium and was voted into office.

Answer 5

First of all, these in-game representations of political systems are always going to be flawed. A representation will always lose some detail, but the keyword here is "game", you certainly do not want to have to deal with the actual issues of running a state.

• Totalitarian states are not that efficient:

  • There is no such a thing as a state run by a single man. Nazi Germany is a paramount example, under the myth of unity and Hitler's leadership, it actually was a nightmare of individuals and organizations working against each other (Heer vs Waffen-SS, SS vs ABWEHR, Himmler vs Goering) with different priorities, pet projects and the like, hoping to get Hitler's favor.

  • Even dictators need support. They do not need to be legitimated by elections, but even without these, they need to have the support (or at least the control) of the public. And, lacking democratic legitimacy, they need the support of other power brokers (army, aristocracy, capitalists, etc.). See this CGP Grey video for a very interesting introduction.

  • As stated by other answers, totalitarian states rely on the capabilities of those at its top. Are they wrong? Say hello to the Big Leap Forward, or the Holodomor, or go ahead and invade Russia.

  • Totalitarian regimes are more worried about their stability. People will advance on the basis of their loyalty, not of their merits. No matter how good you are, if you are not in line with the leadership objectives you will not get responsibility positions (and that is if you are lucky enough to not spend your time in a jail). And of course, you will need to keep a big security system that you want to feed with lots of resources to keep it happy.

• Democratic states are not incapable of having objectives. The key point here is are lagging behind. If there is a perceived threat, it is relatively easy to get their act together. Good examples could be the USA or the UK during WWII (including a "national coalition" government in the UK), the space race or even (fruitless as it was) Reagan's SDI (the famed "Star Wars") project.

TL/DR: Totalitarian states have internal tensions, do not always have the best leadership, are not that efficient and have to consume resources both for repression and public support. Democracies are capable of making sacrifices if there is a perceived need for it; the aspect being that as soon as the need seems to wane there are strong interests in redirecting the efforts to other issues.

Answer 6

Given the definitions you've provided the only real difference is that in one the leaders are in place for life, while in the other the leaders are only in place for a term or two, based on votes.

With that in mind there's one rather crucial disadvantage an autocratic society has: it's bad at dealing with particularly bad leaders.

In a democracy, if you don't like the Prez, you can just wait 3-4 years and vote them out of office. Impeach them, if you're impatient. Bring in a new Prez, maybe they'll do better.

In an autocracy, if Le Roi is a fool, you can either starve while he runs amuck eating cake for 50-odd years, or, well, I suppose you could burn the regime down and invite a whole lot of people to meet Madame Guillotine.

This is... less than ideal for the advancement of science. We can only speculate how much was lost when Antoine Lavoisier had his head lopped off.

In reality we're never going to get a good leader 100% of the time. For every Sun King there's a Louis XVI, and for an absolute leader, their failure is absolute.

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For power concentrated in a small group of powerful people (what Stellaris understands as an oligarchy), we can look to other similar setups - one notable one was the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Long story short, the loss of the de-facto leader (Lenin) led to a power struggle in the Central Committee that eventually led to Stalin taking supreme control of the USSR - and purging his rivals for good measure. This was more or less repeated after Stalin's death, with a power struggle breaking out among Stalin's inner circle before Khrushchev took control.

Generally we'd expect these sorts of setups to shift towards one absolute power at a time, and generally deal with power struggles due to variations in how much power and influence the 'powerful' actually have.

Answer 7

A strong centralization of power, of any kind, hinders discovery

When Columbus asked the Portuguese for permission to sail, they said no. So he went to the Spanish, who said yes, and the rest is history. When the Chinese pronounced Haijin, its fleets were scrapped and nobody could do anything about it. China was not more or less autocratic than Europe, but European power was decentralized. In a democracy, power is supremely decentralized - when the government says no, protesters, lobbyists, local governments, etc. can say yes. In an autocracy, they would all be shot.

Socialist science

Despite its successes in the Space Race, science in the USSR was severely hampered on many fronts. Russian electronics were trash, all computers were clones of American designs. Russian genetics was suppressed by demagogues. Quantum mechanics were considered counter-revolutionary, and only existed at all because Stalin wanted his bombs.

This is a trend in all aspects of Soviet culture. The geriatrics in the Kremlin set political, cultural, and scientific norms that everyone else had to follow. Communications beyond the USSR's borders were difficult if not impossible, so scientists couldn't collaborate with foreign colleagues, or even steal their ideas. If you disagreed, you were, at best, denied advancement.

Stupid Jetpack Hitler

German success in the field of science had nothing to do with Nazism. In fact, Nazi policies encouraged Deutsche Physik over "Jewish physics." The Germans commissioned many wonder weapon designs, but they amounted to very little. Their crowning glory, the V2, was terrible when compared to a conventional Allied bomber dropping conventional bombs onto conventional German research labs. Their vaunted jet fighters were... well, as Chuck Yeager put it, "when I first saw a jet fighter, I shot it down."

Il Duce is not a psychic

The Supreme Leader decrees that the People should go to space. Is technology ready? Does anybody want to go to space? Are there problems at home that might be addressed? Supreme Leader says no. In a democracy, many things are happening at once, and freedom of the press means that everyone knows about these initiatives. A vaguely free market means that demand outstrips political support, and the leaders are not threatened by letting new, radical ideas thrive. Democracies go to space when their people are ready to embrace space travel, and have found a sensible way to do so. Autocracies go to space when the autocrats have too much to drink, and risk too much on too foolish a venture. The USSR collapsed because it was spending too much to make rockets and bombs, and not enough to produce food for its people. The Germans invented Skype for the sake of national prestige, and it didn't go anywhere.

Answer 8

There's some fundamental societal principles that come into play when dealing with autocracies, oligarchies, and even democracies with small elected groups of representatives. Whenever you concentrate power, you become more dependent on the decisions of those in power being the "right" decisions. And, of course, "right" is a concept which is decided later, in the future.

If you are a ruler that has the Mandate of Heaven, as in you actually are striving after the "correct" thing and have the heavens in your favor, you will always be able to use an autocracy to lead your nation better because that concentrates all the power into your hands, and magnifies your correct decisions.

Of course, real people aren't always perfect. Consider the case of North Korea, whose leaders have used their power to create a greatly magnified military system that has a good portion of the Western world on edge, despite having a GDP substantially smaller than Apple's yearly revenue. Is this the "correct" path? Well, we in the West would generally say "heck no!" But only time will tell.

The power of democracies arises when it becomes too difficult for the individuals in power to identify and pursue the "best path forward." It distributes the power in the nation (how much it distributes depends on the style of democracy). This dilutes the power, so it's harder to make crisp clear judgements that move the country in one direction or another, but it vastly increases the ability to observe the world and make adjustments as you go.

Thus, one thing the democracies could do is strive to create a thriving dynamic solar system where the "best path forward" is constantly changing. In such a system, it is enormously difficult for the leaders of the autocracies to stay sufficiently informed in order to make "right" decisions, but it is much easier for the democracies to keep up. It also helps to have those thriving dynamics be very broadband. By that I mean have those changes occurring on many different timescales and many different size scales. If a change occurs in a democracy (such as the invention of the iPhone), it is very easy for a democracy to quickly develop a structure to leverage it to its best capabilities. Our President didn't have time to write edicts to tell us how to manage iPhones while simultaneously managing the Iraq War. But we have CEOs and company presidents and startups formed in people's garage to figure out what to do with it. That is a structure which is hard for the autocracies to mimic or outperform.

Answer 9

I think your underlying premise is flawed.

In the real world, and in most strategy games, neither the state nor its form of government is relevant to technological or scientific development. All that is required is a need and an opportunity as described in the old adage: "Necessity is the mother of invention". In the modern world, the need is to make a profit and technological innovation leads to greater profitability. This is not driven by the governments, but by the consumers. The entities doing the innovating are companies which are autocratic not democratic and are simply responding to needs. This is why no pharmaceutical company has cured a disease in many years, but all of them have come up with treatments. In the scientific world, the 'need' driver is far less obvious. Peer respect would be a major factor and I suspect inertia is another one, but the consequence is that science has slowed down to a crawl with the exception of areas that directly feed technological innovation (ie profit). When we have another 'necessity', I expect that science will pick up again, unfortunately, that probably means waiting for a collapse in climate, energy, health or food source. Or a war.

Answer 10

I think it is strange that nobody mention that scientific culture does not go well with Totalitarian regimes.

The scientific culture pushes toward checking facts and being curious, exactly the contrary of the goal of a totalitarian regime. If your population start to question why it should obey your rule, why they should stay, or even why they should NOT try to take power for themselves, the stability of the regime will decline.

Most of the totalitarian regimes will make sure that only a small part of their population wants to make high studies, and will control that group in fear of the ideas they could produce.

You could have democracies without scientific culture. (but they risk to slowly become totalitarian regime, with a closed political class and staying a democracy in name only).

In a scientific race, the democracy would always outrun the totalitarian regime, because that regime will either not have enough scientists or collapse under the pressure.

Answer 11

Normal people may not care about scientific advancement, but fortunately, we don't need to rely on them, even in a democracy. In the U.S., for instance, a lot of funding comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as a few Department of Defense groups, e.g. DARPA. Let's take the NSF as an example. Each year, they request a budget from Congress (in 2017, it was about 0.2% of total federal spending for the NSF) and give them a high level overview of how the money will be spent and examples of the sort of impressive things NSF funding has supported in the past. But then once the NSF has its budget, qualified people decide which research grants will be supported, so even if a research project only has long-term benefits, it will still get funded if it's a promising idea.

Another major source of funding comes from industry. In addition to in-house research, companies will sometimes send funding to academic researchers working on topics relevant to them. Even if they won't be the only ones to benefit from the research, they don't need to invest any time or employees into the project, so if they have the money to spare, it can be a good investment. (It also buys goodwill from potential future employees.)

And finally, a base level of funding comes from the universities themselves. Undergrad tuition pays salaries, and offering solid research funding will attract good professors to the institution.

The average citizen may look at something like a particle accelerator and say "That will magically create a black hole and kill us all". A congressman may look at it and say "That won't have any practical benefits before the next election". But the NSF people will look at it and think, "That may reveal information that will open up new avenues of research in 50 years" and fund it. The more short-sighted people just need to know that funding "Science" has always paid off before, so if we show them that it has, they'll keep funding it. (That came out as a bit more cynical than I intended, but if I'm being honest...) The average citizen of a democracy doesn't necessarily understand or even care about specific research projects, but as long as you have a good research infrastructure in place, they don't need to as long as they're interested in having technology continue to advance.

Answer 12

The problem here is that there really isn't a worldbuilding sort of problem. Your complaint is that within certain games, centrally planned economies beat free market ones. But the problem is that whoever set up the rules/programmed the logic for these games did not accurately model the real world.

(This might be in part because games are restricted, while real life has much larger bounds that can be modelled.)

So the "solution" seems to be either to not play these games, or - if you're making up your own game - to make a more realistic set of rules. To take a couple of your points:

1) Autocracies always persecute some group, and the more intelligent/innovative the group, the more likely they are to be among the persecuted, if for no other reason than that they start asking questions like "Why should we believe this idiot, anyway?"

2) Big tech vs consumet tech: It's often the economies of scale involved in producing consumer tech that allows relatively cheap scientific progress. Consider for instance why most supercomputers these days are clusters of cheap commodity processors and GPUs, which wouldn't be available for cheap if it wasn't for the gaming community. Or the way the US was able to convert e.g. automotive plants to making tanks in WWII...

Answer 13

Why not an Illuminatti Democracy? If an elite controls what the people see and hear they control what they think and control how they vote. So you can have your free market and political freedoms and the projects that matters will survive the electoral cycles because the Secret Societies that control the media and the church of your society will control the public opinion and make sure the public wants those projects completed. And these Societes know that big science is vital for them because if their civilization is conquered by enemies they will lose their privileged positions and if, on the other hand, their civilization conquer others they will become even more rich and powerful.

Answer 14

It may be too complicated to say, though culture seems the most important issue.

Games strive for balance and fun, not realism. Importantly, in the real world, technological progress varies considerably because most nations have huge cultural differences which makes it hard to answer this without resorting to caricatures.

During the Second World War Britain shared many technological secrets with America via the Tizard Mission. Britain had a lot of technology which was ahead of America's; especially when it came to radar and jet engines.

Wartime comparison between the USA, Britain, Germany, and the USSR is complicated by a vast difference in cultural and material circumstance. In 1897 the Russian empire had a literacy rate of 24%. In 1900 the United Kingdom had a literacy rate close to 100%. Britain's elite universities were some of the oldest in the world; Oxford was created 1096, Cambridge 1209. Universities in St. Petersburg and Moscow were setup in 1724 and 1775 respectively.

Therefore, to make a comparison between such places is a non-trivial task with so much statistical noise it's hard to make meaningful conclusions. A precise scientific comparison requires controlling for as many factors as possible.

On face value modern America is a research powerhouse. That's true... but when this data isn't controlled for population or GDP it's not informative, in the same way economic data not adjusted for inflation is often meaningless.

Even contemporary free market democracies don't have the same research output per capita. This original research found on academia.stackexchange finds significant differences. It doesn't adjust for GDP per capita... which would itself have to be adjusted by an inequality indicator to try and measure median wealth. We'd probably need to further adjust for difference in national education spending and access to higher education. Intuitively countries with more money will produce more research, but it's never going to be just about money.

The research publications per capita figure will probably also need filtered by STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine), as though a thesis on Cultural Studies or Law might be interesting, it's not relevant to what you're asking.

Nevertheless. Let's add world bank GDP per capita data from 2012.

No. ... Country ... Research publications per capita (GDP per capita)
1. Switzerland 0.049 (57,000)
2. Sweden 0.039 (44,000)
3. Denmark 0.037 (44,000)
4. Finland 0.035 (40,000)
7. Norway 0.032 (65,000)
9. United Kingdom 0.030 (37,000)
10. Australia 0.030 (42,000)
20. United States 0.022 (51,000)
21. Germany 0.021 (43,000)
22. France 0.019 (37,000)
28. Japan 0.013 (37,000)
50. Russia 0.004 (25,000)
82. China 0.002 (11,000)

Most Chinese people are poor compared to their western peers, so it's little surprise fewer of them can afford to publish research. But what about the Anglosphere? Britain, Australia, and America share a great deal culturally. Britain and Australia produce the same research per capita. Meanwhile America, which is much wealthier per capita, publishes much less.

Britain is poorer per capita than Australia, but has the same per capita wealth as Japan and France; which both produce considerably less research. So what's going on?

A more revealing comparison may be between Finland and the USA. Finland regularly appears at the top of the scoreboard of the PISA study; an OECD measure of how well school children are doing across its member states. Perhaps unsurprisingly Finland is also doing well in our research per capita list.

Finland's 2012 PISA average was 529 at 8th place. America's was 492 at 29th place. The difference seems largely due to alternative cultural and educational values. For example, in America sports are a big deal for schools. In Finland sports are relegated to after school clubs.

Would Finland produce less research under a Finnish autocracy? This doesn't seem likely. The biggest factor appears to be culture, not the form of government.

P.S. I don't understand Switzerland.

P.P.S. As jamesqf points out in the comments, CERN is based in Switzerland, which likely makes Switzerland an outlier.