It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
Maybe. Politics is a skill, and not everyone has a knack for it. It’s dirty, requires compromise, and a willingness to work with your opponents. Or, well, at least it used to.
And in many others they’re small czars of their own kingdoms. However it’s always nice to refresh parliaments with new educated people, with new progressive political movements, shatter old alliances and practices.
> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Diverse? Over-educated university graduates is possibly the least diverse set of thinkers one could hope to find.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Lord help up. This is going to be demonstration of hubris and an exercise in arrogance.
Yeah, there's plenty of high-profile academic politicians in Europe with debatable legacies including Thatcher and Merkel. Time will tell.
A quick search suggests the economists associated with this movement are fairly 'mainstream' institutionalists of the type that's popular with government these days in the west. I don't think there will be big changes soon beyond dealing with corruption/nepotism.
Later on, I imagine they will push for faster EU integration on possibly slightly worse terms. Serbia may become marginally less independent in terms of fiscal policy at least and the markets might become even more exposed/beholden to foreign capital. This process has been in motion for years now and I don't expect the student movement to care - the upsides are broadly popular with younger people globally. Personally, I think it is deeply ironic that in the age of tariffs and huge government spending by the superpowers, small countries like Serbia are still signing up to be bound by the 'free market' consensus which is rapidly disintegrating globally.
Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain: law, civics, economics, political science, or similar. On the other hand it’s a common failure mode of STEM people in particular to assume their expertise can be directly applied to more "human" fields and indeed to dismiss those fields as unscientific hand-waving.
Maybe they are just less experienced in politics. I wonder if their education includes much about the problems they need to solve for society in that country. On the plus side a PhD is good at research and can probably get up to speed damn quick and read a lot. As long as they don't have the hubris!
Have politicians ever been voted en masse for their ability to navigate the domain they will be deployed to work on? It's a combination of popularity and (stated) opinion overlap.
Politics also require quite a bit of emotional intelligence and charisma and ability to get diverse people to come to the table for compromises. Academic achievements are orthogonal to all these.
Best case would be multi-talented persons who have both IQ and EQ and good character. Just IQ is not enough.
Some character traits that are useful to academics are useful to politicians; others are kinda the opposite of what politicians need.
Intelligence? Problem solving? Understanding statistics? Speaking in front of rooms full of people? Communicating complex ideas clearly? Useful for both jobs.
But an academic can be bookish, shy or haughty. Pursuing your own ideas is actively encouraged. There are arguments - but the main audience for the debates are other academics. They needn't collaborate on research with anyone they don't want to, and when they do collaborate everyone has the same destination in mind even if they disagree about the route to get there. When dealing with students, they've all chosen to be there, passed exams and paid money. And of course they have excellent job security.
Politicians, though? Gotta love campaigning and talking to voters. Gotta all get together behind the party's national platform. Even colleagues in your party are rivals because everyone wants the top job. 'Debates' all about playing to the audience and getting 3-second soundbites for social media, not engaging with the substance of arguments. No choice in who you collaborate with, including people with deep-seated disagreements about things like tax, debt, spending. Gotta represent voters many of whom hate you. Oh, and every 4-5 years you're fired and get to re-apply for your job.
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
Silicon Valley is worse than average because they're mostly techies and techies are people that on average love things more than people and have low empathy. They also lean isolationist/libertarian and are the perfect victims for "bootstraps" mentality.
I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.
I dunno man. Having worked with organisations that exist purely to coordinate academics and doctors in the medical field made up of a committee of the same folks...I only have concern. Smart as they maybe in their fields...academics are usually poor at management, logistics, empathy and organisation.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just are vulnerable to these things.
I hope so so much that the current level of corruption will get down. They have been given an immense task. I wish them all the best. The world will be watching.
I've seen posts of yours on other threads, and all I have to say to you is that you keep on pretending that only the politicians you don't like are the corrupt ones; this is very naive.
which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
I would love to be governed by 500 average Joes and Janes, chosen at random, for a mandatory 4 years of (political) conscription.
But eventually they will themselves vote to abolish this in favour of career politics. It is one of those cursed problems there are no valid solutions to.
Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
Now, here's a challenge for you: name an elected government that's the polar opposite. The greatest by assemblage of premium-grade idiots to have ever managed by any civilisation. I know - it's a very hard question.
In India at one point AAP had raised hopes. But they couldn’t work as a team. Let us hope Serbia shows the way for others. If they get some good advisors it might help. AAP infighting felt to me like infighting of French revolutionaries though it was not that bloody.
Politicians are lacking in EQ, not IQ. Higher IQs would make things slightly better while higher EQ leads to much better outcomes. Ideally, yeah, both are needed.
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Any system no matter how well intentioned will outlast its usefulness and eventually dies. I think the key is to see it in the moment and immediate future — Serbia's Gen Z's GDP/GINI/what-have-you is a good yardstick to measure that. So its kind of weird to say we believe because every time something like this is tried it really is different and whatever you/I believe in _never_ lasts even our lifespans.
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child.
Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
Singapore is the opposite of the ivory tower rule. Most high-ranking officials hold either a master's or a professional degree. You wouldn’t find many PhDs with no prior executive experience.
Politicians are very well compensated there. And part of their pay is linked to how well they perform.
Prime minister gets 3 million per year for example.
thing with Mugabe n his government - those guys were mostly just lawyers and other PHDs in things social studies etc
they grew up on communist rhetoric, got support from communist countries - so their main ideology had already failed in the real world. so accumulating degrees without practical experience is a recipe for failure as seen in most african countries.
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
The latter, maybe? The former, I'm not so sure. However we don't have many examples of competent organisations trying to enact genocide to compare against. (Fortunately.)
How were the Nazis technocrats? The core of the Nazi party were weirdo political extremists and violently nationalistic army veterans. The only example I can think of which matches your idea of an 'extraordinarily capable technocratic leader' is Speer, and like his military counterpart Rommel, his reputation has been somewhat laundered and propagandised both during and after the war.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was
less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people
in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would
ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from
richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and
they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich.
Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single
one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded.
France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape,
so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
Being able to freely and easily trade with the EU, and not wanting to be controlled by Russia, are probably the most important two reasons to join the EU!
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
But that's precisely the point of the article: that after "countrywide student protests" this group has managed to unseat "13 years of populist authoritarian rule by Aleksandar Vučić".
I'm not saying they will succeed, but they have been explicitly voted to fight the corruption you speak of.
Pretty cringe, and if what I've seen at the top of university faculties is any indication, it's gonna be a shitshow. There's something to be said for at the very least the common working class man having a direct say in things, if not the deciding say in the things.
There's no modern historical indication that more degrees results in better governance.
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
Only one Serbian university barely qualifies to international rankings. Education from these institutions is not what you think it is. I'm not arguing against Serbia in particular, this applies to most Eastern and Central European countries.
Nobody takes seriously those gaming metrics. University rankings are based on how many researchers, you can get to pretend they are teaching at your University...based on the extortionate funds you get from students more interested in partying at their AlphaPis.
All this while said Researchers offload the real work the students are paying for... to TAs.
They need to translate the election victory into
tangible improvements and results. Otherwise
voters in Serbia would not see any difference to
the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought
Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently
Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of
Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed
out that Peter is just a younger face but the same
Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein
network is not only much bigger than known, but has different
actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can
not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically -
and logistically - no sense at all.
I mean this specific example seems like a far cry from how horrible the Orban regime was. It’s basically ultra-conservative posturing. And Magyar being super conservative was known ahead of the vote. Granted I am no expert in Hungarian politics, but from this single example it seems a bit intense to call him Orban 2.0.
And I also don’t think you can compare Magyar pre- and post election to the new Serbian elected government at all. But I do agree actually producing enough noticeable change until the next election will be hard for both. It just takes time to unfuck countries.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
Proper up to the point. No way he is giving up built in advantages right wing has in Hungary - like rural voters votes having way more power then city voters.
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
You cannot setup a team of dozens of people to run an important sector of the whole country by having them apply for positions. Not even companies hire that way, most companies hire based on recommendations and contacts. You don't have time for this, they need to form a government in a month or so. Six months in people already get antsy if enough is getting done, you'd be going through the third round of interviews.
This is true, but doesn't contradict my statement. As I said, I am looking forward to this and am in fact not that pessimistic. But in the end you need actual people, and these need to be found.
I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.
The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
Idk which period you're referring to, but for a long time, the Politburo was nothing but Stalin's mouth piece, as was the Central Committee and the rest of the Party, ad they ruled through very hard repression. That puts a long-lasting kind of mark on a society that you can't engineer yourself out of. So I'd argue it's not much of an argument.
US government-funded pro-opposition outlet BIRN through its Media Ownership Monitor Serbia project admits the central Student List media channels - N1 and Nova S - were created by former US director of the CIA David Petraeus via KKR and former US Ambassador to Serbia Cameron Munter;
The parent United Group was acquired and the media platforms built up from 2013-2014 onward as the center of opposition media in Serbia opposing Serbia’s existing leadership and institutions, and playing a central role in both “student protests” last year and the “Student List” movement this year;
United Group was only recently (earlier this year) acquired by Alpac Capital, but KKR still maintains an undisclosed amount of shares
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;
When “leaderless” and “decentralized” protests are praised in the Western media, scroll down in the article where they eventually admit who the leaders and organizations are behind them, perform a simple internet search to identify the key people and investments making them possible to determine whether a movement is indigenous or the product of foreign interference;
Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones.
Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
On the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
Exactly. My fellow countrymen fucked my country (Brexit). Foreign meddling didn't help, but it also didn't hinder to the point of changing the outcome.
It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
Sure jan, the country with an all time low in trust for institutions and academia ruled by an strongman-loving, education-bashing fascist is secretly funding meritocracies around the world…
The US is famous for never intervening into other countries' politics. Other famous examples of no intervention in the area is their total non-involvement in Ukraine with Euromaidan protests for example!
Conspiracy would be saying that the US orchestrated the existence of the Student's list and created protests from thin air. Realism is that the US is very happy about any political destabilization that could favor their interest and will provide unofficial support wherever it's convenient for them.
It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
I love that they won and I love the hope and expectation surrounding their victory but MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
There's definitely a chance of failure here.
Liable to get hoodwinked by "academic publisher" types.
Because a working group of 80 career politicians is more effective?
Maybe. Politics is a skill, and not everyone has a knack for it. It’s dirty, requires compromise, and a willingness to work with your opponents. Or, well, at least it used to.
We'd be living in a better world if politics was a skill and our politicians were good at it.
In some clusters, senior academics are exactly like that.
And in many others they’re small czars of their own kingdoms. However it’s always nice to refresh parliaments with new educated people, with new progressive political movements, shatter old alliances and practices.
Before you ask, Gyúcsány was better
It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee
And they won't, system in Serbia is still the same - they will form ministries and prime minister leading them.
They will choose who will that be by a committee, but after that they have to function as usual.
> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Diverse? Over-educated university graduates is possibly the least diverse set of thinkers one could hope to find.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Lord help up. This is going to be demonstration of hubris and an exercise in arrogance.
Yeah, there's plenty of high-profile academic politicians in Europe with debatable legacies including Thatcher and Merkel. Time will tell.
A quick search suggests the economists associated with this movement are fairly 'mainstream' institutionalists of the type that's popular with government these days in the west. I don't think there will be big changes soon beyond dealing with corruption/nepotism.
Later on, I imagine they will push for faster EU integration on possibly slightly worse terms. Serbia may become marginally less independent in terms of fiscal policy at least and the markets might become even more exposed/beholden to foreign capital. This process has been in motion for years now and I don't expect the student movement to care - the upsides are broadly popular with younger people globally. Personally, I think it is deeply ironic that in the age of tariffs and huge government spending by the superpowers, small countries like Serbia are still signing up to be bound by the 'free market' consensus which is rapidly disintegrating globally.
Whatever it is going to be it will hardly be worse than what we had for past 14 years of SNS / Vučić dictatorship.
Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
Average professional politician is a psychopath fighting for power no matter what.
At least these guys might be honest about their hubris and arrogance and won't smile to you while slaughtering your future or robbing your family.
Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain: law, civics, economics, political science, or similar. On the other hand it’s a common failure mode of STEM people in particular to assume their expertise can be directly applied to more "human" fields and indeed to dismiss those fields as unscientific hand-waving.
Maybe they are just less experienced in politics. I wonder if their education includes much about the problems they need to solve for society in that country. On the plus side a PhD is good at research and can probably get up to speed damn quick and read a lot. As long as they don't have the hubris!
Have politicians ever been voted en masse for their ability to navigate the domain they will be deployed to work on? It's a combination of popularity and (stated) opinion overlap.
Politics also require quite a bit of emotional intelligence and charisma and ability to get diverse people to come to the table for compromises. Academic achievements are orthogonal to all these.
Best case would be multi-talented persons who have both IQ and EQ and good character. Just IQ is not enough.
You think you navigate a career in academia without working through different opinions, collaboration etc.?
The two are strongly correlated.
Intelligence is a tool - one that can be put to use against any problem. "Get diverse people to come to the table for compromises" is no exception.
Some character traits that are useful to academics are useful to politicians; others are kinda the opposite of what politicians need.
Intelligence? Problem solving? Understanding statistics? Speaking in front of rooms full of people? Communicating complex ideas clearly? Useful for both jobs.
But an academic can be bookish, shy or haughty. Pursuing your own ideas is actively encouraged. There are arguments - but the main audience for the debates are other academics. They needn't collaborate on research with anyone they don't want to, and when they do collaborate everyone has the same destination in mind even if they disagree about the route to get there. When dealing with students, they've all chosen to be there, passed exams and paid money. And of course they have excellent job security.
Politicians, though? Gotta love campaigning and talking to voters. Gotta all get together behind the party's national platform. Even colleagues in your party are rivals because everyone wants the top job. 'Debates' all about playing to the audience and getting 3-second soundbites for social media, not engaging with the substance of arguments. No choice in who you collaborate with, including people with deep-seated disagreements about things like tax, debt, spending. Gotta represent voters many of whom hate you. Oh, and every 4-5 years you're fired and get to re-apply for your job.
I think we have people who are highly intelligent and still unable to navigate social situations. Neurodivergents are not uncommon in academics.
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
Humble politicians loose elections and negotiations.
Better than the absolute idiots who are running the US into the ground now
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Hopefully the Serbian youths learned from them.
Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
Maximilien Robespierre was an intellectual.
"Populist" is whatever the other side wants. "Nuanced and complex" is my side. My point is, "muh boomers" is a pretty populist reddit-brained take.
Silicon Valley is worse than average because they're mostly techies and techies are people that on average love things more than people and have low empathy. They also lean isolationist/libertarian and are the perfect victims for "bootstraps" mentality.
I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.
> youths learned
Ha! <knee slap> <snort!> Good one!
I dunno man. Having worked with organisations that exist purely to coordinate academics and doctors in the medical field made up of a committee of the same folks...I only have concern. Smart as they maybe in their fields...academics are usually poor at management, logistics, empathy and organisation.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just are vulnerable to these things.
I hope so so much that the current level of corruption will get down. They have been given an immense task. I wish them all the best. The world will be watching.
They are more vulnerable because they are not used to dealing with these types of people.
Academic environment has plenty of those.
More vulnerable then Vucic, Vance, Trump, Orban, Bolsnaro, Paxton, ...
I've seen posts of yours on other threads, and all I have to say to you is that you keep on pretending that only the politicians you don't like are the corrupt ones; this is very naive.
which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
"Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it." - Plato
If only there was a law to uphold this.
I would love to be governed by 500 average Joes and Janes, chosen at random, for a mandatory 4 years of (political) conscription.
But eventually they will themselves vote to abolish this in favour of career politics. It is one of those cursed problems there are no valid solutions to.
Just have a monarchy that only exists to enforce that one rule.
Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
We will see how spectacularly it will fail. But hey at least some young blood, they will probably try honestly.
Maybe for the first two weeks.
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
Now, here's a challenge for you: name an elected government that's the polar opposite. The greatest by assemblage of premium-grade idiots to have ever managed by any civilisation. I know - it's a very hard question.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988).
In India at one point AAP had raised hopes. But they couldn’t work as a team. Let us hope Serbia shows the way for others. If they get some good advisors it might help. AAP infighting felt to me like infighting of French revolutionaries though it was not that bloody.
The Simpsons tackled this once.
It is a courageous experiment, I wish them the best.
I hope they are confident enough to reach out to people who can help them in matters where not smarts but experience is needed.
And they won't be able to change anything due to the massive HR-like bureaucracy.
The entire world should be cleaning up the toxic lead reside generation from it's legislative bodies. It's done enough.
good thing they're stem oriented. serbia can only go up from here.
vs electing lawyers as done in other countries.
> An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Yes, very STEM oriented indeed.
Politicians are lacking in EQ, not IQ. Higher IQs would make things slightly better while higher EQ leads to much better outcomes. Ideally, yeah, both are needed.
I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Any system no matter how well intentioned will outlast its usefulness and eventually dies. I think the key is to see it in the moment and immediate future — Serbia's Gen Z's GDP/GINI/what-have-you is a good yardstick to measure that. So its kind of weird to say we believe because every time something like this is tried it really is different and whatever you/I believe in _never_ lasts even our lifespans.
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child. Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/the-i-d-man
the most prominent long-term technocratic/meritocratic cases (especially Singapore) rank among the least corrupt countries
Singapore is the opposite of the ivory tower rule. Most high-ranking officials hold either a master's or a professional degree. You wouldn’t find many PhDs with no prior executive experience.
Maybe low corruption is a prerequisite for successful technocratic government.
Edit: which makes sense, because technocracy leans heavily on trust (in the experts).
I mean Singapore is also a dictatorship which muddies a useful comparison, but I didn't realise it was so strong on corruption.
Politicians are very well compensated there. And part of their pay is linked to how well they perform. Prime minister gets 3 million per year for example.
International observers have never found flaw with Singapore's elections, have they?
> but I didn't realise it was so strong on corruption.
That's literally a core part of the brand, isn't it?
I'd imagine not having to deal with PR to your voters would make going by merit easier, not harder
What makes you think Singaporean politicians don't have to deal with voters?
Mugabe had seven academic degrees.
The current president of Romania, Nicușor Dan, is apparently an exceptional mathematician[0] and quite useless as a politician.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta_jumping#History
thing with Mugabe n his government - those guys were mostly just lawyers and other PHDs in things social studies etc
they grew up on communist rhetoric, got support from communist countries - so their main ideology had already failed in the real world. so accumulating degrees without practical experience is a recipe for failure as seen in most african countries.
I mean its just a practicality.
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Seeing the billions of people who believe in the imaginary, and a few millions of these fight and kill others over these imaginary things, I would say, rationality is not a solved problem.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
Fascism favors loyalty over competence.
They were very competent at genocide and propaganda.
The latter, maybe? The former, I'm not so sure. However we don't have many examples of competent organisations trying to enact genocide to compare against. (Fortunately.)
How were the Nazis technocrats? The core of the Nazi party were weirdo political extremists and violently nationalistic army veterans. The only example I can think of which matches your idea of an 'extraordinarily capable technocratic leader' is Speer, and like his military counterpart Rommel, his reputation has been somewhat laundered and propagandised both during and after the war.
Speer was an academic failure. Also as architect, except the Nuremberg lightshow.
But he was extremely successful as manager then. Just like the ex-NAZI NASA leader then a bit later.
That was the golden time of German management.
National Socialism was right but now we have Claude so it isn't necessary anymore has to earn some sort of award.
Either the Delusional Leftist Against AI Bro Award or the Delusional AI Bro Against Leftist Award.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich. Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded. France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape, so it will drag the whole EU down.
Estonia and Poland. I’m going to France and Estonia every year, and Estonia seems more developed and comfortable, I’m now seriously thinking of retiring there so good it is
Yes for Estonia, they were 3rd largest recipient per capita of EU aid in 2023:
https://www.euronews.com/2024/12/09/eu-budget-who-pays-the-m...
Hint: Norway has oil and Switzerland has been fairly rich for a while. No country got rich with the EU and that's a good sign, otherwise it would probably also imply that many got much poorer. But the living standards for a lot of people certainly went up in comparison to what they had before.
Switzerland is a member in EU treaties, pays into the EU budget, temporarily pegs its currency to the Euro when it has to, is surrounded by the EU.
Switzerland is the opposite of a state being "without the EU".
> Which country got rich with the EU?
Poland and the other new members in the East, probably?
Although I suspect they would have got richer anyway just being able to trade with the EU and not being controlled by Russia,
Being able to freely and easily trade with the EU, and not wanting to be controlled by Russia, are probably the most important two reasons to join the EU!
Well, being in the EU makes it a lot easier to trade with the EU.
However I broadly agree otherwise.
Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania.
Poland? Baltics?
>Which country got rich with the EU?
Poland? >250 billion Euros received in subsidies since joining the EU; almost any construction you walk by has the "Funded by EU" poster next to it.
I think the massive service and outsourcing industry would also not have been possible (at the current scale) without EU membership.
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
Serbia is among the most corrupt countries. I doubt that will change anything.
But that's precisely the point of the article: that after "countrywide student protests" this group has managed to unseat "13 years of populist authoritarian rule by Aleksandar Vučić".
I'm not saying they will succeed, but they have been explicitly voted to fight the corruption you speak of.
Pretty cringe, and if what I've seen at the top of university faculties is any indication, it's gonna be a shitshow. There's something to be said for at the very least the common working class man having a direct say in things, if not the deciding say in the things.
There's no modern historical indication that more degrees results in better governance.
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
Have you noticed how vicious the politics is in academia?
Only one Serbian university barely qualifies to international rankings. Education from these institutions is not what you think it is. I'm not arguing against Serbia in particular, this applies to most Eastern and Central European countries.
Nobody takes seriously those gaming metrics. University rankings are based on how many researchers, you can get to pretend they are teaching at your University...based on the extortionate funds you get from students more interested in partying at their AlphaPis.
All this while said Researchers offload the real work the students are paying for... to TAs.
Notorious cronyism, nepotism, and outright corruption is the real deal. Not these losers from global top 100.
They need to translate the election victory into tangible improvements and results. Otherwise voters in Serbia would not see any difference to the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed out that Peter is just a younger face but the same Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein network is not only much bigger than known, but has different actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically - and logistically - no sense at all.
I mean this specific example seems like a far cry from how horrible the Orban regime was. It’s basically ultra-conservative posturing. And Magyar being super conservative was known ahead of the vote. Granted I am no expert in Hungarian politics, but from this single example it seems a bit intense to call him Orban 2.0.
And I also don’t think you can compare Magyar pre- and post election to the new Serbian elected government at all. But I do agree actually producing enough noticeable change until the next election will be hard for both. It just takes time to unfuck countries.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
> with proper democratic civil liberties".
Proper up to the point. No way he is giving up built in advantages right wing has in Hungary - like rural voters votes having way more power then city voters.
“All our problems will be fixed when this other group get voted in”
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
In Serbia it was rather "when this conniving bunch of corrupt criminals gets oustes".
What is even your point?
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
The idea that people apply for positions and, if they are qualified, they are accepted. At least in theory.
You cannot setup a team of dozens of people to run an important sector of the whole country by having them apply for positions. Not even companies hire that way, most companies hire based on recommendations and contacts. You don't have time for this, they need to form a government in a month or so. Six months in people already get antsy if enough is getting done, you'd be going through the third round of interviews.
The previous ruling party's pool was more like a sewer, so it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse than it already is.
This is true, but doesn't contradict my statement. As I said, I am looking forward to this and am in fact not that pessimistic. But in the end you need actual people, and these need to be found.
Compare also how the various pirate parties have done around the world.
I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.
The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.
We need a country to elect an AI government and see how it goes, on the ballot this year are Claude Fable, Grok, Carbon and Astra
Well the recent experiments shows they can't make effective government for minecraft, let alone entire country
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
The article https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/09/23/ai-written-spee... has some data on this (it uses Pangram for the classification).
Did anyone listen before anyway? I feel like it's mostly about rhetorics and headlines
I am far from an ai booster but at this point I think even chatgpt 3.5 would do a better job than the current establishment
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
The politburo in the Soviet Union was stacked with engineers and it didn't work out that well.
Idk which period you're referring to, but for a long time, the Politburo was nothing but Stalin's mouth piece, as was the Central Committee and the rest of the Party, ad they ruled through very hard repression. That puts a long-lasting kind of mark on a society that you can't engineer yourself out of. So I'd argue it's not much of an argument.
A bit like the engineers themselves.
US CIA and US State Department Behind Serbia's "Student List" Media N1 and Nova S (United Group) [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300051
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5lwZU7Q5U0
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones. Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
This is false, these channels all over social media, and activist feeds,
"leaderless" is propaganda framing, you have been brainwashed
and there is follow up video
https://youtu.be/P2JKKvKX99c
This channel is literally full of pro-Russian propaganda by a random guy in Bangkok. Show us a substantial source, if there is one.
Or are you simply reproducing a regime’s narrative on here?
All substantial sources are literally right there with links in video description, and he literally points at them in video.
It is doubtful he is pro-Russian, but he is surely anti-US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNL4xoD5uMYOn the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
Exactly. My fellow countrymen fucked my country (Brexit). Foreign meddling didn't help, but it also didn't hinder to the point of changing the outcome.
It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
Sure jan, the country with an all time low in trust for institutions and academia ruled by an strongman-loving, education-bashing fascist is secretly funding meritocracies around the world…
Conspiracy drivel.
The US is famous for never intervening into other countries' politics. Other famous examples of no intervention in the area is their total non-involvement in Ukraine with Euromaidan protests for example!
Conspiracy would be saying that the US orchestrated the existence of the Student's list and created protests from thin air. Realism is that the US is very happy about any political destabilization that could favor their interest and will provide unofficial support wherever it's convenient for them.