Comment by duke_sam
1 day ago
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.
I laughed out loud at this — my dad is a retired Uni professor, so I know exactly what you are talking about — but I'd point out that the "student list" has around 140 seats in the parliament, so 80 academics hopefully still has another 60 common sense people who are not all about being right all the time, and who bring other perspectives too.
> common sense people
Just as we should keep in mind that brainy academic types can get carried away in theoretical flights of fancy, we should also acknowledge that 'common sense people' are not composed exclusively of experienced and unselfish pragmatists, but also wilfully ignorant and cynical anti-intellectual types.
Academia, especially senior academia (professors, academics, uni leaders, department heads) is the profession in my opinion closest to the politics, if not the exact same, just that you don't see them every day in media. So don't worry, they're more than qualified.
Umm, you might want to read a but on the (new) opposition, ex 12+ years of total unchecked control.
I didn't, but I saw a friend go into a week long alcohol session because he wanted to leave academics and couldn't take it anymore...
It must be like a pit fight, but with connections and half truths
"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!
I mean the whole point of democratic system _is_ you want rotating cliques and infighting. Because defaulting to consensus isn't really that democratic.
The large blocks need to be able to move forward in legislation but the more uglier and tumultuous the backroom dealing are (within legal bounds) the healthier the democracy is.
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Maybe they will fail, maybe they will do very well - time will tell. Even if they fail badly, it still can't be as bad as an authoritarian rule, right?
Previous gov now is opposition. So if students fail, next election might bring back the old team.
Isn’t China run by engineers?
It isn't a parliament though.
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There’s a chance of failure in any human endeavor. but I am sick of lawyers, bankers, landlords, lobbyists and various other grifters hanging on currently in most western governments no one can say that they haven’t had their chance. There needs to be a wider variety of professions involved at/in the legislative branch.
I could not imagine a group more able to come up with new ideas and have no ability to actually execute!
Should be exciting
Having spent a significant time in academia, the problem is you are never judged on what works, but on what idea you can take credit for. Now this is not great for innovation, but it is disasterous for keeping things running.
which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!
"Winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."
Seems pretty obvious to me that it's not going to be 80 academics debating everything under the sun, but instead dedicated groups focusing on their expertise area...
Liable to get hoodwinked by "academic publisher" types.
> There's definitely a chance of failure here.
I was thinking the same.
This can either go incredibly well or it can go incredibly wrong.
They need historians and political scientists, and maybe some politicians, to constantly remind them not to allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
It is not always obvious how to lay ground work over a decade ... or four of them.
It isn't even mostly about fixing problems. But how to make government act as an expedient rather than as an impediment.
A group of 80 academics sounds like the level of dysfunction that can only be superseded by a group of 80 politicians.
You can either support the status quo or you can support change. You seem to have chosen the third option, blanket cynicism, which is more like opting out. Yes, there are bad examples of every-single-thing in the world, and you can choose to cling to those bad examples and throw your hands in the air instead of engaging more critically and looking for ways to build instead of mock. The cynic's path accomplishes nothing and, frankly, poisons the world for those who give a fuck.
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.
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Management is basically 99% people's relations/network. It doesn't matter how good the technical implementations are at the top, if they don't have the knowledge and capacity to enforce it downstream from middle layer to the base. There's so much people involved whose interests are farmed by your competitors.
Imposing it top down requires oppression. Imposing or pressuring this huge layer from the bottom requires a continuously updated base so you can squeeze from the top and the bottom to enact the changes needed quickly.
It's impossible for leaders at the top, to personally vet the members of a village or city council for example.
I think I've never seen any of such concatenation of events and organization to have ever happened.
I believe this is the usual tension that's present even in private companies: are professional managers better than field experts at managing work?
The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!
The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts? A great manager would be great, but these are similarly rare (rarer than good experts in a field).
And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.
The same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.
Before you ask, Gyúcsány was better
This is an interesting experiment, although I wouldn't call it a technocracy just yet. Italy had technocratic governments under Mario Monti and, to a lesser extent, Mario Draghi, with mixed results.
Having highly educated people in parliament is one thing; actually governing a country is another. Political leadership requires negotiation, compromise, institutional knowledge, and the ability to execute decisions.
I'm curious to see how Serbia handles the transition from academic expertise to actual governance, especially without a conventional party leadership structure.
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> MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
As compared to what? A working group of 80 uneducated idiots?
If democracy doesn't work if you put smart, educated people in control then it doesn't work, period and we need to pay better attention to whatevere China is doing.
China has more engineers involved in their government. Who tend to be more clear- thinking let’s solve the problem at hand. Which explains why they have so many infrastructure projects going on across their country.
It also partially explains why they pursue are open to multiple solutions to a problem. And it certainly explains why they looked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that thorium research and built two thorium reactors and will probably build many more because guess what?
They figured out how to make it work and apparently solved that alloy molten salt problem, it took about 10-15 years but they are on schedule. to deploy many more reactors after 2029.
They also switched or are are in the process of switching from lithium batteries to sodium ion batteries which is something else they didn’t have to do, they could hung on to lithium through 2040 milking, but instead they are moving on, which is also something that can happen when you have a bunch of engineers involved in the decision-making as opposed to those finance/MBA people who have a tendency to want to milk people for as long as possible.
https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/china-emerg...
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> A working group of 80 uneducated idiots
This is why people hate IT nerds.
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> It was an amazing achievement
Yeah, the thing that really strikes me is that their movement _did not exist_ in the last election. Went from scratch to power in three years. Whatever you want to say about their politics or their ability to lead...sure. But that's an incredible thing to do.
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
The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
>that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a prescient article about this roughly a decade ago:
https://archive.ph/B3mMG
> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
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The US has not failed yet, only grown unpleasant for certain groups of people.
> The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That's correlation, not causation. Switzerland made enormous amounts of money from its banking secrecy system over many decades until the US pressured it to end it. And the trends are not looking good for Switzerland based on data. We'll see how stable it remains as the cost of living keeps rising, real wages decline, and unemployment goes up.
If you provide wealth and a good lifestyle to your citizens, then almost any system will be stable.
Yes and no. The US presidency is very different than the way it's reported on, but it is true that the executive branch is being more assertive to make up for the disfunction of the legislation. We're doing that intentionally and for good reason, to demonstrate to China that the US can act with speed as one small part of the overall deterrent against World War 3. The US is almost always hugely misunderstood, because there isn't any other country in the world that actually works exactly like the US does.
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The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor (they were vehemently opposed to the idea of putting so much power in the hands of one individual).
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
The Roman Republic was incredibly decentralized with more people working for the administration of the city of Rome than for the Roman state itself at the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Extreme executive power existed, but not at the level of the imperial administration. Provincial governors had near absolute power and generals had control over their armies to a degree well beyond what any general today has. They were basically private mercenaries with the generals, not the state, being in charge of payroll for the soldiers. Local territories had near 100% control of their own affairs so long as they did not do anything to interfere with the tribute flowing to Rome.
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)
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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.
Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
No it comes from spending a lot of time in my home country (the UK), which despite nominally being a parliamentary democracy is very clearly run by a small number of (largely unelected) people at the top.
The same as every company I've ever worked for, large or small.
Some systems obfuscate it more than others, but at the end of the day somebody has to have the executive power to make a decision when the chips are down, or you just have chaos
Switzerland effectively runs via committee
"effectively" is doing some heavy work in this sentence
A country is not a business. The goals are different. The levers and constraints are different.
The constitution will necessitate a certain structure so it's not like "it can't work". It is working and then at some point soon the structure will be reified and some will be given more power and different portfolios than others.
It worked really well so far.
I mean ... most countries are run by some sort of committee hierarchy / supervisor chain. Having consulted at many different levels of govt. over here in Europe, I can tell you there are way more committee decisions than Executive directives.
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
Also, see the Tomato guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUBdX1d3ok
Amateur politician have good intentions but are not very effective. It's hard to get consensus when everyone has their own opinion. Professional politician have the background to get somethings done but yes they have thier own issues. My suspicion is that the new group might get a few items thru. Things that have been burning in the majorities minds but after that there won't be much done. It very hard to get people to agree, specifically intelectuals that think they are always right and can put up a good argument.
> 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.
In Germany the focus is usually on the parties and not the figurehead for over 70 years now.
edit: for the election
Sure, b/c all over history it shows students always know what for and why they protest... /s
> 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.
Whatever it is going to be it will hardly be worse than what we had for past 14 years of SNS / Vučić dictatorship.
It's always funny to me when people say "overeducated", as if knowing things is only good up to a point. If you know too much, you suddenly turn bad.
When people use the term, it is obviously not a reference to just "knowing things" but rather 1) the distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world (and I say that as an academic), and 2) hyperspecialization to the point one loses the big picture, a problem in education today.
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A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but better than a master of one because he has broad, intersectional knowledge. Academia is designed for specialization and the more you specialize in something the more you lose the forest for the trees.
Everything looks like a nail if you are a hammer and all that.
https://www.oglaf.com/labyrinth/
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Academic credentials and knowledge have very little correlation. A master electrician knows things. So does an airline pilot in charge of hundreds of lives. Yet neither has letters after their name.
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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.
Thatcher was a scientist, but no more an academic than most politicians.
She had a honors bachelors degree. An Oxford MA is awarded three years later on application, and is not an earned master’s degree. Unusually for a politician, it was a science degree (chemistry), and she worked in a lab at school and after school briefly, but she got a law degree later, which is a typical politician thing.
If that bachelor’s degree was in humanities, like almost all elected officials, no one would refer to her as an academic.
In contrast, Merkel earned a PhD, and some of these newly elected Serbian reps are long-time professors.
There are more ardent second amendment supporters among tenured professors in US universities than you think.
it is the only amendment there is in the USA, all others are just for show. fourth amendment gotta be the biggest joke at this point that it even “exists” on paper so-to-speak. 2A holds it together though to make us feel like we are “free” :)
Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
Alternative? The corrupt career politicians in the US mostly hold JDs.
> Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
Are you sure? After the covid and position of the scientific community on it's origin it is evident that most scientist are ready to do the exact things that corrupt career politicians are doing, but for free, purely for the love of the game.
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.
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Why are russian bots always so easy to spot?
Fun fact: The US has only had one academic hold the presidency. He is also considered to be the worst US president in history.
Academics don't have a great track record in politics or governance pretty much anywhere at anytime in history.
Considered by whom - you?
Most surveys, either of experts or the public, rank Wilson above average.
Worst are generally Buchanan, Johnson, Harding and of course Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...
What anti-intellectual horse shit. Carney has a PhD in economics, for one. But there are many: Tomáš Masaryk, Manmohan Singh, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Lagos, Mary Robinson, Lee Teng-hui, Tsai Ing-wen, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Claudia Sheinbaum.
All these people have been been at the forefront of b ringin freedom, democracy, and well being to their populations. If anything, the "fun facts" show that academics can make great leaders.
You made that conclusion using one person?
I didn't know Trump held an academic appointment. (Other than John G. Trump, I mean.)
He means Woodrow Wilson.
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US government organizations such as USAID and the CIA-adjacent National Endowment for "Democracy" backed this movement to the tune of millions of dollars, funding "civil society groups" and other NGOs. Yet supposedly it is spontaneous and grassroots, and we wonder how its governance will be decided.
This is the standard claim by the Vucic regime and his media, still haven't seen any evidence. Please share if you have any.
Any sources?
$10M+ US funding of "Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance" https://www.wheremytaxesgo.com/foreign-aid/serbia/
$500K+ NED funding listed here: https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Europe-Grant-...
$2.9M USAID->CRTA https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72016923CA00002_0...
$10M USAID->Trag Foundation (Inspire2Action) https://2021-2025.state.gov/reports/2024-investment-climate-...
The Russians paying him.
Source: The Russians paying me.
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