The View | Education, not politics, key to economic strength
An educated population leads to better economic strength, which in turn leads to more vocal calls for leaders to provide greater political freedoms
One of the best performing stock markets this summer has been Thailand, a country that experienced a military coup in the spring. Of course, coups aren't particularly new to the Southeast Asian country but this one seemed to come as a relief.
Which is a reminder that many investors have something in common with authoritarian policymakers: they fear chaos and populist capture. In Thailand's case, Yingluck Shinawatra's clownishly inefficient rice-subsidy scheme was enough to write off her government as one of populist idiocy.
A couple of years ago the Morgan Stanley fund manager Ruchir Sharma, while researching a book on emerging markets, looked at 124 countries that had experienced high growth rates over the past three decades. He found that only about half of the countries were democracies.
"It's not the type of system that matters but the stability and whether the leaders running it understand economic reform," Sharma said at the time.
It is against this backdrop - of democracy linked with instability in so many narratives - that Beijing perhaps felt comfortable citing the threat of "populism" while explaining its decision to limit the scope of the 2017 chief executive elections.
Yet this charge obviously rings very hollow in a city like Hong Kong, with its high education levels and a long tradition of civic virtue - on display with the pro-democracy protestors' zeal for orderliness, food sharing and even trash recycling.