Does anything you learned in the talk make you think that a particular cause area/problem is more important (or, if already an EA focus, less important) than you did before?
I enjoyed reading this, but I'm not really sure what these ideas mean for individuals or EA organizations; at most, I can imagine there being some relevance to the work of the Center for Election Science, but that's very broad speculation on my part.
Last month I attended a talk by David Runciman, the author of a recent book called How Democracy Ends. I was prepared for outrage-stirring and pearl-clutching, but was pleasantly surprised by the quality of his arguments, which Iâve summarised below, along with my own thoughts on these issues. Note, however, that I havenât read the book itself, and so canât be confident that Iâve portrayed his ideas faithfully.
Many people have compared recent populist movements with the stirrings of fascism a century ago. And indeed itâs true that a lot of similar rhetoric being thrown around. But Runciman argues that this is one of the least interesting comparisons to be made between these two times. Some things that would be much more surprising to a denizen of the early 20th century:
The last of those is particularly surprising in light of the first two. Parliamentary democracies in the Anglophone world have been governed by the same institutions - and in some cases, even the same parties - for centuries. Continental European democracies were more disrupted by World War 2, but have been very stable since then, despite the world changing in many ways overall. Thatâs true even for institutions that are probably harmful - consider the persistence of the electoral college in the US, the House of Lords in the UK, the monarchy in Australia (despite their ardent republicanism movement), first-past-the-post voting systems in many countries, and so on. (In fact, Runciman speculates that Americans voted for Trump partly because of how much confidence they had in the durability of their institutions - a confidence which so far seems to have been well-founded.)
So history gives us pretty good evidence for the robustness of democratic institutions to the normal flow of time - but not to exceptional circumstances. In fact, an inability to make necessary changes may well render them more fragile in the face of sharp opposition. If and when pressure mounts, are they going to snap like the democratic institutions of 1930s Europe did? Runciman argues that they wonât, because of the nature of the demographic changes the West has seen. There are three particularly important axes of variation:
These three factors are some of the most powerful predictors of behaviour that we have, and so we should take them into account when judging the likelihood of democratic failure. For instance, wealthier and more educated people are much less likely to support populist or extremist groups. But Runciman focuses the most on age, which I think is the correct approach. Wealth is relative - even if people are actually much richer, they can feel poor and angry after a recession (as they did in the 1930s, despite still being many times wealthier than almost all their ancestors). Education may just be correlated with other factors, rather than the actual cause of lasting differences in mindset. But there are pretty clear biological and social reasons to think that the behaviour and priorities of older people are robustly and significantly different from those of younger people. You need only look at the age distribution of violent crime, for example, to see how strong this effect is (although it may have lessened somewhat over recent years, since marriage rates are declining and single men cause more trouble).
In short: the failures of democracy in the 30âs were based on large populations of young men who could be mobilised in anger by militaristic leaders - see for instance the brownshirts in Germany and blackshirts in Italy. But thatâs not what the failure of democracy in our time would look like, because that group of people is much smaller now. For better or worse, older populations are less disruptive and more complacent. To see where that might lead, consider Japan: an ageing population which canât drag itself out of economic torpor, resistant to immigration, dominated for decades by one political party, betting the country's future on using robots to replace the missing workforce.
During a Q&A after the talk, I pointed out that Japan is very different to western countries in its particularly strong culture of social conformity and stability. Age trends notwithstanding, I have much more difficulty imaging the same quiet tolerance of slow decline occurring in the US or UK. So, given that government institutions are very difficult to change, where will people direct their frustration if lacklustre growth continues in the coming decades?
In response, Runciman raised two possibilities. Firstly, that people will âgo around their governmentsâ, finding new domains in which politics is less relevant. We could call this the âWild Westâ possibility. Of course, thereâs no longer an uncolonised West to explore - but there is the internet, which isnât democratically run and probably never will be. We already see fewer young men working full-time, because the alternative of spending most of their time gaming has become more appealing. As virtual worlds become even more immersive, it seems plausible that people will begin to care much less about political issues.
One problem with the idea of âgoing around governmentsâ, though, is that governments are just much bigger now than they used to be. And as technology companies profit from the growing role of the internet, thereâll be pressure for governments to intervene even more to fight inequality. So a second option is a more Chinese approach, with increasingly autocratic Western governments exerting heavy pressure on (and perhaps eventually control over) tech companies.
A more optimistic possibility is for the internet to make democracy more accountable. Runciman invites us to consider Platoâs original argument against direct democracy (in which people vote on individual issues) - that it would lead to rule by the poor, the ignorant, and the young, all of whom necessarily outnumber the wealthy, wise and old. This argument turned out not to apply for representative democracy, since elected representatives tend to be wealthy, educated and old despite their constituents being the opposite. But now itâs inapplicable for a different reason - that although our representatives havenât changed much, the rest of us are starting to look much more like them. So maybe itâll become feasible to implement a more direct democracy, facilitated by the internet and modern communication technology. (This still seems like a bad idea to me, though.)
The last section was a little speculative, so letâs take a step back and think about how to make predictions about these sorts of events in general. Runcimanâs analysis above provides good reasons not to draw a specific parallel between the rise of fascism last century and recent political events. But it would take extraordinary evidence to exempt us from extrapolating broader historical trends, in particular the fact that states always collapse eventually, and that the base rate for coups and other forms of internal strife is fairly high. Are the extraordinary changes weâve seen since the industrial revolution sufficient to justify belief in our exceptionalism?
Itâs true that since World War 2, almost no wealthy democracies have descended into autocracy or chaos (Turkey and Ireland being two edge cases). Itâs also true that, despite widespread political disillusionment, norms against violence have held to a remarkably large degree. But drawing judgements from the historical period âsince World War 2â is a classic case of the Texan Sharpshooterâs Fallacy (and possibly also anthropic bias?). In fact, this recent lull should make us skeptical about our ability to evaluate the question objectively, because people are in general very bad at anticipating extreme events that haven't occurred in living memory. I think this is true despite these possibilities being discussed in the media. For example, while thereâs a lot of talk about Trump being a potential autocrat, few Americans are responding by stockpiling food or investing in foreign currencies or emigrating. This suggests that hostility towards Trump is driven primarily by partisan politics, rather than genuine concern about democratic collapse. An additional data point in favour of this hypothesis is how easily the Republican political establishment has fallen in line.
Another key question which isnât often discussed is the nature of modern military culture. Historically, this has been a major factor affecting governmental stability. But, apart from vague intuitions about modern militaries being fairly placid, I find myself remarkably ignorant on this subject, and suspect others are as well. What facts do you know about your country's military, about the character of its commanders or the distribution of power within it, that make you confident that it won't launch a coup if, for example, one of its generals is narrowly defeated in a disputed presidential election (as in Gore vs Bush)? Note that military demographics havenât changed nearly as much as those of our societies overall. Theyâre still primarily composed of young working-class men without degrees - a group thatâs unusually angry about todayâs politics. So while I am pretty convinced by Runcimanâs arguments, this is one way in which they may not apply. Also consider that warfare is much less hands-on than it used to be, and firepower much more centrally concentrated, both of which make coups easier.
So far I've looked at societal collapse from a political point of view. But many historical transitions were precipitated by natural disasters or diseases. See, for instance, the Mayan collapse, or the Little Ice Age, or the Black Death. Today, we're much safer from natural disasters, both because of our technology and because of the scale of our societies - few people live in countries in which the majority of a population can be struck by a single natural disaster. Similarly, we're also much safer from natural diseases. But we're much more vulnerable to severe man-made disasters, which I think are very likely to occur over the next century. Since this post is focused on political collapse as a distinct phenomenon to technological disaster, I wonât discuss extreme risks from technology here. However, it's worthwhile to look at the ways in which smaller technological harms might exacerbate other trends. AI-caused unemployment and the more general trend towards bimodal outcomes in western countries are likely to cause social unrest. Meanwhile terrorism is going to become much easier - consider being able to 3D-print assassin drones running facial recognition software, for instance. And due to antibiotic overuse, it's likely that our safety from disease will decline over the coming years (even without the additional danger of bioterrorism using engineered diseases). Finally, I think we're much softer than we used to be - it won't take nearly as much danger to disrupt a country. Runciman is probably correct that weâre less susceptible to a collapse into authoritarianism than we were in the past - but the same trends driving that change are also pushing us towards new reasons to worry.
In addition to the talk by Runciman, this post was inspired by discussions with my friends Todor and Julio, and benefited from their feedback.
I got a sense of some of the considerations to keep in mind when thinking about this question. But I didn't get a sense of whether collapse of democracy is more or less likely than before. Did you update some direction? Does Runciman have a strong view either way?