Stasis is Illiberal

A stereotypical “illiberal” society is culturally and socially static and conservative, tightly bound, and suspicious of outsiders. Each is run by a coalition of elites who maintain strong discretionary control over key social areas: government, law, commerce, religion, culture, and public talk. Such societies can react in swift, decisive, and unified ways to external military threats and opportunities.

But in illiberal societies, elite coalitions also coordinate well to suppress competition that challenges their leadership in these key areas. And they can ensure that their children become the elites of the next generation. This hinders such societies from adapting fast to anything but changes in military context and internal elite alliances. But that didn’t much matter when other kinds of change were quite slow or unimportant.

A few centuries ago, however, parts of the world started to grow much faster, due to faster rates of change and innovation. (Innovation is effective change that accumulates, caused by invention plus diffusion.) Coincidentally, that’s about when and where science, democracy, printing, travel, commerce, finance, and orgs became much bigger things. And also roughly when and where societies became more “liberal”, with elite coalitions having less discretion to suppress competition in key areas. This liberality was supported not just by new tech, but also by new laws and social norms. 

That is, liberal societies had relatively neutral rules and norms supporting democratic competition for control of governance. Freedom of religion and the press supported freer competition in those areas. Stronger norms of neutral law limited law’s value to elites in suppressing rivals. Stronger travel, property rights, free trade, and neutrally-enforced law supported stronger competition in commerce. Stronger neutral competition in school and prestige career paths also made it harder for kids of elites to inherit elite positions. Furthermore, culture and norms came more to expect and support big competition-enabled innovations in many areas of society. 

I propose that this correlation in time and space between liberality and innovation was not a coincidence, and that substantial causation went both ways. That is, not only did liberality promote innovation, but innovation also promoted liberality. Less liberal societies were seen to fall behind and look “backwards” in international competitions related to commerce, war tech, population, and culture, all because they less supported innovation. So the world learned this rough lesson: winning societies must support sufficiently neutral competition to allow internal innovation. Societies lose when they give elite coalitions overly great discretion to suppress competition in government, law, commerce, religion, culture, and public talk.

Of course even today this lesson has been only partly learned. Many rankings of nations are available showing that large factions of nations are still pretty illiberal. Many local elite coalitions still see great gains for themselves from suppressing rivals in key areas. And if they expected weaker gains from innovation, they’d feel more free to move further in that direction. It is thus in substantial part an expectation of rapid valuable innovation that holds them back, and has pushed nations to be more liberal. 

I’ve said that world population looks to peak soon and then fall far, and that econ theory predicts the world economy will then also fall, with innovation rates falling in rough proportion to economic activity. Thus as population falls, innovation will “grind to a halt.” Many have asked why that is such a bad thing. Yes, the population will be older, and we will lose scale economies, but we would also put less pressure on nature, and it might be good to take more time to consider what social changes we really want. 

The above is my response. When innovation grinds to a halt, so also will many of the social pressures that have driven and supported liberalism. There will be less of an expectation of substantial innovation, and less of a presumption that such innovation is good. Local elites will still want to coordinate to suppress rivals, and they will less need to fear that this will put their society at a disadvantage in international competitions. So they may tend more to empower state religions and ideologies, stronger censorship of “misinformation”, more elite-coalition-favoring discretion in legal rulings, more discretionary regulations that can take down rivals in commerce, and more elite-coalition-favoring discretion in school and prestige career admissions and promotion.

This isn’t a hypothetical problem. Both the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations became substantially less liberal in their declining phases, both of which were caused in part by low fertility leading to a falling population, phases accompanied by less innovation and effective adaptation to changing conditions. Declining eras of Chinese empires also seem to have been less liberal on average, compared to growth eras.

Honestly I think we already see these sort of less-liberal trends to a modest degree in the last few decades, correlated with a modest decline in innovation rates. But with a big rapid population decline the effects will be far more dramatic. I predict that societies will become far less liberal during the coming great innovation pause, further suppressing innovation. Yes, maybe it will be your religion/ideology that they enshrine, your enemies they censor, and rivals to your kids and firms they suppress. That is, maybe you will be a favored elite. But will that really be good for the world?

While this pause might last for several centuries, eventually some insular fertile subcultures is likely to grow enough that world population will rise again. But the insular fertile subcultures we see around us now are quite far from liberal, and so it might take quite a big longer for liberality to rise again on Earth. If it ever does. 

Added 12Jan: In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Freidman says

A rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy. (more)

However, he sees “liberality” more in terms of openness, kindness, tolerance, and redistribution than support for competition, and his explanation for the association is in terms of individual psychology making good times causing kindness. He sees the US Great Depression as a main counterexample to his claim. However, in my terms of open competition and innovation promoting each other, the US Great Depression is not an exception, as it didn’t promote competition.

Here is some empirical support for his claim.