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.
1) Isn't it likely the causation mostly goes the other way. That liberal and free societies result in more innovation?
Maybe greater absolute wealth can be shown to make countries freer and more liberal but i don't see much evidence for a causal arrow from innovation to increased freedom/liberalness.
2) Even if 1 is false your evidence doesn't distinguish between the claims that the overall level of innovation predicts the degree of freedom/liberalness and the claim that the innovation per person does.
Actually, it's worse than this because if you want to make the claim about spatial correlation there are plenty of small and very liberal countries like Iceland or other Nordic countries that in absolute terms were far less innovative than giant but very illiberal countries like China or the USSR. If anything the evidence points to per person innovation.
Yet it's not at all clear smaller populations reduce per person innovation.
I said above that causation goes both ways. My story is that it is the expectation of losing out from others innovating when you do not that encourages societies to allow more competition. Innovation here is not about invention, but about adopting innovations.
I understand you say that but I don't really see what evidence you have for it.
I agree there is a wealth -> liberalism causal story but that's not enough to show that decreasing innovation means decreasing liberalism (our wealth doesn't decrease only the rate it increases does).
Ultimately, you've got a ton of factors here with a very complicated causal relationship between all of them and a very limited amount of evidence.
Can you honestly tell me that you came up with this argument before you got worried about population decline? If not, it feels like a situation where you can get manipulate your assumptions about how all those complex factors relate to fit both the limited data and the conclusion you want.
There's a causal arrow from innovation to greater wealth, and there's a causal arrow from greater wealth to greater freedom/liberalness. So you can join the two arrows.
Of course there's also a lot of fear of missing out as Hanson mentioned, not only between nations but also between towns/cities or between competing corporations.
If innovation is a big factor in the economy, what you see is that wealth migrates to people who embrace innovation, and migrates away from people who are too traditional. These people who are now innovating and have more wealth exert political influence on society to permit more innovation so they can get richer.
Also, innovation requires a more educated population, in order for the workforce to understand and effectively use the new tools. Education causes freedom/liberalness.
But if it goes through wealth than that doesn't mean if we decrease innovation we should expect society to get less liberal. After all reducing innovation just decreases the rate at which you increase wealth.
I think the idea is that elite groups have a tendency to be illiberal in order to protect their privileged positions. What counteracts this is innovation, which gives these groups a selfish reason to avoid stasis. When innovation stops, these groups don't become illiberal because they have less wealth; they do so because that is their natural tendency. It's an interesting idea.
Right, but those all occur per person so as long as per person innovation stays the same the incentive doesn't change. Indeed, decreasing population might increase per person innovation.
If it wasn't per person innovation that mattered you'd expect smaller countries to be highly illiberal and we don't see that.
To the extent that elites compete on a global basis, country size shouldn't affect their incentives toward innovation. Also it seems that absolute innovation, not per-person, is most relevant in this competition. A factor that Robin doesn't discuss is the (likely) increasing number of countries that will join in this competition, as the Asian countries have done over the last decades. (Without a doubt China has increased American elites' willingness to adopt AI innovations, for example.) If for example the African countries became major contributors to global innovation, this would offset declining total populations. The world still has a lot of untapped human potential.
But elites can change the laws in their country to retain their high status there without affecting the rest of the world. If I'm an elite in a small country, why don't my incentives look the same as the incentives of someone in a world with small global population? Indeed, why don't I have even more incentive to be illiberal because I can count on people in other countries innovating? But that doesn't appear to be what we see.
Re: number of countries entering the competition that's a good point. And doesn't that suggest, on Robin's argument, that we should see more liberalism than today as long as the world population remains above about 1 billion (as his argument rests on countries entering this global culture). If so, then what we need to know is if population will fall that far (Robin agrees it won't literally go to zero so there will be some floor and we need to know where that floor is before we can draw conclusions).
I mentioned four factors, a general increase in wealth only being one of them. If innovation decreases, (1) fear of missing out on innovation decreases, reducing that incentive to have social rules permitting it (2) there are fewer influential people who personally profit from innovation and have a resulting incentive to push for rules allowing it (3) there is less need for an educated populace.
In the absence of those factors, the tendency of powerful factions to entrench their power and maintain stability by prohibiting innovation would be ascendant.
Regarding the other factors, sure that could be how things go but you could come up with lots of different stories here about how things are likely to play out and I don't think there is very strong evidence cited for any of these more involved causal stories.
So yah, it's a way things could play out but not really persuasive reason to increase one's probability of decreasing liberalism conditional on decreasing population.
I could equally well point to the same considerations and say that since the Innovation per person likely increases the incentive is to increase liberalism because the relative benefit of control to allowing freedom to innovate more increases.
I'm not trying to argue it's impossible things go as Robin suggests just that he hasn't yet actually given us reason to be persuaded that they will.
Yeah, I am also not convinced by Robin's projections for decreasing innovation in the future. We're going to reach the point where engineered intelligence is superior to and cheaper than human intelligence, all bets are off after that.
Although, I'm skeptical that "innovation of the sort that makes nation-states worried about falling behind other nation-states" is actually slowing currently. The Big One right now is AI. The world is getting separated into the AI Haves and Have-Nots. It's easy to imagine how even fairly dumb AI could completely revolutionize the entire economy by replacing all sorts of menial jobs. The AI that we've got is increasingly not dumb, and is thus reaching towards office jobs as well.
Also the fears of population decline are overblown. There is currently a strong selection pressure for people with heritable genes that cause them to have a lot of kids despite living in a high-education high-tech society. People with genes like that do exist and their descendants will be numerous. We're talking hundreds of years in the future, anyway, by which point our society will be practically unrecognizable due to robots doing everything, so such predictions are pointless.
The more pressing demographic problem is that as AI keeps doing more and more human jobs better and cheaper than the humans, we are going to have to figure out what to do with all the humans who cannot get a job because they cannot compete with the AI. This could become a majority of the population. UBI? Mass starvation and riots? Legal restrictions on what jobs robots can do? Subsidies for human workers?
Most people in world history have lived lives of terrible poverty and oppression. If you are correct, and, sadly, I suspect you are, we would just be going back to normal.
But what about in the world where insular fertile subcultures dominate, would not it then be the case that the population very quickly reaches whatever the the Malthusian limit is, given available tech?
Do you mean we haven't improved average human well-being/welfare? Seems implausible given we've significantly attenuated the worst forms of physical suffering.
I mean what I stated. In the thousands of years that we humans have been in control of this glob of dirt, we all call home, we've worked so hard at acquiring uneeded objects, that we still hate way too much. History, as well as present day, are testament to this fact. Though we are able to see the effects of our greed for an increasing lifespan . So that's the progress the "smartest" species has accomplished. If physical suffering were equal to mental, then perhaps we'd agree.
How many dinners with your family or hours of listening to your favorite band would trade to avoid the worst kinds of physical suffering (eg. the equivalent of someone pulling your toenails out or the last few weeks of a fatal small pox infection) ? Mental well-being is not only about freedom from physical suffering but it certainty has to encompass it. In other words, you can cash out freedom from physical pain in mental well-being terms. By this metric alone, your claim is false, unless you think our mental suffering has gotten significantly worse to compensate for that.
I feel that the amount of mass shootings and our suicide rates could lend some credence to the mental health of Americans, in general. Humans inability to find peace should be our need, placed above all of our wants, including the size of our TV's, garages larger than our homes used to be, etc. Perhaps if we returned to a less pain free time then people would focus on ending the selfishness the world seems to cherish so dearly, and stop killing one another due to greed. But this is just my opinion. When nearly half of our fellow citizens are willing to begin another civil war over their "wants".
I'm fairly confident that they're not interested in my pain level. I suppose that I could very well be the one with insane mental health issues and the lovers of war, word-wide famine, religious beliefs du jour, the money holders, to name just a few, are the sane individuals though.
The lynchpin of your analysis is that when populations decline, so will innovation. I would posit that the two are not inextricably linked. We know, for instance, that population growth doesn't in and of itself ensure liberal societies - many a society has growth in population to be illiberal. So, why would the reverse be different?
I am trying very hard to think of an economic equation that says innovation and GDP are reliant on population headcount in any way whatsoever. There is certainly no empirical evidence in support of your assertion, and I'd be interested to find out where the supposed supporting economic theory comes from.
I am trying very hard to think of an economic equation that says innovation and GDP are reliant on population headcount in any way whatsoever. There is certainly no empirical evidence in support of your assertion, and I'd be interested to find out where the supposed supporting economic theory comes from.
Your analysis seems very similar to my own analysis of the advantages and drawbacks of skepticism: "In environs and situations in which survival is precarious and military-esque deference to authority is necessary to stay alive, having a sudden increase in skepticism and doubt of the hierarchy could lead to the death of the society and the individuals that it comprises. But at other times, the meme of skepticism presents great advantages: being creative, willing to go one’s own way, follow one’s inclinations and not blindly stumble after the herd can yield enormous benefits when it comes to science, business, art, politics, or personal interactions. I would posit that there is a strong correlation between the prevalence of the skepticism meme and the level of creativity, dynamism, and liberty of a society."
Unless we see a massive cultural shift in the direction of higher fertility, seems like there are only three ways out of this:
1. Advances in synthetic biology that help us engineer higher IQ babies such that we need fewer people to produce the same number of ideas.
2. Artificial wombs and other technology that can potentially reduce the human cost of bearing or raising children.
3. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence
It's concerning that effective altruism is perhaps marking #3 less plausible and doing nothing to make 1 and 2 more likely. Even if you're concerned about x risk from AI, you should probably hedge your AI forecasts by funding #1 and #2, such that if AI progress stalls, we're in a world that has made progress on both enhancing human cognition and making the species more prolific.
My mother had 11 biological children but said 3 was the hardest number to take care of for her. After that the older ones were developed enough to entertain the younger ones more.
I think you would see fertile subcultures emerge with very large families (20+ children) if you remove the biological limits of age and every-other-year. These populations would double much faster than Amish.
Also need to consider that secular people who wait could start families in their 40s and still have quite a few children if they saved eggs earlier.
I'm not saying artificial wombs will happen. I just think if they worked and were relatively cheap they would boost fertility a lot over time.
You're right. Within that bucket of directly targeting , I'd be inclined to prioritize subsidizing fertility extension (egg freezing) and cash incentives to couples. What gives me pause is the diminishingly small % of women who opt to freeze their eggs even when it's paid for by employers. If we're living in a world where most of the fertility decrease ie being driven by women pair-bonding late; annd if in fact, people's (especially women) attitudes towards child bearing and raising become more favorable with age (when they're also better able to afford kids), making fertility extension as less invasive, painless and inexpensive as possible seems like a good bet so that an increasing proportion of women in their 20s freeze their eggs.
Curious: how does your latest thinking, if at all, affect your thinking re: great filters, grabby aliens, UFOs, et al.
That the virtuous cycle b/t innovation begets liberality will eventually peter out (due to the wealth-fertility paradox, i.e., declining fertility) implies a very hard step for any civilization to overcome indeed and not specific to our own civilization.
I think IIRC he also says that times of fast economic growth are good for liberalism, conceived rather broadly to include various kinds of tolerance. But his mechanism is different, it's not interstate competition but more like "a growing pie makes people less mean and focuses them on positive-sum interactions". I read it a long time ago.
A few issues with your argument.
1) Isn't it likely the causation mostly goes the other way. That liberal and free societies result in more innovation?
Maybe greater absolute wealth can be shown to make countries freer and more liberal but i don't see much evidence for a causal arrow from innovation to increased freedom/liberalness.
2) Even if 1 is false your evidence doesn't distinguish between the claims that the overall level of innovation predicts the degree of freedom/liberalness and the claim that the innovation per person does.
Actually, it's worse than this because if you want to make the claim about spatial correlation there are plenty of small and very liberal countries like Iceland or other Nordic countries that in absolute terms were far less innovative than giant but very illiberal countries like China or the USSR. If anything the evidence points to per person innovation.
Yet it's not at all clear smaller populations reduce per person innovation.
I said above that causation goes both ways. My story is that it is the expectation of losing out from others innovating when you do not that encourages societies to allow more competition. Innovation here is not about invention, but about adopting innovations.
I understand you say that but I don't really see what evidence you have for it.
I agree there is a wealth -> liberalism causal story but that's not enough to show that decreasing innovation means decreasing liberalism (our wealth doesn't decrease only the rate it increases does).
Ultimately, you've got a ton of factors here with a very complicated causal relationship between all of them and a very limited amount of evidence.
Can you honestly tell me that you came up with this argument before you got worried about population decline? If not, it feels like a situation where you can get manipulate your assumptions about how all those complex factors relate to fit both the limited data and the conclusion you want.
There's a causal arrow from innovation to greater wealth, and there's a causal arrow from greater wealth to greater freedom/liberalness. So you can join the two arrows.
Of course there's also a lot of fear of missing out as Hanson mentioned, not only between nations but also between towns/cities or between competing corporations.
If innovation is a big factor in the economy, what you see is that wealth migrates to people who embrace innovation, and migrates away from people who are too traditional. These people who are now innovating and have more wealth exert political influence on society to permit more innovation so they can get richer.
Also, innovation requires a more educated population, in order for the workforce to understand and effectively use the new tools. Education causes freedom/liberalness.
But if it goes through wealth than that doesn't mean if we decrease innovation we should expect society to get less liberal. After all reducing innovation just decreases the rate at which you increase wealth.
I think the idea is that elite groups have a tendency to be illiberal in order to protect their privileged positions. What counteracts this is innovation, which gives these groups a selfish reason to avoid stasis. When innovation stops, these groups don't become illiberal because they have less wealth; they do so because that is their natural tendency. It's an interesting idea.
Right, but those all occur per person so as long as per person innovation stays the same the incentive doesn't change. Indeed, decreasing population might increase per person innovation.
If it wasn't per person innovation that mattered you'd expect smaller countries to be highly illiberal and we don't see that.
To the extent that elites compete on a global basis, country size shouldn't affect their incentives toward innovation. Also it seems that absolute innovation, not per-person, is most relevant in this competition. A factor that Robin doesn't discuss is the (likely) increasing number of countries that will join in this competition, as the Asian countries have done over the last decades. (Without a doubt China has increased American elites' willingness to adopt AI innovations, for example.) If for example the African countries became major contributors to global innovation, this would offset declining total populations. The world still has a lot of untapped human potential.
But elites can change the laws in their country to retain their high status there without affecting the rest of the world. If I'm an elite in a small country, why don't my incentives look the same as the incentives of someone in a world with small global population? Indeed, why don't I have even more incentive to be illiberal because I can count on people in other countries innovating? But that doesn't appear to be what we see.
Re: number of countries entering the competition that's a good point. And doesn't that suggest, on Robin's argument, that we should see more liberalism than today as long as the world population remains above about 1 billion (as his argument rests on countries entering this global culture). If so, then what we need to know is if population will fall that far (Robin agrees it won't literally go to zero so there will be some floor and we need to know where that floor is before we can draw conclusions).
I mentioned four factors, a general increase in wealth only being one of them. If innovation decreases, (1) fear of missing out on innovation decreases, reducing that incentive to have social rules permitting it (2) there are fewer influential people who personally profit from innovation and have a resulting incentive to push for rules allowing it (3) there is less need for an educated populace.
In the absence of those factors, the tendency of powerful factions to entrench their power and maintain stability by prohibiting innovation would be ascendant.
Regarding the other factors, sure that could be how things go but you could come up with lots of different stories here about how things are likely to play out and I don't think there is very strong evidence cited for any of these more involved causal stories.
So yah, it's a way things could play out but not really persuasive reason to increase one's probability of decreasing liberalism conditional on decreasing population.
I could equally well point to the same considerations and say that since the Innovation per person likely increases the incentive is to increase liberalism because the relative benefit of control to allowing freedom to innovate more increases.
I'm not trying to argue it's impossible things go as Robin suggests just that he hasn't yet actually given us reason to be persuaded that they will.
Yeah, I am also not convinced by Robin's projections for decreasing innovation in the future. We're going to reach the point where engineered intelligence is superior to and cheaper than human intelligence, all bets are off after that.
Well, I think you're generally right about this.
Although, I'm skeptical that "innovation of the sort that makes nation-states worried about falling behind other nation-states" is actually slowing currently. The Big One right now is AI. The world is getting separated into the AI Haves and Have-Nots. It's easy to imagine how even fairly dumb AI could completely revolutionize the entire economy by replacing all sorts of menial jobs. The AI that we've got is increasingly not dumb, and is thus reaching towards office jobs as well.
Also the fears of population decline are overblown. There is currently a strong selection pressure for people with heritable genes that cause them to have a lot of kids despite living in a high-education high-tech society. People with genes like that do exist and their descendants will be numerous. We're talking hundreds of years in the future, anyway, by which point our society will be practically unrecognizable due to robots doing everything, so such predictions are pointless.
The more pressing demographic problem is that as AI keeps doing more and more human jobs better and cheaper than the humans, we are going to have to figure out what to do with all the humans who cannot get a job because they cannot compete with the AI. This could become a majority of the population. UBI? Mass starvation and riots? Legal restrictions on what jobs robots can do? Subsidies for human workers?
Most people in world history have lived lives of terrible poverty and oppression. If you are correct, and, sadly, I suspect you are, we would just be going back to normal.
My guess is that the world will stay pretty rich during this long innovation pause. So an illiberal world, but not so much a poor world.
But what about in the world where insular fertile subcultures dominate, would not it then be the case that the population very quickly reaches whatever the the Malthusian limit is, given available tech?
That's a long way off, so hard to foresee.
I'll repeat myself here, the only progress we humans have actually accomplished, in our brief history, is our ability to live longer lives, period.
Do you mean we haven't improved average human well-being/welfare? Seems implausible given we've significantly attenuated the worst forms of physical suffering.
*unneeded
I mean what I stated. In the thousands of years that we humans have been in control of this glob of dirt, we all call home, we've worked so hard at acquiring uneeded objects, that we still hate way too much. History, as well as present day, are testament to this fact. Though we are able to see the effects of our greed for an increasing lifespan . So that's the progress the "smartest" species has accomplished. If physical suffering were equal to mental, then perhaps we'd agree.
How many dinners with your family or hours of listening to your favorite band would trade to avoid the worst kinds of physical suffering (eg. the equivalent of someone pulling your toenails out or the last few weeks of a fatal small pox infection) ? Mental well-being is not only about freedom from physical suffering but it certainty has to encompass it. In other words, you can cash out freedom from physical pain in mental well-being terms. By this metric alone, your claim is false, unless you think our mental suffering has gotten significantly worse to compensate for that.
I feel that the amount of mass shootings and our suicide rates could lend some credence to the mental health of Americans, in general. Humans inability to find peace should be our need, placed above all of our wants, including the size of our TV's, garages larger than our homes used to be, etc. Perhaps if we returned to a less pain free time then people would focus on ending the selfishness the world seems to cherish so dearly, and stop killing one another due to greed. But this is just my opinion. When nearly half of our fellow citizens are willing to begin another civil war over their "wants".
I'm fairly confident that they're not interested in my pain level. I suppose that I could very well be the one with insane mental health issues and the lovers of war, word-wide famine, religious beliefs du jour, the money holders, to name just a few, are the sane individuals though.
The lynchpin of your analysis is that when populations decline, so will innovation. I would posit that the two are not inextricably linked. We know, for instance, that population growth doesn't in and of itself ensure liberal societies - many a society has growth in population to be illiberal. So, why would the reverse be different?
Population growth just isn't the same thing as innovation.
I am trying very hard to think of an economic equation that says innovation and GDP are reliant on population headcount in any way whatsoever. There is certainly no empirical evidence in support of your assertion, and I'd be interested to find out where the supposed supporting economic theory comes from.
I am trying very hard to think of an economic equation that says innovation and GDP are reliant on population headcount in any way whatsoever. There is certainly no empirical evidence in support of your assertion, and I'd be interested to find out where the supposed supporting economic theory comes from.
Your analysis seems very similar to my own analysis of the advantages and drawbacks of skepticism: "In environs and situations in which survival is precarious and military-esque deference to authority is necessary to stay alive, having a sudden increase in skepticism and doubt of the hierarchy could lead to the death of the society and the individuals that it comprises. But at other times, the meme of skepticism presents great advantages: being creative, willing to go one’s own way, follow one’s inclinations and not blindly stumble after the herd can yield enormous benefits when it comes to science, business, art, politics, or personal interactions. I would posit that there is a strong correlation between the prevalence of the skepticism meme and the level of creativity, dynamism, and liberty of a society."
https://whitherthewest.substack.com/p/the-heterozygote-advantage-and-the
Unless we see a massive cultural shift in the direction of higher fertility, seems like there are only three ways out of this:
1. Advances in synthetic biology that help us engineer higher IQ babies such that we need fewer people to produce the same number of ideas.
2. Artificial wombs and other technology that can potentially reduce the human cost of bearing or raising children.
3. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence
It's concerning that effective altruism is perhaps marking #3 less plausible and doing nothing to make 1 and 2 more likely. Even if you're concerned about x risk from AI, you should probably hedge your AI forecasts by funding #1 and #2, such that if AI progress stalls, we're in a world that has made progress on both enhancing human cognition and making the species more prolific.
Most of the work of parenting happens after birth, so tech to make it easier to birth doesn't help much.
My mother had 11 biological children but said 3 was the hardest number to take care of for her. After that the older ones were developed enough to entertain the younger ones more.
I think you would see fertile subcultures emerge with very large families (20+ children) if you remove the biological limits of age and every-other-year. These populations would double much faster than Amish.
Also need to consider that secular people who wait could start families in their 40s and still have quite a few children if they saved eggs earlier.
I'm not saying artificial wombs will happen. I just think if they worked and were relatively cheap they would boost fertility a lot over time.
You're right. Within that bucket of directly targeting , I'd be inclined to prioritize subsidizing fertility extension (egg freezing) and cash incentives to couples. What gives me pause is the diminishingly small % of women who opt to freeze their eggs even when it's paid for by employers. If we're living in a world where most of the fertility decrease ie being driven by women pair-bonding late; annd if in fact, people's (especially women) attitudes towards child bearing and raising become more favorable with age (when they're also better able to afford kids), making fertility extension as less invasive, painless and inexpensive as possible seems like a good bet so that an increasing proportion of women in their 20s freeze their eggs.
Robin, bravo.
Curious: how does your latest thinking, if at all, affect your thinking re: great filters, grabby aliens, UFOs, et al.
That the virtuous cycle b/t innovation begets liberality will eventually peter out (due to the wealth-fertility paradox, i.e., declining fertility) implies a very hard step for any civilization to overcome indeed and not specific to our own civilization.
A thousand year delay hardly makes any difference re cosmological estimates.
Good angle! Sounds like stasis is useful only in the strictest winter; flux (innovation) the rest of the time
Some evidence to support your view: https://scholar.harvard.edu/bfriedman/pages/moral-consequences-economic-growth
His claim seems to be that increasingly rich people are generous people. I'm making a rather different claim.
I think IIRC he also says that times of fast economic growth are good for liberalism, conceived rather broadly to include various kinds of tolerance. But his mechanism is different, it's not interstate competition but more like "a growing pie makes people less mean and focuses them on positive-sum interactions". I read it a long time ago.