Balaji Srinivasan: prediction

Transcript context

…You’ve given a very famous talk, or several talks actually, on the ideas of exit and voice in the global community — the idea that your ability to leave a government can induce liberty and wealth-creating policies. If we have a theory where exit is important as a source of liberty, how do we explain that liberty seems to be declining in all of the world’s leaders, or most of them? Now, I think, the whole axis is tilting back the other way where, because they were civilizationally vaccinated against the lure of communism due to the 20th century, the Chinese, the Russians, the Eastern Europeans have a civilizational memory of why that was a bad idea. So they’ve reacted against it by establishing these states, which are not necessarily all totally free-market capitalist in the best ways but certainly are not what you’d call hardcore communist. They’re not mass-murdering people and seizing their land anymore. That affects society in many different ways. Basically, people have this near-term 30-years-ago-memory of “Hey, that was actually a bad idea to try to move in that direction politically.” Right now, are you more bullish on large political units or small political units?…

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