Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…No, but if you said to a randomly selected person, “Almost certainly you’re not going to be a slave,” then that does matter. From behind a veil of ignorance, if an average person has some likelihood of being a slave, and that’s way down, then that matters. In any case, legal slavery, that is enforceable by the state and carried out in open slave markets, no longer exists. Will it come back? I think probably not. There are other things where it’s not inexorable, it’s not monotonic, but it certainly seems to have a direction. That doesn’t guarantee that it continues because there is no such thing as literal momentum, but it does indicate that as there are greater means of exchanging information, as there are wider and wider pools of people exchanging information and having to agree on common interests, there is some force, some vector. Now, again, I don’t want to say it’s going to win, just that it exists. It’s not that liberal enlightenment, I think, is gone forever. It isn’t even gone. More countries are democratic than not, even though if it’s fewer than it was 20 years ago. Liberal democracy is on its heels. There is some retreat, but we’re still better off than we were in the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s, the ’60s, the ’50s in terms of liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s gone forever. I think my view would be science will do fine, but even the Enlightenment proper did not have universalism to begin with. The future for universalism, to me, looks quite grim. I think we will have a steady stream of low-level conflict across major powers. China does all these cyberattacks on us. They would have been acts of war way back when, and we just put up with it. Russia sabotages EU infrastructure. That might have been an act of war way back when. We just put up with it. We’ll just be creeping up, up, up that threshold, not to nuclear war, but we’ll get as close as we can get without deterrence really having to kick in. The world will just be more violent and have more conflict. Why is that wrong? I think that’s interesting because, as you say, it doesn’t result in war, and war would be much worse. The invasion of Ukraine, rewinding the clock 100 years, that could have been like the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo. It could have been that NATO decided to go all in, and something like World War I or even worse could have happened. As awful as Ukraine is, and that is awful, it’s not as bad as World War I. If these cyberattacks, these insults, because of a norm threatened by Putin, no doubt, and by Xi, that you don’t invade your neighbors, you don’t try to rearrange borders by force, we haven’t had another world war. If what you said is correct, things could suck, but still, they could suck much worse if we had a world war. I think it is less likely than it was 100 years ago.…

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