Last month, I posed the following challenge on Twitter:
The last 25 years have delivered amazing economic and technological progress for humanity.
*Political* progress, in contrast, is hard even to detect during this period.
What political change on Earth since 1996 has been even 2% as wonderful as the collapse of Communism?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) February 10, 2021
The responses mostly confirmed my political pessimism. After all, the collapse of Communism did not merely greatly increase the freedom and prosperity of the subjects of the former Soviet bloc; it also drastically reduced the risk of World War III, along with Soviet-backed and Soviet-inspired military strife across the Third World. What political changes since then remotely compare?
1. As the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, I’m a “one cheer for democracy” kind of guy. Still, the best responses to my challenge pointed to the continuing rise of democracy. Arthur Baker pointed to the modest rise in the number of democracies (and corresponding modest fall in the number of autocracies). Jeremy Horpedahl pointed to the rise in the share of people worldwide living under democracy. But Our World In Data also shows an absolute fall in the number of liberal democracies. The number of closed autocracies fell, but by most counts China’s has grown markedly more despotic during this quarter century. So while I wouldn’t dismiss the democracy answer out of hand, I’d say that if these gains exceeds my 2% threshold, they don’t exceed it by much.
2. A few other respondents pointed to immigration liberalization: the Schengen zone, EU expansion, and rising immigration to the U.S. and Western Europe. While I consider these steps in the right direction, the magnitudes arevery modest. Generously speaking, global borders moved from 98% closed to 97% closed. I’m open to the idea that moving to 0% closed borders would be as good as the Soviet collapse, so perhaps the immigration changes we’ve experienced are roughly 1% as good as the Soviet bloc. But it takes some effort to believe that open borders would be twice as good as the Soviet collapse. To repeat, the Soviet collapse did much more than merely free the victims of Soviet tyranny; it lifted the specter of World War III for the whole planet. So again, I doubt actually-existing immigration liberalization exceeds my 2% value cutoff.
3. A few respondents hailed the fall in world poverty and so on. All this would of course fall under the heading of amazing “economic and technological progress.” The same goes for Bitcoin, another popular answer, though it’s hard to see that it noticeably improved the quality of life for even 1% of the global population. Humanity can and does enjoy economic and technological progress despite political stagnation.
4. Finally, respondents named a grab bag of newspaper headlines: Brexit, Tunisian democracy, increasing gay rights, multi-party democracy in Mexico, higher transparency, and so on. None of these strike me as plausible candidates. Remember: Almost everything is small from a global perspective. The Soviet collapse dramatically improved the lives of billions, though most of them probably never realized what they gained. To be in the running, then, your change would have to dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions. Increasing gay rights is the most credible contender, but how much of the improvement there comes from actual political reform rather than cultural evolution?
Overall, then, the responses to my query strengthened my conviction that global politics has been basically stagnant for a quarter century. The world keeps getting better. We have more stuff. We know more stuff. We even treat each other better. But since the burst of progress in my youth, the quality of global politics has been, like Han Solo, frozen in carbonite.
READER COMMENTS
Alex Harris
Mar 31 2021 at 10:01am
What about the economic liberalization of China, Vietnam, etc.? Not as dramatic as the Soviet collapse – but might it be 2% as dramatic (especially in the long term)?
Phil H
Mar 31 2021 at 10:30am
“China’s has grown markedly more despotic during this quarter century”
This is absolutely incorrect. I have lived in China for the last 18 years, and it is much freer than it was 18 years ago. Most of the increase in freedom is a result of increasing wealth and new technologies. But there has also been a massively significant increase in political freedom on one particular dimension: the end of the 1 child policy. (On other dimensions, not so much – repression in Xinjiang is terrible, as repression in Tibet was 20 years ago.)
More generally, I would cite the increase in peace (it seems to me that violent conflicts are fewer and smaller now, though I don’t have the figures); and the increase in political deadlock in democracies, which suggests that there aren’t any more low-hanging Pareto improvements to make.
Josh S
Mar 31 2021 at 10:43am
I’m curious what political changes you think meets this bar prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union? If they occur more frequently than every 25 years, then it may be stagnation. But if there’s only one every 100 years or so then it shouldn’t be especially surprising or depressing that we haven’t had one since 1996.
Mark Bahner
Apr 1 2021 at 12:14am
The defeat of Nazi Germany and the empire of Japan certainly qualifies.
P.S. It’s interesting that Bryan would say there has been a “collapse of communism” since the Communist Party runs mainland China, which has a world-highest population of approximately 1.4 billion, and has the largest GDP of any country in the world, on a purchasing power parity basis. So “partial collapse,” or “collapse of the Soviet Union” would seem to be more accurate descriptions.
Phil H
Apr 1 2021 at 7:43pm
I think it’s fair to say that in China, communism as an ideology was thoroughly subverted by Deng in the 1980s. While the word “communist” remains a major part of the CPC’s propaganda, their policies no longer include enforced equality or state ownership of all means of production. These days in economic policy terms, they are centre-left. (Also, authoritarian, statist, militarist.)
BC
Apr 2 2021 at 12:36am
While the CCP may not practice communist ideology, it is still the most powerful totalitarian regime in the world. The most salient characteristic of the different flavors of totalitarianism — fascism, communism, and whatever one wants to call the Chinese version — is the totalitarian part more so than the subtle distinctions that distinguish them from each other.
Steve
Mar 31 2021 at 10:56am
There hasn’t been anything close to a new Hitler, or a new Stalin. I’ll take today’s political villains of Xi, Putin, Kim, and the Ayatollah over the 20th century’s any day. The lack of a globally relevant tyrant coming to power over 25 years may not exactly look like progress, but it is compared to the 20th century status quo of expecting someone like that to come to power every so often.
Steve
Mar 31 2021 at 11:28am
Whoever answered “Bitcoin” is living in such an alternate reality I can’t even comprehend how they think about the world.
Bitcoin means exactly nil to 99.98% of the people on this planet.
Francisco Garrido
Mar 31 2021 at 6:20pm
I think you are taking a rather short time frame. What were the great political gains in the previous quarter of a century (1970-1995)? I’m hard pressed to find anything comparable to the fall of communism. To find something of the same magnitude you’d have to go back to the end of WWII.
Erik L
Mar 31 2021 at 10:21pm
Bryan, at this point I really feel you have to answer some of the questions raised by Josh S, Steve, and Francisco Garrido for us readers to understand what you mean and what your point is. Just to add what a are essentially variations I thought of when reading your post: What measure up to the fall of the Soviet Union during 1946 – 1971 (ie the 25 years before rather than after; 1946-1971, 1971-1996, 1996-2021)? I could think of some, but no idea what you think. Given where we are, what concrete change could measure up in the next 25?
Weir
Apr 1 2021 at 12:15am
Stagnation?
Washington Post: “Murders skyrocketed in many major U.S. cities in 2020, increasing by nearly 37 percent over 2019’s total in a collection of 57 large jurisdictions. The rise was much larger in some places, such as Seattle (74 percent) and Chicago (56 percent). New York, long the national symbol for how crime rates plummeted in the 1990s, saw a nearly 45 percent hike in murders and a 97 percent increase in shootings.”
You could say that’s just American politics, not global politics. As if the rest of the world can escape from American politics.
Which it can’t. Try to imagine the Russian government in 1986, after Chernobyl, saying something like “frozen food” or “racism” as a way of changing the subject.
The official fiction about Chernobyl was a failure. Nobody bought it. But it turns out that American politics is the only politics there is, and American politics means that this Communist government, in 2021, is protected in a way that, in 1986, Russia’s Communists weren’t.
Chernobyl was embarrassing to Russia’s Communist government. But is Xi Jinping embarrassed about his government’s failure to come clean and to bring a little transparency to what went wrong under his leadership?
I’m not sure that Xi Jinping’s Chernobyl in Wuhan is as much as 2% of the problem to him, personally, that Chernobyl was to Gorbachev. Does Xi feel much pressure to face up to the failures of his government, or to get honest about the censorship and the disinformation that got us here?
American politics means that this Communist government doesn’t feel 2% of the pressure that Russia’s Communists were under. And this is despite the fact that the death toll from Chernobyl is a fraction of, for example, the death toll in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, to say nothing of what Xi Jinping is responsible for.
Mark
Apr 1 2021 at 3:46pm
The Chinese government response was a Chernobyl-level embarrassment for about a months until all the other countries on Earth also showed that they also couldn’t contain COVID. The equivalent would be if, immediately after Chernobyl, even worse nuclear power plant disasters happened all around the world. The conclusion that normal people would draw from that would be “nuclear power is dangerous” rather than “the USSR was unusually incompetent.”
Weir
Apr 6 2021 at 4:43am
Poynter: “On Jan. 3, Agence France Press reported that police forces from Wuhan, the capital of the Chinese province of Hubei, “had punished eight people for ‘publishing or forwarding false information on the internet without verification.'” By that time, police forces had posted a note on their social media channels, informing people about the detention and requesting citizens in Wuhan to obey the law and refrain from spreading misinformation.”
Arresting people for publishing true information is, as a practical matter, not conducive to containing a disease. (Arresting people for publishing true information is wrong regardless.)
Knowing more stuff, as Bryan says up above, is good. Knowing more is better than knowing less.
But taking their database offline, which the Wuhan Institute of Virology did in October 2019, and putting their knowledge off-limits? Not good. Obviously.
These are the experts. Nobody knows more about this stuff than these particular scientists. This is the place that MIT Technology Review calls “the world epicenter of research on dangerous SARS-like bat coronaviruses.” They should share what they know. They shouldn’t fear being punished, the way Li Wenliang was punished, and the way his seven colleagues were punished.
But obviously the precedent was set back in 2019. Tell the truth, go to jail. Share what you know, the police arrest you for it.
Julian
Apr 1 2021 at 8:22am
“Stagnant” is better than “worse”, in a “no news is good news” kind of way. And the immigration restrictions probably have something to do with it.
Now, I know Bryan’s arguments about that—namely, that immigrants have lower turnout, make the natives more fiscally conservative, that the parties aren’t all that different anyway, etc.— but as we’re seeing, there’s one party that takes recklessness in spending, regulating, and public-health restrictions to insane new levels. And immigrants don’t just vote economic ideology; they vote parties.
So, yeah. Chalk me up as the “restriction to preserve freedom” kind of guy when it comes to this issue. At least, until Latinos and Asians go over 40% Republican or something—somewhere close to fifty-fifty.
And truth is, I don’t really like this, because I’m socially liberal, in the more traditional sense: I’m not really pro-family (politically speaking), I’m not a nationalist of any kind, not much of a puritan, and I do enjoy diversity. But I’d like to enjoy diversity in a country where the combined levels of government suck up less than 40% of its wealth.
Mark
Apr 1 2021 at 3:35pm
I think this overrates the importance of the fall of the Soviet Union. The fall of the Soviet Union was an unambiguous benefit only for the Baltic countries and maybe Georgia and Azerbaijan, which collectively were only a small percentage of the overall population of the USSR. It did not benefit Russia, where half the Soviet population lived, as Russia suffered a very severe economic crisis and drop in life expectancy in the 90s. Ukraine, the second largest Soviet Republic, is now a basket case and the poorest country in Europe. The Central Asian parts of the USSR got dictators that were worse than the late Soviet leaders, like the guy who boiled people alive in Uzbekistan, and massive trade barriers and poverty to boot. Polls in post-Soviet countries show that most people regard the fall of the Soviet Union as a bad thing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx. So the fall of the USSR probably hurt democracy and freedom in the long run because it is a scary precedent for a lot of people in the world, who do not want their countries to turn into 90s Russia or Ukraine or Uzbekistan. Xi and Putin cite the fall of the USSR as something to avoid.
The liberalization of trade, the ongoing economic reforms in China and the economic reforms in India in the 1990s, and more generally the rapid economic development of Global South countries in the 2000s, were all a much bigger deal that benefitted far more people than the fall of the USSR.
BC
Apr 2 2021 at 1:30am
The mid 90s was the presumed End of History, when liberal democratic capitalism finally triumphed over all competitor ideologies including socialism and fascism. So, it’s not surprising that there have been no significant political gains after that as there were many more ways that things could have gone wrong than ways that things could have gotten better. In a sense, the best we could have hoped for would have been for things to have remained the same, i.e., to have reached the true End of History.
How could things possibly have gotten better? The two obvious ways, already alluded to by others: (1) the collapse of the Chinese Communist regime (CCP) and (2) open borders immigration. The second would have been a straightforward application of liberal democratic capitalist principles, the End of History running its natural course. The first, if it had happened, would have indeed rivaled, or arguably surpassed, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over 1B Chinese suffer under CCP totalitarianism, far more than lived in the Soviet Union, and CCP collapse would have also freed billions more Indo-Pacific neighbors from the threat of CCP domination. We need only look at Hong Kong to understand the threat faced by the entire Indo-Pacific region. (In 1996, Hong Kong was not part of China, and only the New Territories were under an expiring 99-yr lease. The rest had previously been permanently ceded to the British.) It’s actually somewhat surprising that, in the immediate aftermath of the Free World’s victory over Soviet communism in the Cold War, the Free World didn’t even attempt to follow the same successful playbook to defeat Chinese communism over the last 25 years. It’s one thing to repeat the same mistakes in history; it’s quite another to forgo repeating the same successes.
What was one of the many ways that things could have gotten worse that actually happened? The rise of nationalist populism seems like the most obvious development.
Caplan’s question and comments seem to suggest that he would agree that the mid-90s were the pinnacle of liberal democratic capitalism. The same period was also the peak of American hegemony. The periods on either side of that peak, when other superpowers and nationalist populists competed with America for influence, have been worse for liberal democratic capitalism. The coincident timing of liberal democracy and American hegemony is probably worth noting for skeptics of American Exceptionalism and American interventionism, of which Caplan is probably one.
Marko
Apr 5 2021 at 6:35pm
There is no bigger political change / reform in the last 25 years than that was the collapse of Soviet Union, but there is one economic and political reform that could benefit more people than the collapse of USSR: abolition of income tax worldwide. Giving people back the fruits of their labour.
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