📈 Democracy's growth dependence

Liberal institutions thrive when living standards rise. New research suggests they may struggle to survive without it

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:

Stagnation and tyranny were humanity’s default settings for tens of thousands of years. The growth + democracy combo is only a very recent aberration.

I’m reminded of astronomer Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar,” which compresses the entire history of the universe into a single year. On that clock, modern humans arrive only in the final minutes of December 31, and everything from agriculture to democratic market capitalism flickers into existence in the final few seconds before midnight. Our political and economic modernity, in other words, isn’t humanity’s norm, it’s a startling, late-breaking experiment.

And how’s the experiment working out? When Henry Kissinger, then America’s top diplomat, asked Zhou Enlai, the longtime Chinese premier, what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou allegedly replied: “It is too soon to tell.”

So far, so good for us — more than good, miraculous really — but can this project be sustained? Maybe too soon to tell.