I’m a big fan of extrapolating trendlines, and I think the current trendlines are concerning. But when evaluating the likelihood that “most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships”, I’d say these trends point firmly against this being “the most likely overall outcome” in the next 10 years. (While still increasing my worry about this as a tail-risk, a longer-term phenomena, and as a more localized phenomena.)
If we extrapolate the graphs linearly, we get:
If we wait 10 years, we will have 5 fewer “free” countries and 7 more “non-free” countries. (Out of 195 countries being tracked. Or: ~5-10% fewer “free” countries.)
If we wait 10 years, the average democracy index will fall from 5.3 to somewhere around 5.0-5.1.
That’s really bad. But it would be inconsistent with a wide fascist turn in the West, which would cause bigger swings in those metrics.
(As far as I can tell, the third graph is supposed to indiciate the sign of the derivative of something like a democracy index, in each of many countries? Without looking into their criteria more, I don’t know what it’s supposed to say about the absolute size of changes, if anything.)
This also makes me confused about the next section’s framing. If there’s no “National Exceptionalism” where western countries are different from the others, then presumably the same trends should apply. But those suggest that the headline claim is unlikely. (But that we should be concerned about less probable, less widespread, and/or longer-term changes of the same kind.)
+1.
I’m a big fan of extrapolating trendlines, and I think the current trendlines are concerning. But when evaluating the likelihood that “most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships”, I’d say these trends point firmly against this being “the most likely overall outcome” in the next 10 years. (While still increasing my worry about this as a tail-risk, a longer-term phenomena, and as a more localized phenomena.)
If we extrapolate the graphs linearly, we get:
If we wait 10 years, we will have 5 fewer “free” countries and 7 more “non-free” countries. (Out of 195 countries being tracked. Or: ~5-10% fewer “free” countries.)
If we wait 10 years, the average democracy index will fall from 5.3 to somewhere around 5.0-5.1.
That’s really bad. But it would be inconsistent with a wide fascist turn in the West, which would cause bigger swings in those metrics.
(As far as I can tell, the third graph is supposed to indiciate the sign of the derivative of something like a democracy index, in each of many countries? Without looking into their criteria more, I don’t know what it’s supposed to say about the absolute size of changes, if anything.)
This also makes me confused about the next section’s framing. If there’s no “National Exceptionalism” where western countries are different from the others, then presumably the same trends should apply. But those suggest that the headline claim is unlikely. (But that we should be concerned about less probable, less widespread, and/or longer-term changes of the same kind.)