My understanding is that this explains what is happening in poor countries and why democracies came to be quite well, but I don’t think it’s obvious this also applies in situations where there are enough resources to make everyone somewhat rich because betting on a coup to concentrate more power in the hands of your faction becomes less appealing as people get closer to saturating their selfish preferences.
When Norway started to make a lot of money with oil, my understanding is that it didn’t become significantly more authoritarian, and that if its natural resource rent exploded to become 95% of its GDP, there would be a decent amount of redistribution (maybe not an egalitarian distribution, but sufficient redistribution that you would be better off being in the bottom 10% of citizens of this hypothetical Norway than in the top 10% of any major Western country today) and it would remain a democracy.
but I don’t think it’s obvious this also applies in situations where there are enough resources to make everyone somewhat rich because betting on a coup to concentrate more power in the hands of your faction becomes less appealing as people get closer to saturating their selfish preferences.
I think the core blocker here is existential threats to factions if they don’t gain power, or even perceived existential threats to factions will become more common, because you’ve removed the constraint of popular revolt/ability to sabotage logistics, and you’ve made coordination to remove other factions very easy, and I expect identity-based issues to be much more common post-AGI as the constraint of wealth/power is almost completely removed, and these issues tend to be easily heightened to existential stakes.
I’m not giving examples here, even though they exist, since they’re far too political for LW, and LW’s norm against politics is especially important to preserve here, because these existential issues would over time make LW comment/post quality much worse.
More generally, I’m more pessimistic about what a lot of people would do to other people if they didn’t have a reason to fear any feedback/backlash.
Edit: I removed the section on the more common case being Nigeria or Congo.
the much more common case is something like the Congo or Nigeria [...] so the base rates are pretty bad.
These are not valid counterexamples because my argument was very specifically about rich countries that are already democracies. As far as I know 100% (1/1) of already rich democracies that then get rich from natural resources don’t become more autocratic. The base rate is great! (Though obviously it’s n=1 from a country that has an oil rent that is much less than 95% of its GDP.)
My understanding is that this explains what is happening in poor countries and why democracies came to be quite well, but I don’t think it’s obvious this also applies in situations where there are enough resources to make everyone somewhat rich because betting on a coup to concentrate more power in the hands of your faction becomes less appealing as people get closer to saturating their selfish preferences.
When Norway started to make a lot of money with oil, my understanding is that it didn’t become significantly more authoritarian, and that if its natural resource rent exploded to become 95% of its GDP, there would be a decent amount of redistribution (maybe not an egalitarian distribution, but sufficient redistribution that you would be better off being in the bottom 10% of citizens of this hypothetical Norway than in the top 10% of any major Western country today) and it would remain a democracy.
I think the core blocker here is existential threats to factions if they don’t gain power, or even perceived existential threats to factions will become more common, because you’ve removed the constraint of popular revolt/ability to sabotage logistics, and you’ve made coordination to remove other factions very easy, and I expect identity-based issues to be much more common post-AGI as the constraint of wealth/power is almost completely removed, and these issues tend to be easily heightened to existential stakes.
I’m not giving examples here, even though they exist, since they’re far too political for LW, and LW’s norm against politics is especially important to preserve here, because these existential issues would over time make LW comment/post quality much worse.
More generally, I’m more pessimistic about what a lot of people would do to other people if they didn’t have a reason to fear any feedback/backlash.
Edit: I removed the section on the more common case being Nigeria or Congo.
These are not valid counterexamples because my argument was very specifically about rich countries that are already democracies. As far as I know 100% (1/1) of already rich democracies that then get rich from natural resources don’t become more autocratic. The base rate is great! (Though obviously it’s n=1 from a country that has an oil rent that is much less than 95% of its GDP.)
Reference class tennis, yay!