Falling everyday violence, bigger wars and atrocities: how do they net out?

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

> Adapted from an [old GiveWell blog post](https://blog.givewell.org/2015/07/08/has-violence-declined-when-large-scale-atrocities-are-systematically-included/), which has more detail.

[The Better Angels of our Nature](https://smile.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0/) argues that “violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence … it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.”

The book gives many examples of ways in which violence has declined. It looks at trends in homicides, in executions, in bans on slavery and torture, in corporal punishment at school, in hunting, even in apologies by political and religious leaders.

What it doesn't provide is a [systematic](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/#the-basic-approach), long-run examination of trends in violence: a **single, consistent set of key indicators reported in the same way and tracked over long time periods** (in particular, [going back further than a few hundred years](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/)). Without this, it's hard to know whether "violence has declined" is a consistent, across-the-board phenomenon, or just a description of the particular measures and time periods that the book chooses to focus on.

And my best attempt to look at a single systematic indicator (the violent death rate) presents a muddier picture about long-run trends in violence, because **it's plausible (though not clear) that the increasing severity, over time, of the largest wars and atrocities has been big enough to mostly (if not entirely) offset a lot of the improvements on everyday (and other) dimensions of violence.**

Below, I will:

* Outline what I see as the "missing piece" of the existing analysis on trends in violence over time: the question of what happened to the violent death rate, accounting *both* for everyday violence (e.g., homicides) *and* large-scale wars and atrocities.

* Present some rough analysis that I did to address the "missing piece" and thus examine trends in overall violent death rates over the long run. In brief:

* Deaths from wars and atrocities appear to have gone up significantly starting around the 13th century, which is pretty close in time to the first documented signs of [falling homicide rates](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/#comparison-to-societies-in-between-then-and-now).

* When accounting for deaths from wars and atrocities, it's not clear whether the violent death rate declined between 500 BCE and the mid-20th century. (And that's as far back as the wars/atrocities data goes.)

* The last 50 years or so have had low death tolls from *both* homicides and wars/atrocities.

* One spin on these observations - a bit on the provocative side, but a simple take that has a number of implications I agree with - might be: "Over time, increasing state power and order has led to falling everyday violence, but offsetting (at least partially, maybe fully) risk of increasingly infrequent, extreme violence. You could think of these twin trends as continuing even now, as observed violence levels are low across the board, but [global catastrophic risks may be at all-time highs](https://theprecipice.com/)."

* To be clear, today's violent death rates look solidly lower than [those of very early humans](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/#violent-death-rates-in-nomadic-societies-sedentary-societies-and-todays-societies). So it seems like there must have been a decline in violence at some point - it just remains very unclear when that decline was and how steady it was. (This is similar to my [general take quality of life over the very long run](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/): we know the most recent period has seen improvement, but the picture is murkier before that.)

* Estimates of death tolls from wars and atrocities seem highly debatable. Some of the discrepancies and revisions are really huge, so all of the claims here are quite uncertain.

The "missing piece": total violent death rates
----------------------------------------------

In my view, the single best indicator for long-run trends in violence is the **violent death rate:** how many total deaths from violence there were, per person (or per 100,000 people), per year. Deaths tend to be easier to verify and measure than most other relevant indicators, and to the extent that *Better Angels* discusses very long time frames, it is mostly discussing some measure of violent deaths. But the way it presents these is, in my opinion, easy to get confused by:

* It presents many charts of declining *homicide* rates over the past several centuries.

* It does not present comparable charts for deaths from *wars and atrocities* (famines, genocides, etc.) It does have an extensive discussion of what we should make of the fact that some of history's bloodiest wars and atrocities were in the 20th century - but it does not look at the numbers for these wars and atrocities in the same terms as homicides, and plot the overall trend of all violent deaths combined. (Some more discussion of the analysis that *is* presented for atrocities is summarized at my [2015 blog post](https://blog.givewell.org/2015/07/08/has-violence-declined-when-large-scale-atrocities-are-systematically-included/); see "BA's argument and the need for more analysis.")

In my view, this means there's a "missing piece" of the story of trends in violence: we see that one kind of violent death has become less common over the last several hundred years, but we don't see the trend in *all* kinds of violent deaths. And I consider this missing piece significant, because my sense is that **wars and atrocities account for far more violent deaths than most of the other sources of violence the book discusses.**

For example - and this surprised me - the global rate of violent deaths from the 20th century's “big four” atrocities alone (two World Wars, regimes of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong) – spread out over the entire 20th century – is ~50 violent deaths per 100,000 people per year; that’s comparable to the very worst national homicide rates seen today, whereas the homicide rate for high-income countries such as the U.S. tends to be less than 1/10 as high.

In other words, **the two World Wars + Stalin and Mao alone were enough to make the 20th century as a whole more dangerous than homicide makes today’s homicide-heaviest countries**, and they were enough to offset the benefit of the European homicide rate decline that Better Angels describes from Medieval times through the Enlightenment.

Deaths from wars and atrocities, by century
-------------------------------------------

*I did this analysis a few years ago, so it's possible that it doesn't incorporate some corrections to the data source I'm using.*

I believe the main source that *Better Angels* uses to tabulate the death tolls of the biggest wars and atrocities is [Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History](http://www.amazon.com/Atrocities-Deadliest-Episodes-Human-History-ebook/dp/B005LW5JMQ/) by Matthew White. (A bit more discussion of why I used this source in [this post](https://blog.givewell.org/2015/07/08/has-violence-declined-when-large-scale-atrocities-are-systematically-included/).) So I pulled the numbers from its "one hundred deadliest multicides [wars and atrocities]" table (pg 529).

I used these numbers to create estimates of the death toll from wars and atrocities each century, per 100k people per year.[1](#fn1) Here's the result (calculations [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N9mMdh2X47AfmDJ4XEw8CDe5CL5O6mfI3KPnzERaplk/edit?usp=sharing)):

| Century | Deaths from atrocities per 100k people per year | #1 worst atrocity (% of deaths this century) | #2 worst atrocity (% of deaths this century) | #3 worst atrocity (% of deaths this century) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 5th BC | 3.1 | Age of Warring States (60%) | Second Persian War (40%) | N/A (0%) |
| 4th BC | 4.3 | Age of Warring States (54%) | Alexander the Great (46%) | N/A (0%) |
| 3rd BC | 11.2 | Qin Shi Huang Di (34%) | Second Punic War (26%) | Age of Warring States (16%) |
| 2nd BC | 3.7 | Roman Slave Wars (52%) | Gladiatorial Games (48%) | N/A (0%) |
| 1st BC | 8.1 | Gallic War (30%) | Gladiatorial Games (21%) | Roman Slave Wars (20%) |
| 1st | 35.0 | Xin Dynasty (94%) | Gladiatorial Games (5%) | Roman-Jewish Wars (2%) |
| 2nd | 3.7 | Gladiatorial Games (43%) | The Three Kingdoms of China (42%) | Roman-Jewish Wars (15%) |
| 3rd | 12.6 | The Three Kingdoms of China (88%) | Gladiatorial Games (12%) | N/A (0%) |
| 4th | 3.2 | Fall of the Western Roman Empire (53%) | Gladiatorial Games (47%) | N/A (0%) |
| 5th | 18.9 | Fall of the Western Roman Empire (97%) | Gladiatorial Games (3%) | N/A (0%) |
| 6th | 2.3 | Justinian (90%) | Goguryeo-Sui Wars (10%) | N/A (0%) |
| 7th | 5.2 | Mideast Slave Trade (73%) | Goguryeo-Sui Wars (27%) | N/A (0%) |
| 8th | 37.6 | An Lushan Rebellion (90%) | Mideast Slave Trade (10%) | Mayan Collapse (1%) |
| 9th | 5.6 | Mideast Slave Trade (63%) | Mayan Collapse (37%) | N/A (0%) |
| 10th | 3.6 | Mideast Slave Trade (94%) | Mayan Collapse (6%) | N/A (0%) |
| 11th | 3.5 | Mideast Slave Trade (95%) | Crusades (5%) | N/A (0%) |
| 12th | 11.2 | Fang La Rebellion (40%) | Crusades (31%) | Mideast Slave Trade (29%) |
| 13th | 98.0 | Chinggis Khan (90%) | Mideast Slave Trade (3%) | Crusades (3%) |
| 14th | 54.7 | Timur (56%) | Fall of the Yuan Dynasty (29%) | Hundred Years War (7%) |
| 15th | 20.8 | Timur (29%) | Atlantic Slave Trade (22%) | Hundred Years War (16%) |
| 16th | 30.4 | Atlantic Slave Trade (30%) | Conquest of the Americas (25%) | French Wars of Religion (20%) |
| 17th | 104.9 | Fall of the Ming Dynasty (48%) | Thirty Years War (14%) | Atlantic Slave Trade (9%) |
| 18th | 33.3 | Famines in British India (34%) | Atlantic Slave Trade (17%) | Conquest of the Americas (14%) |
| 19th | 44.6 | Taiping Rebellion (36%) | Famines in British India (16%) | Congo Free State (11%) |
| 20th | 81.1 | Second World War (33%) | Mao Zedong (20%) | Joseph Stalin (10%) |

My observations:

**There's no clear trend in the death rate from wars and atrocities from the 13th century to the 20th.** The jumpiness of the totals makes it very hard to see any sort of trend, even when aggregating 100-year periods; one every-few-centuries giant atrocity tends to account for a huge chunk of the bad centuries’ death tolls.

**The figures are noticeably lower before the 13th century (which is strikingly close to when we have our [first documented evidence of declining homicides](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/#comparison-to-societies-in-between-then-and-now)).**

This could be misleading: as both *Better Angels* and *Atrocities* point out, the farther back in time one looks, the more likely it is that there are lots of undocumented atrocities, and thus that the numbers above are underestimates.

On the other hand, I somewhat doubt that any of the undocumented atrocities are big enough to really stack up with the biggest atrocities in this table: as shown above, for any given century there is a very steep dropoff from the 1-3 most damaging currently known atrocities to the rest. So if earlier centuries had comparable war/atrocity death tolls, they probably came from *much* larger numbers of smaller wars and atrocities.

**There is a lot of uncertainty in these figures, and revisions could change the picture quite a bit.**

- The 20th century ranks as the 3rd bloodiest, but could easily become the bloodiest if a couple of very uncertain estimates were changed. The 13th century estimate is nearly all from Genghis Khan (referred to above as “Chinggis”), and there is a lot of room for doubt here - alternative estimates[2](#fn2) imply less than half the death toll. The 17th century death toll is more evenly spread out, and probably better documented, but half of it comes from an estimate based on census records of the death toll for the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.

- For the 8th century, *Atrocities* estimates 8 million deaths from the An Lushan rebellion. But this is a downward revision from an earlier figure (by the same author) of 36 million, cited in *Better Angels.* The older figure would make the 8th century appear as one of the most violent. Some context on why the revision happened is in this footnote.[3](#fn3)

**What happens when we account for *both* atrocity+war deaths *and* homicides?** It's very hard to say, because the only homicide rate data I've found (see [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/#comparison-to-societies-in-between-then-and-now)) is from (a) a few European countries starting in the 1300s; (b) the USA starting in the 1600s.

But I wanted to get a sense of the rough ballpark, so I threw together an estimate of the global homicide rate (assumptions I made are in this footnote[4](#fn4)). Here's the result (spreadsheet [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vQQQMV7IwVM6WivfMxWuWylc0qIt7EpUNTmLlH1Zhek/edit#gid=1746901160)):

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/11/homicides-plus-atrocities-1.png)

In this chart, I'm assuming that only Europe saw falling homicide rates as early as 1300 or so,[5](#fn5) and I'm assuming that homicide rates started falling in the *rest* of the world starting around the Industrial Revolution. That is my best guess.

Here's an alternative version, in which I assume that homicides fell worldwide the same way they fell in Europe:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/11/homicides-plus-atrocities-2.png)

This is all very imprecise, because global homicide rates are a mystery before very recently. But the big picture is that **the rise in death tolls from huge wars and atrocities plausibly offset the decline in homicide rates, leading to a flat or unclear trend in overall violent death rates between ~500 BCE until the Industrial Revolution (~1700s), or even later.**

Since the mid-20th century, deaths from wars and atrocities have been *much* lower - though it's hard to make too much of this, because in general, wars and atrocities seem *very* volatile, with massive death tolls sometimes occurring after centuries of relative peace. Furthermore, as argued in Toby Ord's book [The Precipice](https://theprecipice.com/), there's a case to be made that today represents an all-time high in terms of risks that could decimate a significant fraction (or even all) of humanity. So maybe rather than declining violence, what we're seeing is a continued trend of more and more infrequent risks of larger and larger catastrophes.

---

Footnotes
---------

1. For simplicity, I assumed that the death roll for any given war/atrocity was spread out evenly across the years. For example, the Second World War is listed as having a death toll of 66 million over the course of 1939-1945 (7 yeas). I therefore assume there were (66 million/7 = ~9.4 million deaths per year from the Second World War in each of 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945. [↩](#fnref1)- See the section starting on page 123. Also see discussion [here](https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/steve-pinkers-bogus-statistics-a-critique-of-the-better-angels-of-our-nature-part-one-2/), particularly these quotes:

	* "After soberly reviewing the evidence, Clarke formulates his own estimate of 11-15 million victims [compared to the 40 million estimate in *Atrocities*]."

	* "Professor Rudolph Rummel only attributes 4 million deaths to Genghis Khan, but also estimates that 'as many as 30 million people (about 13 percent of the world’s population)” were murdered by the Mongols during the 14th and 15th centuries.'") [↩](#fnref2)- 36 million is the figure for “missing” people given at the beginning of Matthew White’s chapter on the rebellion; in the version of the book I used (which has the more recent figure), White later states: “What happened to 36 million people? Is a loss of two-thirds in one decade even possible? Perhaps … On the other hand, these numbers could also represent a decline in the central government’s ability to find every taxpayer rather than an actual population collapse … the actual population collapse may have been closer to one-half, or 26 million. For the sake of ranking, however, I’m being conservative and cutting this in half, counting only 13 million dead in the An Lushan Rebellion.” [↩](#fnref3)- I:

	* Assumed 100 homicides per 100k people per year before the 13th century (see [previous post](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/#comparison-to-societies-in-between-then-and-now) for the numbers I am working off to get this guess).

	* Filled in rough guesses for Europe-wide figures starting in 1300 based on [this chart](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-western-europe?time=1300..2016) (and assuming that Europe accounted for about 20% of the world population, with the rest unchanged).

	* Assumed that the rest of the world saw a declining homicide rate starting in the early 19th century (consistent with my general take that [this is when rapid global improvement in many things began](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/)), smoothly reaching today's level between then and now.My spreadsheet is [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vQQQMV7IwVM6WivfMxWuWylc0qIt7EpUNTmLlH1Zhek/edit#gid=1746901160).

 [↩](#fnref4)- As noted [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/#comparison-to-societies-in-between-then-and-now), at least the US seems to have much higher rates until 1600 or so. [↩](#fnref5)


Weak point in “most important century”: lock-in

This is the second of (for now) two posts covering what I see as the weakest points in the [“most important century” series](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/). (The first one is [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/weak-point-in-most-important-century-full-automation/).)

The weak point I’ll cover here is the discussion of “lock-in”: the idea that transformative AI could lead to societies that are **stable for billions of years**. If true, this means that how things go this century could affect what life is like in predictable, systematic ways for unfathomable amounts of time.

My main coverage of this topic is in a [section of my piece on digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/#lock-in). It’s pretty hand-wavy, not super thorough, and isn’t backed by an in-depth technical report (though I do link to [some informal notes](https://jessriedel.com/index_files/Value%20Lock-in%20Notes%202021%20(Public%20version).pdf) from physicist [Jess Riedel](https://jessriedel.com/) that he made while working at Open Philanthropy). [Overcoming Bias](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/will-tech-help-totalitarians.html) critiqued me on this point, leading to a [brief exchange in the comments](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/will-tech-help-totalitarians.html).

I’m not going to be dramatically more thorough or convincing here, but I will say a bit more about how the overall “most important century” argument is affected if we ignore this part of it, and a bit more about why I find “lock-in” plausible.

(Also note that "lock-in" will be discussed at some length in an upcoming book by Will MacAskill, *What We Owe the Future*.)

Throughout this piece, I’ll be using “lock-in” to mean “key things about society, such as who is in power or which religions/ideologies are dominant, are locked into place indefinitely, plausibly for billions of years,” and “dynamism” or “instability” to mean the opposite: “such things change on much shorter time horizons, as in decades/centuries/millennia.” As noted [previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/#lock-in), I consider "lock-in" to be a scary possibility by default, though it's imaginable that certain kinds of lock-in (e.g., of human rights protections) could be good.

“Most important century” minus “lock-in”
----------------------------------------

First, let’s just see what happens if we throw out this entire part of the argument and assume that “lock-in” isn’t a possibility at all, but accept the [rest of the claims](https://www.cold-takes.com/forecasting-transformative-ai-whats-the-burden-of-proof/#some-rough-probabilities). In other words, we assume that:

* Something like [PASTA](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/) (advanced AI that automates scientific and technological advancement) is likely to be developed this century.

* That, in turn, would lead to [explosive scientific and technological advancement](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#impacts-of-pasta), resulting in a world run by [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) or [misaligned AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#misaligned-ai-mysterious-potentially-dangerous-objectives) or something else that would make it fair to say we have "transitioned to a state in which humans as we know them are no longer the main force in world events."

* But it would *not* lead to any particular aspect of the world being permanently set in stone. There would remain billions of years full of unpredictable developments.

In this case, I think there is still an important sense in which this would be the “most important century for humanity”: it would be our last chance to shape the transition from a world run by humans to a world run by something very much unlike humans. This is one of the two definitions of “most important century” given [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/some-additional-detail-on-what-i-mean-by-most-important-century/).

More broadly, in this case, I think there’s an important sense in which the [“most important century” series](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/) should be thought of as “Pointing to a drastically underrated issue; correct in its most consequential, controversial implications, if not in every detail.” When people talk about the most significant issues of our time (in fact, even when they are specifically talking about [likely consequences of advanced AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/technological-unemployment-ai-vs-most-important-century-ai-how-far-apart/)), they rarely include much discussion of the sorts of issues emphasized in this series; and they should, whether or not this series is correct about the possibility of “lock-in.”

As noted [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/some-additional-detail-on-what-i-mean-by-most-important-century/), I ultimately care more about whether the “most important century” series is correct in this sense - pointing at drastically underappreciated issues - than about how likely its title is to end up describing reality. (Though I care about both.) It’s for this reason that I think the relatively thin discussion of lock-in is a less important “weak point” than the [weak point I wrote about previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/weak-point-in-most-important-century-full-automation/), which raises questions about whether advanced AI would change the world very quickly or very much at all.

But I’ve included the mention of lock-in because I think it’s a real possibility, and it would make the stakes of this century even higher.

Dissecting “lock-in”
--------------------

There have probably been many people in history (emperors, dictators) with enormous power over their society, and who would’ve liked to keep things going just as they were forever. There may also have been points in time when democratically elected governments would have “locked in” at least some things about their society for good, if they could have.

But they couldn’t. Why not?

I think the reasons broadly fall into a few categories, and [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) (or [misaligned AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#misaligned-ai-mysterious-potentially-dangerous-objectives), but I’ll focus on digital people to keep things simple for now) could change the picture quite a bit.

First I'll list factors that seem particularly susceptible to being changed by technology, then one factor that seems less so.

### Factors that seem particularly susceptible to being changed by technology

**Aging and death.** Any given powerful person has to die at some point. They can try to transfer power to children or allies, but a lot changes in the handoff (and over very long periods of time, there are a lot of handoffs).

Digital people need not age or die. (More broadly, sufficient advances in science and technology seem pretty likely to be able to eliminate aging and death, even if not via digital people.) So if some particular set of them had power over some particular part of the galaxy, death and aging need not interfere here at all.

**Other population changes.** Over time, the composition of any given population changes, and in particular, one generation replaces the previous one. This tends to lead to changes in values and power dynamics.

Without aging or death, and with extreme productivity, we could end up quickly exhausting the carrying capacity of any particular area - so that area might not see changes in population composition at all (or might see much smaller, more controlled changes than we are used to today - no cases where a whole generation is replaced by a new one). Generational turnover seems like quite a big driver of dynamism to date.

**Chaos.** To date, even when some government is officially “in charge” of a society, it has very limited ability to monitor and intervene in everything that’s going on. But I think technological advancement to date has already greatly increased the ability of a government to exercise control over a large number of people and large geography. An explosion in scientific and technological advancement could radically further increase governments’ in-practice control of what’s going on.

(Digital people provide an extreme example: controlling the server running a virtual environment would mean being able to monitor and control everything about the people in that environment. And powerful figures could create many copies of themselves for monitoring and enforcement.)

**Natural events.** All kinds of things might disrupt a human society: changes in the weather/climate, running lower on resources, etc. Sufficient advances in science and technology could drive this sort of disruption to extremely low levels (and in particular, [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) have pretty limited resource needs, such that they need not run low on resources for billions of years).

**Seeking improvement.** While some dictators and emperors might prefer to keep things as they are forever, most of today’s governments don’t tend to have this as an aspiration: elected officials see themselves as accountable to large populations whose lives they are trying to improve.

But dramatic advances in science and technology would mean dramatically more control over the world, as well as potentially less scope for *further* improvement (I generally expect that the rate of improvement has to [trail off at some point](https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/)). This could make it increasingly likely that some government or polity decides they’d prefer to lock things in as they are.

**But could these factors be eliminated so thoroughly as to cause stability for billions of years?** I think so, if enough of society were digital (e.g., [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/), such that those seeking stability could use digital error correction (essentially, making multiple copies of any key thing, which can be used to roll back anything that changes for any reason - for more, see [Jess Riedel’s informal notes](https://jessriedel.com/index_files/Value%20Lock-in%20Notes%202021%20(Public%20version).pdf), which argue that digital error correction could be used to reach quite extreme levels of stability).

A tangible example here would be [tightly controlled virtual environments](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/#lock-in), containing [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/), programmed to reset entirely (or reset key properties) if any key thing changed. These represent one hypothetical way of essentially eliminating all of the above factors as sources of change.

But even if we prefer to avoid thinking about such specific scenarios, I think there are broader cases for explosive scientific and technological advancement radically reducing the role of each of the above factors, as outlined above.

Of course, just because some government *could* achieve "lock-in" doesn't mean it *would*. But over the course of a long enough time, it seems that "anti-lock-in" societies would simply gain ever more chances to become "pro-lock-in" societies, whereas even a few years of a "pro-lock-in" society could result in indefinite lock-in. (And in a world of [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) operating a lot faster than humans, a lot of "time" could go by by the end of this century.)

### A factor that seems less susceptible to being changed by technology: competition between societies

Even if a government had complete control over its society, this wouldn’t ensure stability, because it could always be attacked from outside. And **unlike the above factors, this is not something that radical advances in science and technology seem particularly likely to change**: in a world of digital people, different governments would still be able to attack each other, and would be able to negotiate with each other with the threat of attack in the background.

This could cause sustained instability such that the world is constantly changing. This is the point emphasized by the [Overcoming Bias critique](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/will-tech-help-totalitarians.html).

I think this dynamic might - or might not - be an enduring source of dynamism. Some reasons it might not:

* If AI caused an explosion in scientific and technological advancement, then whoever develops it first could quickly become very powerful - being “first to develop [PASTA](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/) by a few months” could effectively mean developing the equivalent of a several-centuries lead in science and technology after that. This could lead to consolidation of power on Earth, and there are [no signs of intelligent life outside Earth](https://www.cold-takes.com/all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild/) - so that could be the end of “attack” dynamics as a force for instability.

* Awareness of the above risk might cause the major powers to explicitly [negotiate](https://www.cold-takes.com/making-the-best-of-the-most-important-century/#second-best-negotiation-and-governance) and divide up the galaxy, committing (perhaps enforceably, depending on how the technological picture shakes out) never to encroach each others’ territory. In this case, any particular part of the galaxy would not be subject to attacks.

* It might turn out that space settlements are generally easier to defend than attack, such that once someone establishes one, it is essentially not subject to attack.

Any of the above, or a combination (e.g., attacks are possible but risky and costly; world powers choose not to attack each other in order not to set off a war), could lead to the permanent disappearance of military competition as a factor, and open up the possibility for some governments to “lock in” key characteristics of their societies.

Three categories of long-run future
-----------------------------------

Above, I’ve listed some factors that may - or may not - continue to be sources of dynamism even after explosive scientific and technological advancement. I think I have started to give a sense for why, at a minimum, sources of dynamism could be greatly *reduced* in the case of digital people or other radically advanced technology, compared to today.

Now I want to divide the different possible futures into three broad categories:

**Full discretionary lock-in.** This is where a given government (or coalition or negotiated setup) is able to essentially lock in whatever properties it chooses for its society, indefinitely.

This could happen if essentially every source of dynamism outlined above goes away, and governments choose to pursue lock-in.

**Predictable competitive dynamics.** I think the source of dynamism that is most likely to persist (in a world of [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) or comparably advanced science and technology) is the last one discussed in the above section: military competition between advanced societies.

However, I think it could persist in a way that makes the **long-run outcomes importantly predictable.** In fact, I think “importantly predictable long-run outcomes” is part of the vision implied by the [Overcoming Bias critique](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/will-tech-help-totalitarians.html), which argues that the world will need to be near-exclusively populated by beings that spend nearly their entire existence working (since the population will expand to the point that it’s necessary to work constantly just to survive).

If we end up with a world full of digital beings that have full control over their environment *except for* having to deal with military competition from others, we might expect that there will be strong pressures for the digital beings that are most ambitious, most productive, hardest-working, most aggressive, etc. to end up populating most of the galaxy. These may be beings that do little else but strive for resources.

**True dynamism.** Rather than a world where governments lock in whatever properties they (and/or majorities of their constituents) want, or a world where digital beings compete with largely predictable consequences, we could end up with a world in which there is true freedom and dynamism - perhaps deliberately preserved via putting specific measures in place to stop the above two possibilities, and enforce some level of diversity and even randomness.

Having listed these possibilities, I want to raise the hypothesis that **if we could end up with any of these three, and this century determines which (or which mix) we end up with, that makes a pretty good case for this century having especially noteworthy impacts, and thereby being the most important century of all time for intelligent life.**

For example, say that from today’s vantage point, we’re equally likely to get (a) a world where powerful governments employ “lock-in,” (b) a world where unfettered competition leads the galaxy to be dominated by the strong/productive/aggressive, or (c) a truly dynamic world where future events are unpredictable and important. In that case, if we end up with (c), and future events end up being enormously interesting and consequential, I would think that there would still be an important sense in which the most important development of all time was the *establishment of that very dynamic. (*Given that one of the other two could have instead ended up determining the shape of civilization across the galaxy over the long run.)

Another way of putting this: if lock-in (and/or predictably competitive dynamics) is a serious possibility starting this century, the opportunity to *prevent* it could make this century the most important one.

Boiling it down
---------------

This has been a lot of detail about radically unfamiliar futures, and readers may have the sense at this point that things have gotten too specific and complex to put much stock in. But I think the broad intuitions here are fairly simple and solid, so I’m going to give a more high-level summary:

* Scientific and technological advancement can reduce or eliminate many of today’s sources of instability, from aging and death to chaos and natural events. An explosion in scientific and technological advancement could therefore lead to a big drop in dynamism. (And as one vivid example, digital people could set up tightly controlled virtual environments with very robust error correction - something I consider a scary possibility by default, as noted in the intro.)

* Dynamism may or may not remain, depending on a number of factors about how consolidated power ends up being and how different governments/societies deal with each other. The “may or may not” could be determined this century.

* I think this is a serious enough possibility that it heightens the stakes of the “most important century,” but I’m far from confident in the thinking here, and I think most of the spirit of the “most important century” hypothesis survives even if we forget about all of it.

Hopefully these additional thoughts have been helpful context on where I’m coming from, but I continue to acknowledge that this is one of the more under-developed parts of the series, and I’m interested in further exploration of the topic.


Rowing, Steering, Anchoring, Equity, Mutiny

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

This post interrupts the [Has Life Gotten Better? series](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/) to talk a bit about why it matters what long-run trends in quality of life look like.

I think different people have radically different pictures of what it means to "work toward a better world." I think this explains a number of the biggest chasms between people who think of themselves as well-meaning but don't see the other side that way, and I think different pictures of "where the world is heading by default" are key to the disagreements.

Imagine that the world is a ship. Here are five very different ways one might try to do one's part in "working toward a better life for the people on the ship."

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
|  | **Meaning in the "ship" analogy** | **Meaning in the world** |
| Rowing
  | Help the ship reach its current destination faster
  | Advance science, technology, growth, etc., all of which help people (or "the world") do *whatever they want to do, more/faster* |
| Steering
  | Navigate to a better destination than the current one
  | Anticipate future states of the world (climate change, transformative AI, utopia, dystopia) and act accordingly
  |
| Anchoring
  | Hold the ship in place
  | Prevent change generally, and/or try to make the world more like it was a generation or two ago
  |
| Equity
  | Work toward more fair and just relations between people on the ship
  | Redistribution; advocacy focused on the underprivileged; etc.
  |
| Mutiny
  | Challenge the ship's whole premise and power structure
  | Radical challenging of the world's current systems (e.g., capitalism)[1](#fn1) |

**Which of these is the "right" focus for improving the world?** One of the things I like about the ship analogy is that it leaves the answer to this question totally unclear! The details of where the ship is currently trying to go, and why, and who's deciding that and what they're like, matter enormously. Depending on those details, any of the five could be by far the most important and meaningful way to make a positive difference.

If the ship is the world, then where are we "headed" by default (what happens if we have more total technology, wealth, and power over our environment)? Who has the power to change that, and how has it been going so far?

These are important questions with genuinely unclear answers. So people with different assumptions about these deep questions can get along very poorly with each other.

I think this sort of taxonomy provides a different angle on people’s differences from the usual discussions of pro/anti-government interventionism.

Next I will give some somewhat more detailed thoughts on the case for and against each of these pictures of "improving the world." This is not so much to educate the reader as to help them understand where I stand, and why I have some of the unusual views I do.

I talk a bit about the "track record" of each category. A lot of the point of this analogy is to highlight the importance of [big-picture judgments about history](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/).

Rowing
------

I use "rowing" to refer to the idea that we can make the world better by focusing on advancing science, technology, growth, etc. - all of which ultimately result in **empowerment**, helping people do whatever they want to do, more/faster. The idea is that, in some sense, we don't need a specific plan for improving lives: more capabilities, wealth, and empowerment ("moving forward") will naturally result in that.

Rowing is a contentious topic, and it’s contentious in a way that I think cuts across other widely-recognized ideological lines.

To some people, rowing seems like the single most promising way to make the world a better place. People and institutions who give off this vibe include:

* Tech entrepreneurs and VCs such as Marc Andreessen ([It's Time to Build](https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/)) and Patrick Collison ([progress studies](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/)).

* Libertarian-ish academics such as Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok (see their [books](https://marginalrevolution.com/books) for a sense of this).

* The many institutions and funders dedicated to general speeding up of science, such as the [Moore Foundation](https://www.moore.org/), [Howard Hughes Medical Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute), and [CZI Biohub](https://www.czbiohub.org/).[2](#fn2)* The [global development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_development#:~:text=International%20development%20or%20global%20development,development%22%20on%20an%20international%20scale.) world, e.g. nonprofits such as [Center for Global Development](https://www.cgdev.org/) and institutions such as the World Bank, which seeks to help "developing" countries "develop." This generally includes a large (though not exclusive) focus on economic growth.

I sometimes see rowing-oriented arguments tagged as “pro-market” or even “libertarian,” but I think that isn't a necessary connection. You could argue - and many do - that a lot of the biggest and most important contributions to global growth and technological advancement come from governments, particularly via things like scientific research funding (e.g., DARPA), development-oriented agencies (e.g., the IMF), and public education.

To many people, though, advocacy for “rowing” seems like it’s best understood as a veneer of pro-social rhetoric disguising mundane personal attempts to get rich - even to the point where the wealthy create an intellectual ecosystem to promote the idea that what makes them rich is also good for the world.

On priors, I think this is a totally reasonable critical take:

* In practice, a lot of the folks most interested in "rowing" are venture capitalists, tech founders, etc. who sure seem to have spent most of their lives primarily interested in getting rich.

* It seems "convenient," perhaps suspiciously so, that their story about how to make the world better seems to indicate that the best thing to do is focus on "creating wealth" (which usually aligns extremely well with "getting rich"), just like they are. This doesn't mean that they're deliberately hiding their motivations; but it may mean they naturally and subconsciously gravitate toward worldviews that validate their past (and present) choices.

* Furthermore, the *logic* of why “rowing” would be good seems to have some gaps in it. It’s not obvious on priors that more total wealth or total scientific capability makes the world better. When thinking about the direct impacts of wealth and tech on quality of life, it seems about as easy to come up with harms as benefits.
	+ Clear benefits include lower burden of disease, less hunger, more reproductive choice and freedom, better entertainment (and tastier food, and other things that one might call "directly" or "superficially" pleasurable), and more ability to encounter many ideas and choose from many candidate lifestyles and locations.

	+ But clear potential costs include environmental damage, rising global catastrophic risks,[3](#fn3) rising inequality, and a world that is chaotically changing, causing all sorts of novel psychological and other challenges for individuals and communities. And many of the obvious dimensions along which wealth and technology make life more "convenient" do not clearly make life *better*: if wealth and technology "save us time" (reducing the need to do household chores, etc.), we might just be spending the "saved" time on other things that don't make our lives better, such as competing with each other for wealth and status.

These concerns seem facially valid, and they apply particularly to rowing. (If someone works toward equity, there could be a number of criticisms one levels at them, but the above issues don’t seem to apply.)

In my view, **the best case for “rowing” is something like: “We don’t know why, but it seems to be going well.”** If I were back in the year 0 trying to guess whether increasing wealth and technological ability would be good or bad for quality of life, I would consider it far from obvious. But empirically, it seems that the world has been [improving over the last couple hundred years](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/).

And with that said, it's [much less clear](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/) how things were going in the several hundred thousand years before the Industrial Revolution.

So my current take on "rowing" is something like:* Despite all of the suspicious aspects, I think there is a good case for it. I don’t understand where this ship is going or why things are working the way they are - maybe the ship happens to be pointed toward warmer or calmer latitudes? - but rowing seems to have made life better for the vast majority of people over the last couple hundred years, and will likely continue to do so (by default) over at least the next few decades.
* On the other hand, I don't think the track record is so good as to assume that rowing will *always* be good, and I'm particularly worried and uncertain about how things will go if there is a [dramatic acceleration in the rate of progress](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/) - I'm inclined to approach such a prospect with [caution rather than excitement](https://www.cold-takes.com/call-to-vigilance/).

Steering
--------

Steering sounds great in theory. Instead of blindly propelling the world toward wherever it’s going, let’s think about where we want the world to end up and take actions based on that!

But I think this is currently the least common conception of how to do good in the world. The idea of utopia is unpopular (more in a future piece), and in general, it seems that anyone advocating action on the basis of a specific goal over the long-run future (really, anything more than 20 years out) generally is met with skepticism.

The most mainstream example of “steering” is probably working to prevent/mitigate climate change. This isn’t about achieving an “end state” for the world, but it is about avoiding a specific outcome that is decades away, and even that level of specific planning about the long-run future is something we don’t see a lot of in today’s intellectual discourse.

I think the [longtermist](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/update-cause-prioritization-open-philanthropy#Long-termist_vs._near-termist_views) community has an unusual degree of commitment to steering. One could even see longtermism as an attempt to resurrect interest in steering, by taking a different approach from previous steering-heavy worldviews (e.g., Communism) that have fallen out of favor.

* Longtermists seek out specific interventions and events that they think could change the direction of the long-run future.

* They are particularly interested in [helping to better navigate a potential transition brought on by advanced AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/) - the idea being that if AI ends up being a sort of “new species” more powerful than humans, navigating the development of AI could end up avoiding bad results that last for the rest of time.

* It’s common for longtermists to take an interest in [differential technological development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_technological_development) - meaning that instead of being “pro” or “anti” technological advancement, they have specific views on which technologies would be good to develop as quickly as possible vs. which would be good to develop as slowly as possible, or at least until we’ve developed other technologies that can make them safer. It seems to me that this sort of thinking is relatively rare outside the longtermist community. It's more common for people to be pro- or anti-science as a whole.

Why is it relatively rare for people to be interested in “steering” as defined here? I think it is mostly for good reasons, and comes down to the fact that **the track record of “steering” type work looks unimpressive.**

* There are some specific embarrassing cases, such as historical Communism,[4](#fn4) which explicitly claimed to aim at a particular long-term utopian vision.

* There is also just a lack of salient (or any?) examples of people successfully anticipating and intervening on some particular world development more than 10-20 years away. People and organizations in the longtermist community have tried to find examples, and IMO haven’t come up with much.[5](#fn5)

Despite this, I’m personally very bullish on the kind of “steering” that the longtermist community is trying to do (and I’m also sold on the value of climate change prevention/mitigation).

The main reason for this is that I think defining, long-run consequential events of the future are more “foreseeable” now than they’ve been in the past. Climate change and advanced AI are both developments that seem highly likely this century (more on AI [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/)), and seem likely to have such massive global consequences that action in advance makes sense. More broadly, I think it is easier than it used to be to scan across possible scientific and technological developments and point to the ones most worth “preparing for."

In the analogy, I’m essentially saying that there are particular important obstacles or destinations for the ship, that we can now see clearly enough that steering becomes valuable. By contrast, in many past situations I think we were “out on the open sea” such that it was too hard to see much about what lay ahead of us, and this led to the dynamic in which rowing has worked better than steering.

Other reasons that I’m bullish on steering are that (a) I think today’s “steering” folks are making better, more rigorous attempts at predicting the future than people who have tried to make long-run predictions in the past;[6](#fn6) (b) I think “steering” has become a generally neglected way of thinking about the world, at the same time as it has become more viable.

With that said, I think there is plenty of room for longtermists to do a better job than they are contending with the limits of how well we can “steer,” and what kinds of interventions are most likely to successfully improve how things go.

I think our ship draws close to some major crossroads, such that navigating them could define the rest of our journey. If I’m right, focusing on rowing to the exclusion of steering is a real missed opportunity.

Anchoring
---------

In practice, it seems like a significant amount of the energy in any given debate is coming from people who would prefer to keep things as they are - or go back to things as they were (generally pretty recently, e.g., a generation or two ago). This is an attitude commonly associated with "conservatives" (especially social conservatives), but it's an attitude that often shows up from others as well.

As someone who thinks [life has been getting better over the last couple hundred years](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/) - and that we still have a lot of important progress yet to be made on similar dimensions to the ones that have been improving - I am usually not excited about anchoring (though the specifics of what practices one is trying to "anchor" matter).

Some additional reasons for my general attitude:* I think the world has been [changing extraordinarily quickly](https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/) (by historical standards) throughout the past 200+ years, and I think it will continue to change extraordinarily quickly for at least the next few decades no matter what. So when I hear people advocating for stability and trusting the established practices of those who came before us, I largely think they are asking for something that just can't be had. (One way of putting this: as long as things are changing, we may as well try to make the best of that change.)
 * I am particularly skeptical that the previous generation or two should be emulated. There is obviously room for debate here (I might write more on this topic in the future).
 * I think there is a general [bias toward exaggerating how good the past was](https://ourworldindata.org/optimism-pessimism#declinism) that we need to watch out for.

There is a version of "anchoring" that I think can be constructive: asking that changes to policy and society be gradual and incremental, rather than sudden, so we can correct course as we go. In practice, I think nearly all policy and societal changes *do* end up being gradual and incremental, at least in the modern-day developed world, such that I don't currently have a wish for a stronger "anchoring" force than already exists in most domains that come immediately to mind (unless you count the ["caution" frame for navigating the most important century](https://www.cold-takes.com/making-the-best-of-the-most-important-century/#the-caution-frame)).

Equity
------

Of the five different visions of what it means to improve the world, equity seems the most straightforward and familiar. It is about directly trying to make the world more just and fair, rather than trying to increase total options and wealth and rather than trying to optimize for some particular future event.

Equity includes efforts to:

* Redistribute resources progressively (i.e., from rich to poor), whether via direct charity or via advocacy.

* Amplify the voices and advance the interests of historically marginalized groups including women, people of color, and people born in low-income countries.

* Improve products and services aimed at helping people who would be under-served by default, including via education reform and improvement, and scientific research (e.g., the sort of global health R&D funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

You could argue that successful equity work also contributes to the goals of rowing and steering, if a world with less inequality is also one that’s better positioned for broad-based economic growth and for anticipating/preparing for particular important events. But work whose proximate goal is equity tends to look different from work whose proximate goal is rowing or steering.

Most people recognize equity-oriented work as coming from a place of good intentions and genuine interest in making the world better. To the extent that equity-oriented work is controversial, it often stems from:

* Arguments that it undermines its own goals. For example, arguments that advocating for a higher minimum wage could result in greater unemployment, thus hurting the interests of the low-income people that a higher minimum wage is supposed to help.

* Arguments that it undermines *rowing* progress, and that rowing is an ultimately more important/promising way to help everyone. *[Dead Aid](https://smile.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374532125)* is an example of this sort of argument (picked for vividness rather than quality).

I've talked about the track record of rowing and steering; I'll comment briefly on that of equity. In short, I think it's very good. I think that much of the [progress the world has seen](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/) is fairly hard to imagine without significant efforts at both rowing *and* equity: major efforts both to increase wealth/capabilities and to distribute them more evenly. Civil rights movements, social safety nets, and foreign aid all seem like huge wins, and major parts of the story for why the world seems to have gotten better over time.

With that track record in mind, and the fact that many equity interventions seem good on common-sense grounds, I'm usually positive on equity-oriented interventions.

Mutiny
------

Mutiny looks good if your premises are ~the opposite of the [rowers](#rowing)'. You might think that the world today operates under a broken "system," and/or that we fundamentally have the wrong sorts of people and/or institutions in power. If this is your premise, it implies that what we tend to count as "progress" (particularly increased wealth and technological capabilities) is liable to make things worse, or at least not better. Instead, the most valuable thing we can do is get at the root of the issue and change the fundamental way that power is exercised and resources are allocated.

Unlike [steering](#steering), this isn't about anticipating some particular future event or world-state. Instead, it's about rethinking/reforming the way the world operates and the way decisions are made. Instead of focusing on where the ship is headed, it's focused on who's running the ship.

This framework often emerges in criticisms of charity, philanthropy and/or [effective altruism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism) that point to the paradox of trying to make the world better using money obtained from participating in a problematic (capitalist) system - or occasionally in pieces by philanthropists themselves on the importance of challenging the fundamental paradigms the world is operating in. Some examples: [Slavoj Žižek](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile),[7](#fn7) [Anand Giridharas](https://smile.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing-ebook/dp/B077WZRBV2/),[8](#fn8) [Guerrilla Foundation](https://guerrillafoundation.org/some-thoughts-on-effective-altruism/),[9](#fn9) and [Peter Buffett](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=0).[10](#fn10). Often, but not always, people in the "mutiny" category identify with (or at least use language that is evocative of) socialism or Marxism.

Of the five categories, mutiny is the one I feel most unsatisfied with my understanding of. It seems that people use language about fundamental systems change to (a) *sometimes* mean something tangible, radical, and revolutionary like the abolition of private property; to (b) *sometimes* mean something that seems much more modest and that I would classify more as "equity," such as working toward greatly increased redistribution of wealth;[12](#fn12) and to (c) *sometimes* mean a particular emotional/tonal attitude unaccompanied by any distinctive policy platform.[13](#fn13) And it's often unclear which they mean.

(a) is the one I'm trying to point at with the "mutiny" idea. It's also the one that seems to go best with claims that it's problematic to e.g. "participate in capitalism" and then do philanthropy. (It's unclear to me how, say, running a hedge fund undermines (b) or (c).)

I am currently skeptical of (a), because:

* I haven't heard much in the way of specific proposals for how the existing "system" could be fundamentally reformed, other than explicitly socialist and Marxist proposals such as the abolition of private property, which I don't support.

* I am broadly sympathetic to [Rob Wiblin's take on revolutionary change](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/): "Effective altruists are usually not radicals or revolutionaries ... My attitude, looking at history, is that sudden dramatic changes in society usually lead to worse outcomes than gradual evolutionary improvements. I am keen to tinker with government or economic systems to make them work better, but would only rarely want to throw them out and rebuild from scratch. I personally favour maintaining and improving mostly market-driven economies, though some of my friends and colleagues hope we can one day do much better. Regardless, this temperament for ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ is widespread among effective altruists, and in my view that’s a great thing that can help us avoid the mistakes of extremists through history. The system could be a lot better, but one only need look at history to see that it could also be much worse."

* As stated [above](#rowing), I broadly think that the world has made and continues to make astonishing positive progress, which doesn't put me in a place of wanting to "burn down the existing order" (at least without a clearer idea of what might replace it and why the replacement is promising). I'm particularly unsympathetic to claims that "capitalism" or "the existing system" is the *root cause* of global poverty. I think that global poverty is the [default condition for humans](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/), and the one that nearly all humans existed under until [relatively recently](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/).

To be clear, I don't mean here to be advocating against all *radical* views. A radical view is anything that is well outside the Overton window, and I have many such views. And I am sympathetic to many views that many might call "anticapitalist" or "revolutionary," such as that we should have dramatically more redistribution of wealth.

I am also generally sympathetic to both (b) and (c) above.

Categorizing worldviews
-----------------------

Here's a mapping from some key combinations of rowing/equity/mutiny to familiar positions in current political discourse:

|  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Rowing** | **Equity** | **Mutiny** | **AKA** |
| Thumbs down | Thumbs down | Thumbs up | Extreme Marxists
  |
| Thumbs down | Thumbs up | Thumbs up | The radical left
  |
| Thumbs down | Thumbs up | Thumbs down | The less radical, but still markets- and growth-skeptical, left
  |
| Thumbs down | Thumbs down | Thumbs down | Many conservatives ("[anchoring](#anchoring)")
  |
| Thumbs up | Thumbs down | Thumbs down | Libertarians, economic conservatives
  |
| Thumbs up | Thumbs up | Thumbs down | "Neoliberals," the "pro-market left"
  |

I've left out steering because I see it as mostly orthogonal to (and usually simply not present in) most of today's political discourse. I've represented "anchoring" as a row rather than a column, because I think it is mostly incompatible with the others. And I've left out worldviews that are positive on *both* rowing and mutiny (I think there are some worldviews that might be described this way, but they're fairly obscure).[14](#fn14)

So?
---

We can make up categories and put people in them all day. What does this taxonomy give us?

The main thrust for me is clarifying what people in different camps are disagreeing *about*, especially when they seem to be talking past each other by using completely different definitions of “improving the world.”

I think this framework is also useful for highlighting the role of one’s **understanding of history** in these disagreements. It’s far from obvious, a priori, whether the best thing to work on is rowing, steering, anchoring, equity, or mutiny, especially when we are so foggy on where a ship is heading by default. It really matters whether you think that increases in wealth and technological capability have had good effects so far, whether this has come about through deliberate planning or blind “forging ahead,” and whether there are particular reasons to expect the future to diverge from the past on these points.

Accordingly, when confronting one camp from another, I think it’s helpful when possible to be explicit about one’s assumptions regarding [how things have gone so far](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/), and regarding the broad track records of rowing, steering, anchoring, equity and mutiny. History doesn’t give us clear, pre-packaged answers on these questions - different people will look at the same history and see very different things - but I think it’s good to have views on these matters, even if only lightly informed to start, and to look out for information about history that could revise them.

---

Footnotes
---------

1. Though as discussed below, it's often unclear what "capitalism" means in this sort of context. [↩](#fnref1)- While these sorts of institutions often lead with the goal of fighting disease, they tend to fund [basic science](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/breakthrough-fundamental-science) with very open-ended goals. [↩](#fnref2)- For example, [The Precipice](https://smile.amazon.com/Precipice-Existential-Risk-Future-Humanity/dp/0316484911) argues that "Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves." The book sees "anthropogenic" global catastrophic risks as the dominant ones, and I agree. [↩](#fnref3)- I use the term "historical" in order to be agnostic on whether this was "true" Communism or reflects badly on Marxist philosophy. [↩](#fnref4)- See [AI Impacts' attempts to find examples of helpful early actions on risks](https://aiimpacts.org/examples-of-early-action-on-a-risk/) and [Open Philanthropy on historical long-range forecasting](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/how-feasible-long-range-forecasting). Other examples that have been suggested to me: early action to stop damage to the ozone layer, nuclear nonproliferation action, perhaps the US's approach to the Cold War. [↩](#fnref5)- See [Open Philanthropy on historical long-range forecasting](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/how-feasible-long-range-forecasting) for what past efforts look like. There are many longtermist discussions of long-range predictions that seem significantly better on the dimensions covered in the post. [↩](#fnref6)- "There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape ... We should have no illusions: liberal communists [his term for the Davos set] are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system ... Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence." [↩](#fnref7)- ""If anyone truly believes that the same ski-town conferences and fellowship programs, the same politicians and policies, the same entrepreneurs and social businesses, the same campaign donors, the same thought leaders, the same consulting firms and protocols, the same philanthropists and reformed Goldman Sachs executives, the same win-wins and doing-well-by-doing-good initiatives and private solutions to public problems that had promised grandly, if superficially, to change the world—if anyone thinks that the MarketWorld complex of people and institutions and ideas that failed to prevent this mess even as it harped on making a difference, and whose neglect fueled populism’s flames, is also the solution, wake them up by tapping them, gently, with this book. For the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question—Where do we go from here?—is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us." [↩](#fnref8)- "EA’s approach of doing ‘the most good you can now’ without, in our opinion, questioning enough the power relationships that got us to the current broken socio-economic system, stands at odds with the Guerrilla Foundation’s approach. Instead, we are proponents of radical social justice philanthropy, which aims to target the root causes of the very system that has produced the symptoms that much of philanthropy, including EA, is trying to treat (also see here and here) ... By asking these questions, EA seems to unquestioningly replicate the values of the old system: efficiency and cost-effectiveness, growth/scale, linearity, science and objectivity, individualism, and decision-making by experts/elites ... " [↩](#fnref9)- "we will continue to support conditions for systemic change ... It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code." (Though also note this quote: "I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.") [↩](#fnref10)- (Footnote deleted) [↩](#fnref11)- For example, see the "Class" chapter of [How to Be an Antiracist](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07D2364N5/), where the author speaks of capitalism and racism as "conjoined twins" but then states that he is defining "capitalism" as being in opposition to a number of not-very-radical-seeming goals such as increased redistribution of wealth and monopoly prevention. He speaks positively of Elizabeth Warren despite her statement that she is "capitalist to the bone," and says "if Warren succeeds, then the new economic system will operate in a fundamentally different way than it has ever operated before in American history. Either the new economic system will not be capitalist or the old system it replaces was not capitalist." [↩](#fnref12)- For example, a [self-identified socialist states](https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/1/7/21055676/nathan-robinson-ezra-klein-socialism-bernie-sanders): "There’s a great Eugene Debs quote, 'While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.' That’s not a description of worker ownership — that’s a description of looking at the world and feeling solidarity with people who are at the bottom with the underclass. And I think that is just as important to what animates socialists as some idea about how production should be managed ... People focus a lot on the question of central planning. But I’ve been doing interviews of socialists, interviewing DSA people around the country, and the unifying thread really is not a very clear vision for how a socialist economy will work. It is a deep discomfort and anger that occurs when you look at the world and you see power relationships and you see a small class of people owning so much and a large number of people working so hard and having so little. There are socialist divides over nearly every question, but this is the one thing that socialists all come together on." [↩](#fnref13)- I sometimes encounter people who seem to think something along the lines of: "Progress is [slowing down](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/) because our culture has become broken and toxic. The only hope for getting back to a world capable of a reasonable pace of scientific, technological, and economic progress is to radically overhaul everything about our institutions and essentially start from scratch." I expect to write more on the general theme of what we should make of "progress slowing down" in the future. [↩](#fnref13)


Hunter-gatherer happiness

Asking [whether life was better in hunter-gatherer times](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/), I [wrote](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#mental-health-and-wellbeing): “I haven't found anything that looks like systematic data on pre-agriculture mental health or subjective wellbeing.”

Thanks to [commenter Tsunayoshi](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9tHsmALcrydGXG2Ke/has-life-gotten-better?commentId=u2ZEm4bmfkmNRu2xP) for linking to some! [Subjective Happiness Among Polish and Hadza People](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01173/full) is a 2020 study, reporting[1](#fn1) on a survey of 145 people from the [Hadza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadza_people) hunter-gatherer society using a four-question oral survey on happiness (the [Subjective Happiness Scale](https://escholarship.org/content/qt2185n8gb/qt2185n8gb.pdf) - see footnote for the four questions[2](#fn2)). The results are then compared to a comparison sample of 156 Polish participants (who were asked the same questions), with the conclusion that the Hadza report significantly higher happiness.

The study also provides a table comparing the Hadza result to happiness scores from a number of other studies:

![](https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/518297/fpsyg-11-01173-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-11-01173-t004.jpg)

At an average happiness score of 5.83 on a 7-point scale, the surveyed Hadza outscore *all* of the other societies examined!

All else equal, this is evidence for the [“pre-agriculture Eden” hypothesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#the-pre-agriculture-eden-hypothesis) that I have expressed [skepticism about](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times): perhaps, despite seemingly worse [health](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#health), [hunger](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#hunger), and [violence](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#violence), hunter-gatherers are/were significantly happier than people in the modern world.

I have two reactions here: I doubt this picture would hold up to more research and scrutiny, and I think more research and scrutiny seem really valuable to do in case it does.

Doubts
------

From my skim, I don't have any issues with the paper itself. It looks well done. However, there are a number of things that make me skeptical that "hunter-gatherers are happier" would hold up to a more extensive research program:

* This is only one study,[3](#fn3) covering only one hunter-gatherer society (unlike all of the analyses I presented in [this post](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/), which each looked at data from more than one society). By default, I treat any one study as only a light update, and I generally expect results to be less likely to hold up the more striking and exciting they are. (Reasons include [regression toward the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) and [bias in academic incentives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias).)

* Given the big cultural differences between hunter-gatherers and modern-lifestyle societies, I suspect that a lot of what’s going on here has to do with how the survey questions are being interpreted, and/or how people are perceiving their role as study participants.

* The pattern from most of the literature is that [average happiness is higher in richer countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness), and I think there are a number of pretty clear dimensions on which [hunter-gatherer quality of life looks worse than modern-lifestyle quality of life](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#SummaryTable). While it’s certainly possible to come up with possible reasons hunter-gatherers could be happier, I don’t know of any such reasons that seem to have very high initial plausibility.

* 5.83 on a 7-point scale just seems very high, which to me points further toward something about "how people perceived the survey and the expectations for answering." I [don't generally expect the "state of nature" to be associated with such high happiness](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#the-pre-agriculture-eden-hypothesis).

Value of more research
----------------------

But imagine that dozens more studies like this were done, with a variety of different survey methodologies in a number of hunter-gatherer societies, and they continued to show that hunter-gatherer societies seem noticeably happier than modern-lifestyle societies.

At that point, I think we’d be looking at a potentially hugely important area of research, and it would be worth dramatically raising investment to try to understand *why* such differences might exist (particularly given the seemingly poor [nutrition](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#hunger) and [health](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#health) of hunter-gatherer societies). For example, people living modern lifestyles could be recruited to try imitating different aspects of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, to see whether these produce a boost in happiness.

The kind of study I've linked here seems relatively straightforward to conduct, as studies go: it doesn’t require the researchers to enforce unusual policies or interventions, and it doesn’t require trying to [unravel questions about causality](https://www.cold-takes.com/does-x-cause-y-an-in-depth-evidence-review/). It seems to me that further studies like this would be very worth pursuing (and that it’s too bad this appears to be the only study of its kind to date - though if you know of more, please let me know)!

---

Footnotes
---------

1. Here I focus on the “Study 2” part of the paper; “Study 2” has more detailed comparisons than “Study 1,” and they are both focused on the Hadza. [↩](#fnref1)- From [this paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1006824100041):
![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/11/subjective-happiness-scale.png)

 [↩](#fnref2)- Technically two studies, but they are using substantially similar survey methods, among the ~same populations at the ~same time. Also, the paper cites prior literature, but I don’t think it is nearly as relevant to the question of hunter-gatherer happiness. I also searched the [“cited-by” references](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15707180018352641648&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en) for the paper and didn’t find anything else. [↩](#fnref3)
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