Around half the world’s population live in places that held elections in 2024. Some 1.65bn ballots were cast across more than 70 countries. But while the number of democratic elections in a single year has never been higher, 2024 also brought big challenges. According to the latest democracy index published by EIU, our sister company, on February 27th, global democracy is in worse shape than at any point in the nearly two-decade history of the index.
Since 2006 EIU has scored 167 countries and territories on a scale of zero to ten based on five criteria: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. The countries are then grouped into four categories: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes.
For the 16th consecutive year, Norway was named the most democratic country in the world, with a score of 9.81. New Zealand and Sweden followed. Afghanistan has been the lowest-ranked country since 2021, scoring just 0.25 points. The biggest change came from Bangladesh, which dropped 25 places. Rebuilding democracy there will be an enormous task after the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, the country’s longtime autocratic ruler. But there is cause for optimism. A temporary technocratic government, led by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace prizewinner, has restored order and stabilised the economy. For those reasons, we named Bangladesh our country of the year in 2024.
The global average dropped to a new record low of 5.17, down from a high of 5.55 in 2015. Just 6.6% of the world’s population now lives in a full democracy, down from 12.5% ten years ago. And a large share of the world’s population—currently two in five people—lives under authoritarian rule.
Despite the promise of a global election extravaganza, some of the ballots were a farce. Polling day in Pakistan, for example, was marred by violence. The most popular politician, Imran Khan, whose own democratic credentials are questionable, was jailed shortly before the election took place. The country’s score dropped from 3.25 in 2023 to 2.84. In Russia another sham election gave Vladimir Putin a fifth term as president—it scored just two points on the index. In other countries—including Burkina Faso, Mali and Qatar—elections were cancelled altogether.
Even Europe—home to nine of the top ten countries in the index—saw some notable declines. France was downgraded from a full democracy to a flawed one. This mostly reflects a deterioration in its confidence-in-government score after president Emmanuel Macron’s snap election in June failed to secure a legislative majority for any single party or bloc. (Four different prime ministers during the course of the year did little to instil confidence either.) Romania was also downgraded after allegations of Russian interference, illegal social-media tactics and campaign-finance violations prompted the constitutional court to annul the presidential election and call for a new vote. In Asia, South Korea dropped out of the full-democracy category after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared—then hastily revoked—martial law, plunging the country into crisis.
America remained a flawed democracy, shifting only slightly from its position in 2023. But it could face bigger problems this year: the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term has already challenged the political independence of the civil service and seen a flurry of executive orders of questionable legal authority.
Mr Trump’s victory in 2024 was part of a broader global backlash against incumbents. The next test for global democracy in 2025 will be how these newly elected leaders choose to govern…
* John Adams, whose own handiwork as a Founding Father has been nicked, but so far evaded the fate he predicted (in an 1814 letter to John Taylor)
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As we batten the hatches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that RKO‘s King Kong premeired. Directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with special effects by Willis H. O’Brien and music by Max Steiner, it received rave reviews, with praise for its stop-motion animation and score… and has only grown in esteem: in 1991, it was deemed “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2010 it was ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the greatest horror film of all time and the fifty-sixth greatest film of all time.
Trevor Jackson on Martin Wolf‘s new book, The Crisis in Democratic Capitalism, and a fundamental question it raises: if globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?…
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
…people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else…
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure…
And for an interview with Jackson that elaborates on his thoughts and their historical context, see here.
* Warren Buffett
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As we assess systems, we might send provocative birthday grretings to Founding Father Thomas Paine; he was born on this date in 1736 (O.S.; on February 9, 1737 per N.S., which accrued in Britain and its colonies in 1752). He is best known for Common Sense and The American Crisis, two influential pamphlets that helped to inspire colonial era American patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain.
But relevantly to the article above, in 1797 (after witnessing the birth and early years of the U.S. and spending time in France) he wrote Agrarian Justice, in which he proposed remedies for several of the (then nascent) ills discussed by Wolf and Jackson…
In response to the private sale of royal (or common) lands, Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax land owners [the “capitalists” of their day] once per generation to pay for the needs of those who have no land. Some consider this a precursor to the modern idea of citizen’s dividend or basic income. The money would be raised by taxing all direct inheritances at 10%, and “indirect” inheritances, those not going to close relations, at a somewhat higher rate. He estimated that to raise around £5,700,000 per year.
Around two-thirds of the fund would be spent on pension payments of £10 per year to every person over the age of 50, which Paine had taken as his average adult life expectancy.
Most of the remainder would be used to make fixed payments of £15 to every man and woman on reaching the age of 21, then the age of legal majority.
The small remainder of the money raised that was still unused would be used for paying pensions to “the lame and blind.”
For context, the average weekly wage of an agricultural labourer was around 9 shillings, which would mean an annual income of about £23 for an able-bodied man working throughout the year.
Paine’s proposal presaged the social safety net of later eras and governments, proposing seven entitlements to protect the poorest citizens from the ravages of market capitalism:
Grants to subsidize schooling of 4 pounds per annum
One-time payments to adults on reaching maturity
One-time payments to newly married couples and new parents
Eliminate taxes on working poor
Back-to-work schemes
Pensions for seniors
Burial benefits to surviving spouses
and also provided a scheme of how to pay for them.
Americans are now spending more time alone– mostly at home– than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. While the pandemic certainly enforced some of that isolation; the post-COVID world remains extraordinarily atomized.
In a bracing essay, Derek Thompson, explores the emergence of this wide-spread isolation, unpacking its drivers, enumerating its considerable (personal and civic) costs, musing on the possible impact of AI, and pondering what might lead to a return to sociability…
… “I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam [author of Bowling Alone] told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school…
As we call a friend, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Alexander Graham Bell placed the first transcontinental phone call, from New York to San Francisco, where the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations were underway and his assistant, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson stood by. Bell repeated his famous first telephonic words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” to which Watson this time replied “It will take me five days to get there now!” Bell’s call officially initiated AT&T’s transcontinental service.
Alexander Graham Bell, about to call San Francisco from New York. (source)
And, on ths date 45 years later, in 1959, The first non-stop transcontinental commercial jet trip was made by an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Los Angeles to New York. The sleek silver plane made the flight in airline official time of 4 hours and 3 minutes, half the usual scheduled time for the prop-driven DC- 7Cs then in regular use on that route.
As the press continues to treat this year’s all–too–consequentialelection as ahorserace, your correspondent is re-visiting a topic touched a few weeks ago: the prevalence of polling data in election coverage. Rick Perlstein weighs in with a (fascinating) history of presidential election polling, then turns to it implications…
… That polls do not predict Presidential election outcomes any better now than they did a century ago is but one conclusion of this remarkable history. A second conclusion lurks more in the background—but I think it is the most important one to absorb.
For most of this century, the work was the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, even among pollsters. In 1948, George Gallup called presidential polling (as distinguished from issue polling, which has its own problems) “this Frankenstein.” In 1980, Elmo Roper admitted that “our polling techniques have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet we seem to be missing more and more elections.” All along, conventional journalists made a remarkably consistent case that they were empty calories that actively crowded out genuine civic engagement: “Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy,” as a 1949 critic put it, “Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”
Critics rooted for polls to fail. Eric Sevareid, in 1964, recorded his “secret glee and relief when the polls go wrong,” which might restore “the mystery and suspense of human behavior eliminated by clinical dissection.” If they were always right, as James Reston picked up the plaint in 1970, “Who would vote?” Edward R. Murrow argued in 1952 that polling “contributed something to the dehumanization of society,” and was delighted, that year, when “the people surprised the pollsters … It restored to the individual, I suspect, some sense of his own sovereignty” over the “petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think.”
Still and all, the practice grew like Topsy. There was an “extraordinary expansion” in polls for the 1980 election, including the first partnerships between polling and media organizations. The increase was accompanied by a measurable failure of quality, which gave birth to a new critique: news organizations “making their own news and flacking it as if it were an event over which they had no control.”
And so, after the 1980 debacle, high-minded observers began wondering whether presidential polls had “outlived their usefulness,” whether the priesthood would end up “defrocked.” In 1992, the popular columnist Mike Royko went further, proposing sabotage: Maybe if people just lied, pollsters would have to give up. In 2000, Alison Mitchell of TheNew York Times proposed a polling moratorium in the four weeks leading up to elections, noting the “numbing length … to which polling is consuming both politics and journalism.”
Instead, polling proliferated: a “relentless barrage,” the American Journalism Review complained, the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip. Then, something truly disturbing started happening: People stopped complaining.
A last gasp was 2008, when Arianna Huffington revived Royko’s call for sabotage, until, two years later, she acquired the aggregator Polling.com and renamed it HuffPost Pollster. “Polling, whether we like it or not,” the former skeptic proclaimed, “is a big part of how we communicate about politics.”
And so it is.
Even as the resources devoted to every other kind of journalism atrophied, poll-based political culture has overwhelmed us, crowding out all other ways of thinking about public life. Joshua Cohen tells the story of the time Silver, looking for a way to earn eyeballs between elections, considered making a model to predict congressional votes. But voters, he snidely remarked, “don’t care about bills being passed.”
Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is. Our therapy—headlines like the one on AlterNet last week, “Data Scientist Who Correctly Predicted 2020 Election Now Betting on ‘Landslide’ Harris Win.” Our political masochism: “Holy cow, did you hear about that Times poll.” “Don’t worry, I heard it’s an outlier …”
TheWashington Post’s polling director once said, “There’s something addictive about polls and poll numbers.” He’s right. When we refer to “political junkies,” polls are pretty much the junk.
For some reason, I’ve been able to pretty much swear off the stuff, beyond mild indulgence. Maybe it’s my dime-store Buddhism. I try to stay in the present—and when it comes to the future, try to stick with things I can do. Maybe, I hereby offer myself as a role model?
As a “political expert,” friends, relatives, and even strangers are always asking me, “Who’s going to win?” I say I really have no idea. People are always a little shocked: Prediction has become what people think political expertise is for.
Afterward, the novelty of the response gets shrugged off, and we can talk. Beyond polling’s baby talk. About our common life together, about what we want to happen, and how we might make it so. But no predictions about whether this sort of thing might ever prevail. No predictions at all…
Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?
Eminently worth reading in full. Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives? “The Polling Imperilment,” from @rickperlstein in @TheProspect.
As we pray for more consequential coverage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that the (then-venerable) Literary Digest mailed out return postcard to 2,000,000 Americans, asking them to return the card with an indication for whether they would be voting in the upcoming presidential election for incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt or challenger Alf Landon. They published the results of their anxiously-anticipated poll in their October 31 issue: a massive victory for Landon. In the event, of course, Roosevelt defeated Landon in an unprecedented landslide.
The estimable Henry Farrell on James Scott and technology…
The political scientist James Scott died last week. I only knew him through email – an occasional and irregular correspondence, mostly involving unsuccessful attempts to organize discussion at political science conferences around his work. As he suggested in a biographical essay, “Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast,” which just came out a few months ago, he was semi-detached from his academic discipline.
I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me. I am honored even to be seen as a specialist, and probably as much to be embraced by anthropology and history.
The world was better for his iconoclasm. Scott wrote far more beautifully than political scientists are supposed to write and his ideas and work were too big to fit into any discipline. Although arguments were largely rooted in the past, his book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, has shaped how we think about technology.
Seeing Like a State is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems – bureaucracies and markets – that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result.
In Scott’s account, both governments and long distance markets “see” the world through abstractions – technical standards, systems of categories and the like. A government cannot see its people directly, or what they are doing. What it can see are things like statistics measuring population, the number of people who are employed or unemployed, the percentages of citizens who work in this sector or that, and the like. These measures – in numbers, charts and categories – allow it to set policy.
Such knowledge grants its users enormous power to shape society – but often without the detailed, intimate understanding that would allow them to shape it well. There is a lot of social reality that is described poorly, or not at all, by categories or statistics. Even so, as governments and markets established their power, they not only saw the world in highly limited ways but shaped it so that it conformed better to their purblind understanding, ironing out the idiosyncrasies and apparent inefficiencies that got in the way of their vast projects. The state did not just ‘see’ its society through bureaucratic categories, but tried to remake this society so that it fit better with the government’s preconceptions.
So too for the abstractions and general categories that long distance markets depend on, as the historian William Cronon observed in his great book on nineteenth century Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis (Scott was a fan). As another scholar observed of Chicago’s late twentieth century markets, abstract seeming financial conceptions may be engines, not cameras, making the economy rather than merely reflecting them.
This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine.
So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for “abstract citizens” and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world.
Scott focuses on officials in developing countries, who were starry-eyed about “planning.” Many of their notions came second-hand from the most striking example of high modernism, the effort of Soviet bureaucrats to use production statistics and linear programming to make the planned economy work. This provides the most obvious connection between what Scott talks about and the algorithmic ambitions of Silicon Valley today. A distinct whiff of “Comrades, Let’s Optimize!” lingers on, for example, in the airy optimism of Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth’s infamous “We connect people. Period” memo.
Both the old ambitions and the new are bets on the universal power of a particular kind of engineering knowledge – what Scott calls techne, the kind of knowledge that can “be expressed precisely and comprehensively in the form of hard-and-fast rules (not rules of thumb), principles, and propositions.” Scott describes the limits of techne in ways that resonate today. The grand failed projects of the mid-to-late twentieth century – vast rationalized cities like Brasilia laid out according to plans that seemed almost to be the squares of a chessboard; efforts to displace peasants and plan agriculture at scale – are close cousins to Facebook’s failed ambitions to build a world of shared connections on algorithmic foundations, and the resulting social media Brezhnevism of today.
Hence, 20th century state planning and 21st century social media evangelism are different flavors of what Scott called “high modernism … a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” High modernism was both a faith and a practice. It turned rich and diffuse social relations into something much thinner, which could be measured and observed.
Against this kind of knowledge, Scott suggested the value of metis – “the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.” This is the kind of tacit knowledge that peasants come to build about their land and the weather, or that people in less regimented societies accumulate about how to live with others in tolerable peace. Scott – an anarchist – greatly preferred this latter kind of knowledge, and the societies that valued it more, to the kind of world we live in today.
Scott provides intellectual ammunition for those who want to understand what Silicon Valley has in common with past grand efforts to improve the human condition. It’s a fountain of useful comparisons…
[Farrell reviews elaborations on and critiques of Scott’s thought…]
… All this suggests that you could reframe my criticisms of Scott in more positive ways. His contribution is not to provide a systematic framework for getting ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into, but to plant some of the seeds for a different intellectual ecology, in which others will take up his thoughts, use them to argue, also arguing with them and arguing with each other, and hence discover aspects of the world that they would never have seen otherwise. That would be as fine a legacy as any thinker could want…
As we see like a state, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was actually signed (by all of the signatories except Matthew Thornton from New Hampshire, who inked it on November 4, 1776). After the Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2, the final language of the document was approved on July 4– to wit our celebration of the date– and it was printed and distributed on July 4–5.
John Trumbull’s depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Capitol Rotunda
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