The “ubiquity of loss” is not the sole factor.
There are “trends across countries, including growing nationalism, erosion of democratic norms and growth of authoritarianism,” Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in response to my inquiry: “The two trends affecting all of these countries are globalization and technological changes, both of which are fueling inequality and perhaps also aspirations that are going unmet.”
Acemoglu continued:
It is imperative that we build better international/supranational institutions, but I do not see us going in that direction. On the contrary, I think whatever institutions we have (which are highly dysfunctional, including the WHO) are getting weaker and more captured.
Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, emailed me to say:
Globalization, concentration of capital, rapid population growth in poor countries, technological change (robots and digitization) and climate instability have all produced higher inequality, surges of international migration, and put stress on farmers, workers, craftsmen, and rural/small-town populations while concentrating growth and opportunity in the major metro areas of O.E.C.D. countries plus China.
These trends, Goldstone wrote, have
left hundreds of millions of people in countries from India and Brazil to the U.K. and the U.S. resentful that the stable, prosperous life they expected has been taken from them. As a result, many have turned their anger against foreigners, minorities, and elites who they blame (with elites, rightly), for promoting changes that benefited themselves and neglected them.
While most of the challenges “are best handled by international cooperation,” Goldstone argued,
unfortunately, global governance has been a great disappointment. Russia has basically pissed on it; Trump repudiated it, and China sought to benefit from it by seeking to call the shots in old and new multinational organizations in which it has sought a leading role.
Three recent reports explore stresses within the international order: “Global Trends 2040,” a March publication of the National Intelligence Council; “2021 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” issued by the director of national intelligence; and “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020” from the World Bank.
The Global Trends report found that multinational “superstar” firms are driving economic globalization:
These firms captured approximately 80 percent of economic profit among companies with annual revenues greater than $1 billion in 2017 and earned approximately 1.6 times more economic profit than they did in 1997.
In addition,
the economic factors that support the rise of global superstar firms, including high fixed costs, low marginal costs, network and platform effects, and machine learning, are likely to persist through the next two decades.
Perhaps most important, Global Trends notes an intensification of international resource competition:
Climate change and environmental degradation will contribute to and reflect a more contested geopolitical environment. Countries and other actors are likely to compete over food, minerals, water, and energy sources made more accessible, more valuable, or scarcer.
Losers in the competition over resources are shifting rapidly: “The two regions with the most poor people in 1990 were East Asia and Pacific and South Asia, which were home to 80 percent of the poor,” according to the World Bank. By 2015, however, “more than half of the global poor resided in sub-Saharan Africa and more than 85 percent of the poor resided in either sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.”
Elaborating on the Jackson-Grusky argument, Pieter Vanhuysse, a political scientist at the University of Southern Denmark, wrote by email that a major strain on democracy is
the rise of unequal life chances along multiple dimensions. Take education/human capital: as automation and digitization will also be major forces perturbing the world economy, it is likely that new divides will sharpen between human capital haves and have-nots at the level of both nations and persons.
These inequalities, Vanhuysse argued,
may be exacerbated by seemingly unfair practices. For instance, richer nations are likely to engage still more in poorer-to-richer nation brain drain practices, coming from the lower- or middle-income countries that invested massive public resources in producing these skills.
One of the most important setbacks to the cause of democratic governance, in Vanhuysse’s view, is
The advent, then weaponization by the Trump movement in the past 4-5 years, of populism combined with post-truth/fake facts culture in an already not so representative electoral system. This, in turn, has been aided by the seemingly unhindered Russian interference. Over the same period, powerful global actors such as Russia, China, and even countries such as Turkey, Brazil, and the Philippines have become much less cooperative and are likely to remain so.
This trend toward autocracy, Vanhuysse continues, in evident
within the European Union, notably in Poland and, very much, Hungary. Both these countries have started to consciously devise demographic scare tactics (Muslims vs. “true” Polish and Hungarian Christians; true Hungarians vs. foreign cultures, anti-LGBT campaigns, anti-foreign NGOs) to serve incumbents’ power purposes.
The Global Trends report supports Vanhuysse’s point:
In some Western democracies, public distrust of the capabilities and policies of established parties and elites, as well as anxieties about economic dislocations, status reversals, and immigration, have fueled the rise of illiberal leaders who are undermining democratic norms and institutions and civil liberties. In newer democracies that transitioned from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s, a mix of factors has led to democratic stagnation or backsliding, including weak state capacity, tenuous rule of law, fragile traditions of tolerance for opposition, high inequality, corruption, and militaries with a strong role in politics.
There are explicitly anti-democratic forces working to encourage the developments Vanhuysse describes, according to the most recent Annual Threat Assessment.
Authoritarian and illiberal regimes around the world will increasingly exploit digital tools to surveil their citizens, control free expression, and censor and manipulate information to maintain control over their populations. Such regimes are increasingly conducting cyber intrusions that affect citizens beyond their borders — such as hacking journalists and religious minorities or attacking tools that allow free speech online — as part of their broader efforts to surveil and influence foreign populations.
A key factor undermining the willingness to cooperate both locally and globally is the growing threat of scarcity in jobs, basic resources and security. Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan, who died in May, warned of the increasingly pervasive threat of job loss in his 2018 book, “Cultural Evolution”:
In this Artificial Intelligence Society, virtually anyone’s job can be automated. In the early stages of the Knowledge Society, there is growing demand for people with high levels of education and skills and they can get secure, well-paid jobs. But the transition to Artificial Intelligence society changes this: computers begin to replace even highly-educated professionals. In the Artificial Intelligence Society, the key economic conflict is no longer between a working class and a middle class, but between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.
Looking at the United States as a micro case study with global implications, David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., found that among white voters, those who lost jobs because of trade with China moved toward the political right.
“Trade-exposed districts with an initial majority white population or initially in Republican hands became substantially more likely to elect a conservative Republican,” Autor and three colleagues wrote in a 2020 paper, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure.” The results support “a political economy literature that connects adverse economic conditions to support for nativist or extreme politicians.”