How can governments mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on human flourishing?

This is an appropriate question for economists with an interest in public policy to be considering. It recognizes a possible role for governments and recognizes that an approach focused on human flourishing is likely to be more appropriate than one focused entirely on reducing the death rate or reducing adverse impacts on GDP.

The possible role for government stems from the perception that people who are most vulnerable would not able be to protect themselves adequately without some government intervention. People who know they are vulnerable have a strong incentive to practice social distancing, but personal circumstances often make that difficult. Without the threat of coercion, it is unlikely that we will see the degree of social distancing necessary to reduce the rate of spread of the virus. In that event, hospital services are likely to be over-whelmed by the number of people requiring treatment. 

As always, with government intervention, there is a risk that the cure will end up worse that the disease, but the risk is probably worth taking in this instance.

What is the appropriate indicator of human flourishing to be used as a policy objective? There isn’t just one! The prime candidates, per capita GDP and average life satisfaction both suffer from the same flaw – they don’t account for the impact of early death on the well-being of the dear departed. We should continue to consider the impacts of policies on death rates as well as their impacts on the well-being of the living.

Per capita GDP was never intended to be a measure of well-being, but it is relevant. Many factors that impinge on well-being – such as the ability of people to afford food, housing and health care – are influenced by per capita GDP levels. However, per capita GDP cannot account for impacts of coercive policy interventions, such as enforced home confinement, on psychological well-being.

Average life satisfaction seems to be a reasonable indicator of the average psychological well-being of groups of people. It is a poor indicator of economic and social progress because it doesn’t account for the extent that members of one generation perceive themselves to be better off, or worse off, than members of preceding generations. Fortunately, that deficiency is not pertinent for present purposes.

There is some evidence that lock-down and GDP decline have potential to have substantial negative impacts on average life satisfaction.

An article entitled ‘Health, distress and life satisfaction of people in China one month into the COVID-19 outbreak’, has recently been published by Stephen X Zhang, Yifei Wang, Andreas Rauch, and Feng Wei. The article is a pre-print and has not been subjected to peer review, but no major flaws are obvious to me. As might be expected, the study suggests that the life satisfaction of people with chronic medical conditions was adversely affected in locations with severe outbreaks of COVID-19.

However, the life satisfaction of people who exercised a lot was also adversely affected in locations with more severe outbreaks, suggesting frustration at restrictions imposed. Those who were able to continue to work had higher life satisfaction than those who had stopped work, with people who were able to work “at the office” having higher life satisfaction than those who worked at home.

The relationship between per capita GDP and average life satisfaction is complicated. Average life satisfaction is relatively high in countries with high per capita GDP, but tends to grow very slowly, if at all, as per capita GDP rises further in such countries.  However, there is some evidence suggesting that when per capita GDP falls in high-income countries, this is likely to be accompanied by substantial declines in average life satisfaction. Austerity in Greece reduced per capita GDP by about 26% over the decade to 2017 and was accompanied by a decline in average life satisfaction of about 20% (GDP data from OECD and life satisfaction data from World Happiness Report, 2020).

Hopefully, COVID-19 will result in much smaller declines in per capita GDP than in Greece. and economic recovery will be much more rapid.

What are the trade-offs involved in shut-down? The human welfare implications of shutting down large parts of an economy for an extended period are enormous. However, a short close-down of all those activities in which social distancing is difficult might be preferable to a less severe and more prolonged lock-down. Tomas Pueyo’s discussion of the hammer and dance (see graphic above) makes sense to me, even if the Hammer needs to last more than 3-7 weeks.

Social distancing and lock-down is an investment in buying time. Buying time for what? It can’t be for development of a vaccine. That will take too long!

It makes sense to buy time to build up the stock of respirators, ICU beds etc. to help cope with an influx of hospital patients needing treatment.

It also makes sense to buy time to obtain testing equipment that can give accurate results within a short time frame. Speedy and accurate testing has potential to enable infectious people to be detected and temporarily taken out of circulation, so that the rest of the population can return to something like normal life.

This post has not yet referred to stimulus packages. I support giving money to people to help them survive a crisis that is likely to depress aggregate demand. Please note, however, that what people can buy depends ultimately on what is produced. When an economy closes down the necessities of life tend to become scarce.

My conclusions:

• Policies to mitigate COVID-19 should be considered from a human flourishing perspective rather than solely in terms of either minimizing deaths or minimizing damage to an economy.

• The best policy seems to be to buy time by enforcing strict social distancing for a relatively short period rather than less strict distancing for a longer period. The policy aim should be to buy enough time to enable hospitals to cope better with an influx of patients and to put in place a testing regime that can enable life to return to something like normal as soon as possible.

Postscript: May 6, 2020

There isn’t a great deal of substance that I would like to change in this article with the benefit of 6 weeks hindsight. The graphs showing possible outcomes in terms of exponential growth and bell curves still look right. Some countries, including Australia, have moved along to the end of “the hammer” phase of the bell curve and are beginning the tricky “dance”. Perhaps infection rates may be greatly under-estimated and there is now considerable herd immunity, but I doubt it.

Although the governments of some countries are behaving abominably, at this stage I am confident that in Australia the intervention ‘cure’ (palliative might be a better word) will not be worse than the disease. To a large degree, the shutdown occurred spontaneously, with governments playing catchup, as large numbers of people stayed home, and businesses shut down. There has been some coercion, e.g. shutting of beaches in metropolitan areas and travel restrictions. Some police have risked public goodwill by excessively diligent (stupid) enforcement, e.g. picking on individuals sunning themselves in parks many metres away from any other human. Most people seem to be following social distancing rules because they accept that it is a sensible precaution to take for their own benefit and/or the benefit of others.

From an analytical perspective, I have been reminded that it is possible to incorporate deaths and economic considerations in a common metric if you try hard enough. Richard Layard, Andrew Clark et. al. have presented a WELLBY analysis that seeks to do that in a paper entitled, ‘When to release the lockdown: A wellbeing framework for analysing costs and benefits’. The authors use estimates of wellbeing-years (based on life satisfaction surveys) to balance the impact of policy decisions upon the number of deaths from COVID-19 against incomes, unemployment, mental health, public confidence and other factors (including CO2 emissions).

Their analytical framework looks elegant, but I am concerned about the implied policy context. It seems to me that this kind of analysis is more relevant to decision-making by a benevolent dictator (one applying utilitarian philosophy) than to a society where government should see its prime responsibility as protecting the lives and liberty of citizens.

Another article that has been brought to my attention is: ‘Some basic economics of COVID-19 policy’, by Casey Mulligan, Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel. This article looks at the trade-offs we face in regulating behavior during the pandemic.  It uses conventional cost benefit analysis to consider several possible policy objectives, including buying time and limiting the cumulative cost of a pandemic that will ultimately run its course. They conclude:

“The key difference in terms of the optimal strategy is whether our focus is on keeping the disease contained. If the objective is to buy time, then our analysis favors early and aggressive intervention. This minimizes the overall impact … . In contrast, limiting the cumulative cost of a pandemic that will ultimately run its course argues for aggressive policies later, when they will have the biggest impact on the peak load problem for the health-care system and when they will have the greatest impact on the ultimate number infected”.

The authors conclude by listing some simple economic principles to guide how public policy should proceed when faced with a new but poorly understood pandemic. Those principles include buying time upfront, and using that time wisely to gather information to implement a screen, test, trace and quarantine (STTQ) policy. They suggest that both the “buy-time” and long-term containment strategies will have to be based on an effective STTQ policy.

The approach adopted by Mulligan et. al. of considering the nature of trade-offs and suggesting policy principles is more to my liking. If these authors had used their conventional cost benefit analyses to provide specific recommendations of the kind provided by Layard et. al. I would raise the same concerns about the implied policy context of advising a benevolent dictator, rather than informing a democratic political process.

I have misgivings about the valuation of life in both studies, but have not considered the relative merits of each approach, and have nothing better to offer other than directly considering the economic cost of saving lives under alternative strategies.  

Does democracy cause growth?

This question has contemporary relevance, but it came to mind as I was reading Mass Flourishing, by Edmund Phelps, who won the Nobel in economics in 2006. Mass Flourishing, published in 2013, is subtitled How grass roots innovation created jobs, challenge and change.

Phelps’ hypothesis:

“Political institutions arguably played a significant role in the creation of the modern economy. One of these was representative democracy, which arose rather close to the emergence of economic modernity” (p 92).

That challenged my prior view that political change favouring economic freedom, innovation and productivity growth came first, and that voting rights came later to redistribute the fruits of economic progress.

Phelps recognizes that democracy involves downside risks (e.g. tyranny of the majority, interest group politics) but gives plausible reasons why democracy may have helped promote economic growth:

• A democracy would push the public sector to support the interests of lower and middle classes, thus encouraging business activity (including grassroots innovation) and public education. By contrast an autocracy would tend to be more interested in serving landed interests, national prestige etc.
• Rule of the people tends to lend credibility to rule of law, thus reducing sovereign risk.
• Elected politicians have an incentive to heed voters, whereas autocrats may not even be aware of their interests or concerns.

However, in my view Phelps' line of argument runs into problems when he considers whether the mechanics of democracy occurred at the right time and place to trigger an explosion of economic dynamism. He looks at the experience of five countries: Britain, America, France, Belgium and Germany.

In respect of Britain, he refers to the revolution of 1688 as having given representation to new wealth and new cities, and the Reform Act of 1832 as extending the franchise to men without property. The Glorious Revolution didn’t establish democracy and the Reform Act was too late to be a trigger.

Phelps refers to the U.S. Constitution of 1788 as having created a government that was radically more representative than Britain’s parliament at that time. However, my American friends keep telling me that their Founding Fathers established a republic rather than a democracy.

The experience of France seems to support the hypothesis. Both democracy and dynamism were slow to arrive in France. The experience of Belgium was ambiguous.

German experience didn’t support the hypothesis. There was strong innovation in Germany in the latter half of the 19^th century, but little democracy except at local levels.

Phelps’ conclusion suggests a smaller role for democracy than his original hypothesis:

“In any case, the reasonable inference is not that modern democracy caused the modern economy or vice-versa, but that both sprang from the same matrix of values and beliefs—the same culture” (p 96).

Joel Mokyr has emphasized the role of institutional adaptability, rather than democracy, in facilitating growth. He responds as follows to the observation that commercial energy was combined with stable rule by an exclusive elite in 18^th century Britain:

“Yet British institutions also had to possess a built-in capability to adapt to radically changing circumstances, and every such adaptation led to further changes in the economic structure of Britain. It is this kind of dynamic that created the success that allowed the growth of useful knowledge and technological ingenuity to become the foundation of sustained economic development” (The Enlightened Economy, 2009, p 427).

The adaptations that Mokyr refers to include the reform of many institutions that had supported rent-seeking and redistribution. He suggests that by 1850, “the elite that ran British government no longer saw political power as a means to acquire more privileges”, but instead “made sure that no other political group would be able to do the same so it could keep what it already had” (p 395).

As noted at the beginning of this post, the question of whether democracy supports economic growth has contemporary relevance. Bill Easterly’s examination of economic growth experience in his book, The Tyranny of Experts, (discussed here) suggests that political leaders matter very little for either good or ill in driving economic growth. He argues that freedom promotes individualistic values that favour economic development. By contrast, autocrats tend to promote the interests of the kingdom (or state) above those of the individual and foster collectivist values that are inimical to economic development. 

China’s experience of autocrats promoting limited economic freedom, which has resulted in a major growth dividend in recent decades, is interesting in that context. As in Germany in the latter part of the 19^th century, the leaders of China may see a degree of economic freedom as a way to promote the interests of the state.

 Finally, as a matter of empirics, there is evidence that if you classify countries as either democratic or non-democratic and control for other factors, the democratic countries have better growth performance. In a recent study covering 175 countries, Daron Acemoglu et al have found that democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20 percent in the long run [JPE, 2019, 127 (1)].

Unfortunately, those findings do little to allay my concerns about the impact of interest group politics on future productivity growth in the western democracies. I will write more about that, and about Edmund Phelps views of possible causes of declining dynamism, in a later post.

When and how did the concept of progress originate?

Are you one of those people who has not given up hope that following generations will have better opportunities than you have had? If so, you may be interested to know when and how such hopes came to be considered realistic.

If progress is defined very broadly in terms of hope for advancement of mankind, it is possible to argue, as does Robert Nisbet, that the concept has ancient origins:

“the Western idea of progress was born of Greek imagery, religious in foundation; the imagery of growth. It attained its fullness within Christianity, starting with the Church Fathers, especially Augustine” (Idea of Progress: A Bibliographical Essay by Robert Nisbet, 1978-79).

Augustine held that prior to Judgement Day, the blessed will know an earthy paradise.

However, that is probably not what you have in mind if you hope that following generations will have better opportunities. As Nisbet acknowledges, “there is almost no end to goals and purposes which have been declared the fulfillment or outcome of mankind's progress”.

The goals I have in mind relate to growth of opportunities for human flourishing – the pursuit and achievement of happiness in a worthwhile life. More specifically, as discussed in a recent series of posts, flourishing entails opportunities for individuals to have the basic goods of a flourishing human: wise and well-informed self-direction, the prospect of a long and healthy life, positive human relationships, psychological well-being and living in harmony with nature.  Hope for progress involves, among other things, an expectation that useful knowledge will continue to accumulate, and the material conditions of humanity will improve from generation to generation. In those terms, hope for progress isn’t necessarily associated with faith in the possibility of either an earthy or heavenly paradise.

J B Bury, the author of The Idea of Progress: An inquiry into its origin and growth (1921) viewed progress as movement of civilization in the direction of “an ultimate happy state … or of some state, at least, that may relatively be considered happy”. Bury’s emphasis on happiness seems appropriate, but the idea of “an ultimate happy state” seems inconsistent with the idea of ongoing progress.

I disagree also with Bury’s suggestion that “you have not got the idea of Progress until you … conceive that [civilization] is destined to advance indefinitely in the future”. Individual humans are destined to seek to advance their own happiness by reason of their human nature, but it doesn’t follow that civilization is destined to advance. Those who hope progress will be ongoing have a better grasp of the idea, in my view, if they acknowledge, with Karl Popper, that there are “conditions of progress” and “conditions under which progress would be arrested” (The Poverty of Historicism, 1957, p 142).

If we view progress in terms of the advance in useful knowledge and ongoing betterment of the material conditions of humanity, Bury’s claim that it is of comparatively recent origin seems correct. As noted by Joel Mokyr:

“A belief in future progress … requires an implicit model of what could have brought about such progress as well as evidence that such progress had happened in the past” (A Culture of Growth, 2017, reviewed here).

Mokyr argues that the relevant model - in which advances in useful knowledge came to be viewed as an engine of economic progress through improving production techniques - emerged in Europe in the 17^th century.

French rationalists and advocates of liberte’

In Bury’s opinion, Bernard LeBovier Fontenelle “was the first to formulate the idea of the progress, of knowledge, as a complete doctrine”, in his Digression on the Ancients and Moderns (1688). Fontenelle argued that superior methodology, logical rigor and critical faculties enabled the science of the moderns to surpass that of the ancients. He also predicted that one day the current generation would themselves be ancients and their achievements would be surpassed by later generations.

Bury’s opinion of Fontenelle’s importance in the history of progress has been disputed, but Mokyr suggest that “although Fontenelle was no towering intellect”, “he was eloquent, well positioned, and influential”, and “part of an intellectual movement that reached its zenith with Condorcet” (p 262). 

Before we discuss Condorcet, mention should be made of Abbe’ Saint Pierre and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. The Abbe’ widened the compass of progress to embrace progress toward social perfection. Bury notes that he “shared the illusion of many that government is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men”.

Turgot viewed history as a record of human progress, advancing through periods of calm and disturbance toward greater perfection. Unlike some other French Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Voltaire, Turgot acknowledged Christianity as having been a powerful agent of civilization. He noted that the development of human societies has not been guided by human reason, but has occurred as a result of passion and ambition. Nisbet suggests that Turgot’s celebrated discourse, before an admiring audience at the Sorbonne in 1750, “probably” represented “the first full and complete statement of progress”. Mokyr observes that Turgot “seems to fall in the Candidesque error of thinking that almost any event in history, no matter how calamitous, led to progress in some fashion” (p 263). Mokyr’s judgement may be too harsh because Turgot’s laissez faire views on economics were apparently based on an appreciation of the mutual benefits of free exchange (see comments by Murray Rothbard).

The Marquis de Condorcet (known as Nicolas de Condorcet) was a supporter of the French Revolution, but his Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress or the Human Mind was composed after that, in 1793, during the Terror, while he was hiding from Robespierre. Condorcet viewed the history of civilisation as the history of enlightenment – he saw an indissoluble union between intellectual progress and the progress of liberty, virtue and respect for natural rights. Based on his analysis of history, he reasoned that humanity was on the cusp of a grand revolution toward a happy future. He seems to have viewed that outcome as inevitable, provided appropriate help was provided by people who wanted to be on the right side of history. He asked:

“What can better enlighten us to what we may expect, what can be a surer guide to us, amidst its commotions, than the picture of the revolutions that have preceded and prepared the way for it? The present state of knowledge assures us that it will be happy. But is it not upon condition that we know how to assist it with all our strength?”

Bury notes that Condorcet’s “principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot”, but “Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet”. As prophets go, Condorcet seems to have been successful. He predicted equality of the sexes, mitigation of inequality in wealth by means of education, economic development obliterating distinction between “advanced and retrograde races”, and advances in medical science increasing life expectancy. His prophesy of cessation of war has yet to be fulfilled, but if Steven Pinker is right, there may even be a trend in that direction.

Scottish moralists and economists

Nisbet recognises the importance of Adam Ferguson’s contribution in documenting the history of arts, sciences and institutions, without mentioning his most important contribution. Bury mentions in a footnote that Ferguson “treated the growth of civilization as due to the progressive nature of man, which insists on carrying him forward to limits impossible to ascertain” and “formulated that process as a movement from simplicity to complexity”.

Further explanation is required. Ferguson argued that “man is susceptible of improvement” because of “a desire of perfection” stemming from “the powers that nature has given”.  As humans strive “to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages” they “arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate”. He suggests: “the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of men”. His main point:

“Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767).

Bill Easterly has noted recently that Ferguson used lack of intentional design to challenge the notion of innate European superiority leading to the right to coerce non-Europeans. He argues that superior group outcomes could not reflect innate superiority because those outcomes “arose from successive improvements that were made, without any sense of their general effect” (The Review of Austrian Economics, 2019).

Bury and Nisbet both recognize the importance to an understanding of progress of Adam Smith’s great work, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Bury notes that as well as a treatise on economic principles, The Wealth of Nations “contains a history of the gradual economic progress of human society, and it suggests the expectation of an indefinite augmentation of wealth and well-being”.

Smith’s well-known contributions on the gains from specialization and trade helped promote a broader understanding of economic progress, and of the potential for governments to hold it back. 

Although he didn’t present a complete model of technological progress, Smith also made an important contribution to understanding of productivity growth. Smith suggested that “the invention of all those machines by which labour is so much facilitated and abridged, seems to have been originally owing to the division of labour”. He observed that people are “much more likely to discover easier and readier methods of attaining any object, when the whole of their minds is directed towards that single object”. That observation anticipates Friedrich Hayek’s insights on the importance of specific knowledge and Edmund Phelps insights on the importance of grassroots innovation to the economic development process.

In my view, Smith’s account of spontaneous order, building on the insights of Adam Ferguson, represents his greatest contribution to an understanding of progress. Smith observed:

“This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”.

In his oft quoted passage about the “invisible hand”, Smith suggested that an individual pursuing his own commercial interests,

“by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it”.

Smith viewed progress as an outcome of voluntary exchange process with potential for mutual benefit. Bill Easterly reminds us that The Wealth of Nations, which is most famous as a critique of zero-sum mercantilist thinking, is also a critique of zero-sum colonialist thinking. Smith was scathing in his criticism of the conquest of the Americas. He wrote:

“The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries”.

We can’t turn back history and there is a limit to what can be done to compensate for the injustices of the past, but we should ensure that our personal views of progress are consistent with generation of mutually beneficial outcomes, rather than use of force to enable some to prosper at the expense of others.

Conclusion

Hope for progress involves the expectation that useful knowledge will continue to accumulate, providing growing opportunities for human flourishing, including opportunities for voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange. That concept of progress emerged in Europe in the 17^th century and was fully developed in the 18^th century. Thinkers who were important in developing the concept include Fontenelle, Turgot and Condorcet, in France, and Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, in Scotland.

What determines opportunities for humans to flourish?

A series of recent articles on this blog has shown that some societies offer better opportunities than others for individuals to have the basic goods of a flourishing human. My aim in this post is to draw threads together to provide an overview of the links between the basic goods and determinants of opportunities to have those goods.

First, I will recap how the basic goods were identified.

Criteria

As explained in the first article in the series, I have adopted the criteria for the basic goods of “the good life” used by Robert and Edward Skidelsky: 

• Universality: not specific to eras or cultures;
• Finality: not just serving as a means to a more basic good;
• Sui generis: not incorporated in some other good;
• Indispensability: lack of the good leads to loss or harm.

Those criteria were developed by Skidelsky and Skidelsky in their book How Much is Enough (2012). Those authors also presented a list of basic goods that I used as a starting point for thinking about the items that should be regarded as basic goods.

The basic goods that I think a flourishing human could be expected to have are:

1. The prospect of a long and healthy life.
2. Wise and well-informed self-direction.
3. Positive relationships with family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and trading partners.
4. Psychological well-being: emotional stability, positive emotion, satisfaction with material living standards, engagement in doing things for their own sake and learning new things, perception of life as meaningful, a sense of accomplishment, optimism, resilience, vitality, integrity, and self-respect.
5. Living in harmony with nature.

I think my list is comprehensive and have given reasons why I think the items included on it are basic goods. Nevertheless, my perceptions of what it means to be a flourishing human are not incontrovertible.

Some items on this list could be grouped together. Longevity and psychological well-being are both aspects of health. Positive relations with other humans and living in harmony with nature are both aspects of relationships with other living things. However, I think the differences between the items concerned are large enough to warrant separate listing.

Links between the basic goods

The chart shown at the beginning of this post suggests that the basic goods are linked together as an integrated whole when a human is flourishing.

Wise and well-informed self-direction is of central importance. As discussed in the post on that topic, self-direction helps individuals to maintain other basic goods that are necessary to their pursuit of chosen goals.  The exercise of practical wisdom helps individuals to live long and healthy lives, maintain positive relationships, manage their emotional health, and live in harmony with nature.

Psychological well-being depends heavily on other basic goods. As noted in the post on psychological well-being, much of the international variation in life satisfaction scores can be explained by factors that are closely related to other basic goods that a flourishing human could be expected to have. 

The causal link between psychological well-being and self-direction runs in both directions. Sanity is necessary for wise self-direction.

The prospects for people to live long and healthy lives have always depended on living in harmony with nature. That is true even in the modern world. For example, the severity of damage resulting from bushfires recently experienced in Australia may be attributed to failure to have enough regard to living in harmony with nature. In addition to the immediate threat to life posed by the fires, may people have been adversely affected by smoke, which includes particulates that can be detrimental to long term health.

Determinants of opportunities to have the basic goods

Conclusions of the posts relating to each of the basic goods are outlined below.

• Wise and well-informed self-direction: Individuals have strong incentives to learn how to make wise and well-informed choices in societies where there is a great deal of economic and personal freedom. They are likely to have easier access to relevant information in countries with relatively high skill levels.
• The prospect of a long and healthy life: Health spending, income growth and education have contributed substantially to increased longevity. The more fundamental determinants are the cultural and institutional factors that have contributed to economic development, including economic freedom. Long healthy life expectancy is associated with high levels of economic and personal freedom.
• Positive relationships with other humans: The extent to which others can be trusted has an important impact on the opportunities for positive human relationships because it improves incentives for trade and other mutually beneficial activities. Trust levels tend to be higher in countries with relatively low crime rates and adherence to rule of law. Generalized trust, which gives greatest weight to trust of people who have just met and people from different religions and nationalities, tends to be greatest where people hold emancipative values, involving greater tolerance of diversity. Networks of individuals who can rely on each other for social support tend to be strongest in high-income countries.
• Psychological well-being: Countries with the highest average life satisfaction are characterised by relatively high income levels and life expectancy, accompanied by perceptions of strong social support, freedom and low corruption. The percentage of the population who are dissatisfied with life tends to be relatively low in such countries.
• Living in harmony with nature: The sense of kinship that people feel toward some animals living in the wild is similar to their feelings toward household pets. Human reasoning seems likely to continue to expand this sense of kinship to encompass more living things. Rising incomes make people more willing and able to afford more humane treatment of animals.

Common elements among determinants

The most pervasive common elements among the determinants of opportunities to have the basic goods are high incomes and high levels of economic and personal freedom.

The pervasiveness of high incomes as a determinant of opportunities for human flourishing points to the importance of economic growth. I have recently argued that it seems likely that for the foreseeable future the aggregate outcome of choices freely made by individuals as consumers and producers of goods and services will continue to involve further economic growth, even in high income countries.

However, it is possible that, over the longer term, increasing numbers of individuals will choose a lifestyle involving stable incomes and more leisure to one with rising incomes. Such an outcome would be consistent with ongoing growth of opportunities for individuals to live the lives that they aspire to have.

Once we recognize that economic growth is only one possible outcome of personal choices in the context of expanding production and consumption possibilities, that opens the way for us to focus on the determinants of productivity growth, rather than GDP growth outcomes. The cultural and institutional factors that have led to economic growth in the past have potential to continue to raise productivity levels, and thus enable opportunities for human flourishing to continue to expand, even if aggregate demand for goods and services does not continue to grow.

Cultural and institutional factors that support individual self-direction and opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange and cooperation are important not only in enabling people to make effective use of known technology, but also in bringing about improvements in skills, innovation, technological progress and advance of knowledge that enable productivity growth to occur.

Important institutions supporting the ongoing growth of productivity include liberty and rule of law. Individuals need liberty in order to exercise self-direction, and they need trustworthy trading partners and collaborators to engage with for mutual benefit. The perception that others can be trusted is enhanced by widespread adherence to rule of law. Culture is directly important in supporting the advance of knowledge, respect for innovators, and tolerance of diversity. Culture also underpins the values supporting liberty and the rule of law.

 Conclusions

Wise and well-informed self-direction is of central importance among the basic goods of a flourishing human because it helps individuals to maintain the other basic goods. The exercise of practical wisdom helps individuals to live long and healthy lives, maintain positive relationships, manage their emotional health, and to live in harmony with nature.

At a societal level, liberty and rule of law are among the most important determinants of opportunities for individuals to have the basic goods of a flourishing human. That poses the question of why there is greater liberty and adherence to rule of law in some societies than in others.  In order to understand the determinants of opportunities for human flourishing we need to understand the evolution of cultures supporting liberty and the rule of law.

Does the modern world offer opportunities for people to live in harmony with nature?

Living in harmony with nature is one of five basic goods of a flourishing human. That is the opinion expressed in an earlier article on this blog. However, some further explanation may be required to persuade some readers that living in harmony with nature meets the criteria of a basic good.

Meeting criteria

Living in harmony with nature is obviously closely linked to survival of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers, but it might appear less important in the modern world. That is debatable, given the potential for environmental impacts of some human activities to be detrimental to human health and well-being.

It is also beside the point. Living in harmony with nature would not be a basic good if it served only as a means to a long and healthy life. Basic goods are not a means to some other good.

Similarly, the question of whether living in harmony with nature is integral to psychological well-being is beside the point. Basic goods are not components of other goods.

Basic goods are final goods.  As I see it, living in harmony with nature is an indispensable final good of flourishing humans because humans have deep-seated intuitions about their kinship (relatedness) to other living things. Anyone who doubts whether flourishing humans have such intuitions should look at some videos of animals meeting challenges of various kinds. Could any flourishing human not be pleased that this video of ducklings climbing steps has a happy ending?

The nature of kinship

The kinship that flourishing humans feel toward other living things is similar to their positive relationships with other humans. In fact, people often value the lives of household pets more highly than the lives of other humans. Some research by Jack Levin et al suggests that adult victims of crime receive less empathy than do child, puppy, and full-grown dog victims. The explanation offered for adult dogs receiving more empathy than adult humans is that adult humans are viewed as capable of protecting themselves while adult dogs are regarded as dependent and vulnerable, not unlike puppies and children.

Living in harmony with household pets may not be the first example that comes to mind of living in harmony with nature. Nevertheless, the sense of kinship with some animals living in the wild seems to be similar. Steven Pinker suggests in The Better Angels of our Nature that species that are lucky enough to possess the geometry of human babies may benefit to a greater extent from our sympathetic concern than other mammals (p 580).

Environmentalists have suggested that this results in disproportionate concern for a few mammals. Nevertheless, some environmentalists make the most of every opportunity to exploit fears that cute mammals are becoming endangered species. Koalas are a prime example. There would be few Australians who do not feel sadness about the large number of koalas killed in recent bushfires in eastern Australia, but claims that the koala population is now “functionally extinct” are probably exaggerated.

Opportunities offered by the modern world

The concept of an expanding circle of empathy, developed by Peter Singer, suggests that humans are likely to continue to expand their sense of kinship to encompass more living things. Singer suggests that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one's family and community members, but our capacity for reasoning has enabled an expanding circle of moral concern to develop. Those concerns seem likely to result in increasing numbers of people deciding to forgo meat products, without hectoring by climate change zealots claiming that we need to do so to save the planet. In my view, rising incomes play an important role in enabling people to give practical effect to their empathy for animals, for example by being willing and able to pay to ensure more humane treatment.

It is often observed that the move toward urban living has tended to separate people from the natural environment, but that lifestyle is likely to be more in harmony with nature than a lifestyle in which large numbers attempt to live in natural environments, but end up destroying the natural qualities that attracted them. As discussed on this blog a few years ago, the idea of locating human activities away from the natural environment, makes sense to decouple human development from adverse environmental impacts.

In How Much is Enough, Robert and Edward Skidelsky suggest that gardening provides a practical illustration of living in harmony with nature. They suggest that a good gardener “knows and respects” the potentialities of nature:

“His relation to nature is neither vulgarly instrumental nor grimly sacrificial. It is a relation of harmony”.

Gardening offers some potential to live in harmony with nature even in an urban environment. For example, it is often possible to select ornamental trees and shrubs, and to construct water features, with a view to attracting native birds into a garden. Even vertical gardening offers some scope to live in harmony with nature. On a larger scale, the story behind the mistletoe pictured at the beginning of this article illustrates some possibilities. An experiment is being conducted in Melbourne to use mistletoe to turn common street trees with no biodiversity benefits, London plane trees, into virtual wildlife sanctuaries.

The gardening concept may also have some relevance to the preservation of natural habitat. The idea that wilderness can be preserved merely by declaring an area to be a national park is a myth. Wilderness areas have not been free of human intervention in the past and may require careful monitoring and management to maintain existing biodiversity. For example, in Australia, the traditional custodians of the land used fire to create an environment suitable for the animals they hunted and to avoid a build-up of undergrowth that could fuel destructive bush fires.

Conclusions

Living in harmony with nature is one of the basic goods of a flourishing human because humans have deep-seated intuitions about their kinship with other living things.

The sense of kinship that people feel toward some animals living in the wild is like their feelings toward household pets. Human reasoning seems likely to expand this sense of kinship to encompass more living things. Rising incomes make people more willing and able to afford more humane treatment of animals.

Living in harmony with nature is consistent with urban living both because there is potential for substantial biodiversity in urban environments and because of the potential it offers for larger areas of natural wildlife habitat to be set aside and protected from the adverse effects of human activity. Ongoing monitoring and management is necessary in those areas to maintain existing habitat that is an outcome of past human interventions.

Why do opportunities for positive human relationships differ among countries?

Positive relationships with family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and trading partners was identified in a recent article on this blog as one of the five basic goods that a flourishing human would be expected to have. Positive relationships make contributions to individual flourishing that are universal, indispensable, not entirely incorporated in other basic goods such as physical and mental health, and they do not serve just as a means to a more basic good.

The meaning of positive in this context refers to motivations. Positive relationships are motivated by love, compassion, mutual benefit, or benign personal benefit, rather than by malice, or seeking personal gain at the expense of others. The dividing line between positive and negative motivations occurs at the point where there is an intention to infringe natural rights (as discussed here).

Opportunities for individuals to have positive relationships are more constrained in some countries than in others. That occurs to some degree because of constraints on liberty. Positive personal and business relationships of some kinds are not permitted in some parts of the world. Such constraints impinge on the capacity of individuals for self-direction, the basic good discussed in the preceding post.

Perceptions of the extent to which others can be trusted have a major differential impact on opportunities for positive human relationships in different countries. The following discussion makes use of the concept of generalized trust, as defined by Christian Welzel in Freedom Rising (2013). As Welzel explains, generalized trust “derives from trust in close others and then extends to unspecified others to eventually include even remote others”. In order to capture that idea, he combines variables from the World Values Survey representing close trust (trust of family, neighbours and people you know personally), unspecified trust (whether most people can be trusted, and whether most people try to be fair) and remote trust (trust of people you meet for the first time, people of another religion and people of another nationality). In the index construction, all variables are converted to a 0 to 1 scale, close trust is given a weight of 1, unspecified trust and weight of 2 and remote trust a weight of 3. 

The vertical axis of the accompany chart shows values of generalized trust for 58 jurisdictions included in the 2010-14 wave of the World Values Survey. Of those, the 5 jurisdictions with highest generalized trust were Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Hong Kong and United States.

If you want to explain why trust levels vary between countries, it makes sense to look for reasons why people in some countries might consider their compatriots to be untrustworthy, such as the incidence of crime. The accompany chart shows the jurisdictions with highest levels of generalized trust also score highly on the World Bank’s rule of law index. That index incorporates data relating to the likelihood of crime and violence as well as information on the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police and the courts. In a recent article on this blog, I suggested that by penalising plunder rule of law encourages trust and improves incentives for mutually beneficial trade, as well as enabling societies to avoid the violence associated with do-it-yourself (DIY) justice.

The association between trust and rule of law might also reflect causation running from trust to incidence of crime. Societies with high levels of generalized trust could be expected to have stronger incentives for mutually beneficial, rather than predatory activity, a lower incidence of crime and hence, higher rule of law index scores.

The chart also suggests that higher levels of generalized trust tends to be associated with greater endorsement of emancipative values, as indicated by the size of the bubbles. Christian Welzel’s index of emancipative values incorporates twelve items from the World Values Survey covering values relating to autonomy, choice, equality and voice (e.g. protecting freedom of speech and giving people more say in government and workplace decisions). Emancipative values remain relatively dormant when people are poor, illiterate and isolated in local groups, but emerge strongly as people acquire more action resources (wealth, intellectual skills and opportunities to connect with others).

Since emancipative values involve greater tolerance of diversity it is not surprising that people holding such values would be more likely to trust people of different religions and nationalities. Welzel’s analysis in Freedom Rising shows that at an individual level people who endorse emancipative values tend to have higher levels of generalized trust, and that this impact is amplified in societies where those values are more prevalent.

In addition to trust, positive relationships are reflected in networks of individuals who can rely on each other for social support when they need it. Responses to a Gallup World Poll question which asks people whether they have relatives or friends to count on for help when they are in trouble, suggests that support networks tend to be stronger in relatively high-income countries. Of 136 countries in the data set used, 8 of the 10 with strongest support networks are relatively high-income countries: Norway, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Slovenia, Australia, Netherlands and Ireland. (The other 2 countries in the top 10 are Turkmenistan and Mongolia.) Some relatively high-income countries also appear well down the rankings, e.g. U.S.A. in 37^th place, Japan, 48^th place and Greece in 89^th place.

Conclusions

Positive human relationships can be motivated by love, compassion, mutual benefit, or benign personal benefit. The extent to which others can be trusted has an important impact on the opportunities for positive human relationships. Trust levels tend to be higher in countries with relatively low crime rates. Trust improves incentives for trade and other mutually beneficial activities.

Generalized trust, which gives greatest weight to trust of people who have just met and people from different religions and nationalities, tends to be greatest where people hold emancipative values, involving greater tolerance of diversity.

Networks of individuals who can rely on each other for social support tend to be strongest in high-income countries.

What are the basic goods of a flourishing human?

A good place to begin is with the discussion of the basic goods of “the good life”, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky in their book How Much is Enough (2012). The relevant discussion is in Chapter 6, entitled ‘Elements of the Good Life’. I published a somewhat critical review of the book on this blog some years ago, but I saw some merit in the authors discussion of human flourishing.

The authors adopt the following criteria to identify basic goods:

Universality: not specific to eras or cultures;

Finality: not just serving as a means to a more basic good;

Sui generis: not incorporated in some other good;

Indispensability: lack of the good leads to loss or harm.

I accept those criteria.

The authors identify the following seven basic goods:

• Health: ‘‘the full functioning of the body, the perfection of our animal natures”.
• Security: ‘‘an individual’s justified expectation that his life will continue more or less in its accustomed course, undisturbed by war, crime, revolution or major social and economic upheavals”.
• Respect: an individual’s feeling that others ‘‘regard his views and interests as worthy of consideration, as things not to be ignored or trampled on”.
• Personality: ‘‘the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good”.
• Harmony with Nature: ‘‘a sense of kinship with animals, plants, and landscapes”.
• Friendship: ‘‘all robust, affectionate relationships”, including work relationships etc. as well as family relationships.
• Leisure: “that which we do for its own sake”, not just time off work.

That list summarises 17 pages of discussion, so it may not do justice to the authors’ deliberations. Nevertheless, it provides a basis to consider whether items have been identified appropriately, and whether anything important has been left out.

Health is obviously an essential characteristic of a flourishing human. The authors want to discourage “an obsession with longevity”, but it is reasonable to assert that flourishing involves living healthily for the term of one’s natural life.

Security is important, but it serves as a means to other goods, including a long and healthy life and psychological well-being (an important omission from the authors’ list of basic goods).

Having others respect of one’s views and interests feels good, but it isn’t indispensable to individual flourishing. Respect for one’s natural rights (life, liberty and property) is certainly indispensable, but serves as a means to other goods, including the ability to live a long and healthy life, interact with others for mutual benefit, and to the acquire human and physical capital that contributes to flourishing.

“Personality” does not seem to capture adequately the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good. The authors use the term personality, rather than autonomy or practical reason, because it implies “spontaneity, individuality and spirit”. Those aspects of personality could be more appropriately incorporated under psychological well-being. The basic good corresponding to framing and executing a plan of life seems to me to be best described as accepting responsibility for self-direction.

Living in harmony with nature is important to human flourishing, and not just because of environmental impacts on human health and well-being. As I see it, the motivation for living in harmony with nature stems from deep-seated intuitions about our kinship with other living things.

Friendship doesn’t seem the most appropriate word to capture the wide variety of relationships that the authors put under this heading. The relevant basic good seems to me to be positive relationships.

Leisure is usually thought of as time off work, rather than engagement in doing things for their own sake. Martin Seligman uses the term ‘engagement’ to refer to the relevant basic good in his book Flourish (2011).

The other four elements of well-being identified in Seligman’s PERMA acronym (discussed here) are positive emotion, relationships, meaning and achievement. Of these, Skidelsky and Skidelsky only directly acknowledge relationships as an element of the good life. It seems to me that positive emotion and a sense of achievement are essential characteristics of a flourishing human.

Meaning requires a little more discussion. Seligman defines ‘meaning’ as belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self. This makes sense if serving the self means pursuit of personal pleasure. Those who see their lives as meaningful could be expected to value more things in life than their own pleasure.

So, here are the basic goods that I would expect a flourishing human to have:

1.  The prospect of a long and healthy life.
2. Wise and well-informed self-direction.
3.  Positive relationships with family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and trading partners.
4. Psychological well-being: emotional stability, positive emotion, satisfaction with material living standards, engagement in doing things for their own sake and learning new things, perception of life as meaningful, a sense of accomplishment, optimism, resilience, vitality, integrity, and self-respect.
5. Living in harmony with nature.

What do I plan to do with this list? My interest is in the factors that lead to differences in opportunities for human flourishing in different countries. For example, which are the countries where some person chosen at random is likely to have the best prospects of a long and healthy life? How can we explain why the prospects for that individual are better in those countries?

Such questions will be explored in later posts.

What is it important to know about freedom, liberty and natural rights?

Dear readers, this article summarises the conclusions of a series of recent posts on this blog relating to freedom, liberty and natural rights.

It might help you in reading the article to think of it as an outline of the chapter on freedom in a book about freedom, progress and human flourishing. It would help me if you could provide comments below, or by email, on whether you think the article captures adequately what it is important to know about liberty.

The meaning of freedom, liberty and rights. 

Freedom sounds good, but the meaning of the word depends on context. For example, when people talk about freedom from fear, or freedom from want, they may have something important to say about human flourishing, but it isn’t necessary related to personal freedom or economic freedom, which are aspects of liberty. My focus in this post is on liberty.

Liberty has a more precise meaning than freedom. I adopt Friedrich Hayek’s definition of liberty as “a state in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society”. In the civic republican tradition, liberty is sometimes defined more broadly to encompass political freedoms, including the right to political participation. To avoid confusion, however, I think it best to stick with Hayek’s definition.

Rights refer to things that one is morally or legally entitled to do or have. As with freedom, the precise meaning depends on context and qualifier words. A negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group whereas a positive right is an entitlement to have another person or group do something. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights encompasses not only the negative right to liberty and positive legal rights (including political freedom) but also economic and social aspirations that cannot necessarily be met by anything that a person or group might do.   

My focus here is on natural rights, including the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - as famously proclaimed in the United States Declaration of Independence. The inclusion of “pursuit of happiness” as a right in the Declaration might appear to be redundant since pursuit of happiness is encompassed in our understanding of liberty. In 18^th century America, however, an inalienable right to liberty could have been interpreted in civic republican terms. At that time, pursuit of happiness was widely perceived as the activity of human flourishing, as perceived by Aristotle. (Further explanation is provided in an earlier post.)

Liberty is worth having.

Anyone who lives in a liberal democracy should ask themselves from time to time what it would be like to live without liberty. What would your life be like if you lived in a country where you didn’t have freedom of religion, where you could be jailed for expressing views not approved of by political leaders, where you could be subject to arbitrary arrest, where your property could be arbitrarily seized by the government, or where your freedom to  move around was restricted? Such countries are still easy to find.

The right to freedom of speech is particularly important because free speech helps to protect liberty more generally. Some restrictions on freedom of speech have long been widely accepted as desirable, for example to discourage incitement to violence. However, recent efforts in some liberal democracies to make it a crime to offend others based on identity characteristics - such as ethnicity, religion or gender - have potential to curtail freedom of speech substantially. Even when people strive to be respectful in the way they present their views, some people with opposing viewpoints are likely to claim to be offended if they can thereby stifle debate on controversial topics.

Norms of liberty make it possible for individuals to flourish in different ways.

As explained by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl: 

“Individual rights are … needed to solve a problem that is uniquely social, political and legal. … How do we allow for the possibility that individuals might flourish in different ways … without creating inherent moral conflict in … the structure that is provided by the political/legal order? How do we find a political/legal order that will in principle not require that the human flourishing of any person or group be given structural preference over others? How do we protect the possibility that each may flourish while at the same time provide principles that regulate the conduct of all?”  (Norms of Liberty, 2005, p 78).

A discussion of views of other authors who have also advanced metanormative arguments for individual rights was posted on this blog some years ago.

 

Moral intuitions support natural rights.

Natural rights are inherent in human nature. They have traditionally been seen to be endowed by God, but widely-held intuitions about natural rights can also be explained in terms of the evolution of the ethics of respect. Moral intuitions that it is good to respect the lives and autonomy of others provide support for norms of liberty that maximize the opportunities available for all to flourish. As discussed in a recent post, it seems reasonable to suppose that the ethics of respect evolved because of the benefits that voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit brought to individuals and communities.  

Those who seek to deny the existence of natural rights tend to argue that individual rights are bestowed by governments, so it is legitimate for governments to remove them if that serves what they see as the “greater good”. There are times when individual rights do need to be compromised (e.g. via compulsory land acquisition) to prevent a community being held to ransom by an individual, but this should not be done lightly and fair compensation should be provided.

Respect for the rights of others has been advocated as an ideal since ancient times.

In ancient Greece, the poems of Hesiod, which appear to date from the 8^th or 7^th century BCE, urge people to comply with rules of just conduct rather than to seek to benefit via predation. In his poem, Works and Days, Hesiod advises his brother Perses, to “put away all notions of violence” for “fish, and wild animals, and the flying birds” may “feed on each other, since there is no idea of justice among them,” but “to men [Zeus] gave justice,” which is the “best thing they have.”  Hesiod condemns both force and fraud: the grabbing of goods either by “force of hands” or by “cleverness of … tongue.” (Further discussion here.)

Perceptions of natural law have not always supported universal human flourishing.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was the great philosopher of individual human flourishing. His emphasis on the natural capacity of humans to use reason to guide themselves and exercise appropriate moderation in their behaviour provides a basis for understanding human flourishing to be an essentially self-directed activity.

Nevertheless, Aristotle argued that it was natural to make slaves of defeated enemies. He viewed the system of conquest and slavery as a natural system governed by internal sources of change. By identifying the whole system as natural he was able to disregard the use of force at the heart of it.

The perception of what was natural of Cicero, the Roman statesman, lawyer and philosopher who lived from 106 BC- 43 BC, was more supportive of liberty. He argued that “nature made us just that we might participate our goods with each other, and supply each others’ wants”.

(Further discussion here and here.)

Reason and spontaneous legal processes both played a part in recognition of natural rights.

Beliefs and values supporting natural rights of individuals to life, property and liberty seem to have travelled from Cicero to the modern world through both the spontaneous evolution of rules and evolution of reasoning about the natural law. Those different transmission processes interacted. There were periods when reasoning about natural law held back recognition of individual rights to participate in mutually beneficial activities e.g. lending and borrowing. Eventually, however, reasoning about natural law reinforced and extended individual rights recognised under common law. (Further discussion here and here).

Rule of law protects natural rights and enables people to live in peace.

From the 12th century onwards, with the advent of centralised monarchies in Europe, homicide came to be viewed as an offence against the crown, rather than a civil matter. That enabled societies to avoid the violence associated with do-it-yourself justice. More effective justice systems penalised plunder, and thereby promoted peacefulness and improved incentives for mutually beneficial exchange.  

Evolution of the rule of law provided greater protection to natural rights by requiring people to refrain from initiating or threatening any forceful interference with other individuals or their property.  (Further discussion here.)

Systems of government preferment are an infringement of natural liberty.

Adam Smith argued that it was an unjust infringement of natural liberty for the powers of government to be used to assist some economic groups at the expense of others. Smith’s ideal of everyone being free to pursue their own interests in their own way is consistent with Francis Hutcheson’s earlier explanation of the right to natural liberty in terms of pursuit of happiness. (See this post).

In The Law, published in 1850, Frédéric Bastiat foresaw the potential for the universal franchise to endanger natural rights. He was concerned about the use of the power of the state by some groups to seize and consume the products of the labour of others. Legislation that seriously endangers natural rights is difficult to reconcile with rules of just conduct that have evolved to foster mutually beneficial interactions. (See discussion here.)

The right political participation should be viewed as a natural right.

Moral intuitions supporting the right to political participation presumably evolved because human flourishing has always required individuals to participate actively with others in decisions relating to provision of collective goods. Such involvement is less active in modern societies in which many collective goods are provided by remote government agencies and citizen involvement usually involves little more than voting.

The exercise of voting rights provides citizens with some protection against tyranny, but increasing numbers of people in the liberal democracies nevertheless feel unhappy about the outcomes of democratic political processes. That unhappiness may stem to an important extent from unrealistic expectations of what political processes can deliver. It seems likely to increase as low productivity growth reduces government revenues and demographic change increases political demands on governments.

Technological advances that enhance opportunities to seek mutual benefit in cooperative enterprises offer hope that people will in future be able to exercise their natural political rights in ways that give them more involvement in decisions that affect them.

(More discussion here and here.)

For liberty to prevail the ‘real constitution’ must be pro-liberty.

It is illusory to think of political institutions as external to society. The rules of the game exist only insofar as they are continually maintained in existence by human agents acting in certain systematic ways. The constitution of a free society is a pattern of interactions in which people give one another incentives to act and keep acting in ways that tend to maintain liberty. It is not the rules per se that gets disputes resolved, but rather the incentive structure that makes the system’s administrators likely to act in accordance with such rules.

Sheldon Richman defines the real constitution as the set of dispositions that influence what most people will accept as legitimate actions by the politicians and bureaucrats who make up the government. He derives support for this concept from Roderick Long’s observation that “government is not some sort of automatic robot standing outside the social order it serves; its existence depends on ongoing cooperation, both from the members of the government and from the populace it governs”.

It follows that for liberty to prevail the real constitution must be pro-liberty. As a corollary, tyranny cannot persist in any jurisdiction when the real constitution is pro-liberty.