Part VII: What kind of political entrepreneurship is required?

 This essay is one of a series exploring the topic: What impact does political entrepreneurship have on freedom and flourishing? The series commenced with a Preface which provides a synopsis of the series and explains why I think it is important to obtain a better understanding of political entrepreneurship.

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Can strong political leadership bring about institutional change leading to greater economic and personal freedom?  That idea is easy to challenge. It recalls the oft quoted passage by Lord Acton:

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority” (Acton 1887). 

Yet, powerful leadership has attractions to many citizens. I don’t think the question of whether strong political leadership could be consistent with greater economic and personal freedom should be dismissed out of hand.

Restoring order

The attraction of strong leadership is most understandable in chaotic situations where social order has broken down and lives, liberty and property are threatened by groups that have resorted to violence to pursue nefarious ends. Under such circumstances there may be grounds to hope that a strong leader will be able to restore order and protect the rights of individuals.

As Vincent Ostrom pointed out, the ubiquity of coercion means that order and organization in human societies depends upon a Faustian bargain involving use of organized force (Ostrom 1997, p.121). As explained by Paul Aligica and Peter Boettke:

“The implication is that social order and its institutional dynamics are perceived as shaped by and operating under the shadow of the ongoing tension between the threat of chaos and the threat of tyranny” (Aligica and Boettke 2009, p.61).

Benevolent despotism

Some of the best advice for despots who wish to promote freedom and flourishing was provided by Lao Tzu:

“Govern the state by being straight forward; wage war by being crafty; but win the empire by not being meddlesome” (Tzu 1963, LVII p.64).

Aristotle’s politics is somewhat more challenging to libertarians, but Fred D. Miller makes a strong case that it is not anachronistic to attribute to Aristotle a concept of individual rights and support for a moderate degree of liberalism. (Miller 1995, pp.373-378).

Robert Faulkner observes that Aristotle ranks greatness of soul as the "crown" needed to perfect all the virtues, including justice. He writes:

 “Aristotle calls greatness of soul a kosmos. It is an ornament of good character that is also an exalting order: an ordering heightened by an awareness of the grand activities such a soul calls for and is owed” (Faulkner 2007, loc. 250/3375). 

According to Faulkner:

“Aristotle's diagnosis comes to this: the great-souled man is at once drawn above humanity and drawn to humanity. He exhibits his superiority by aiding his fellows, and yet his wish is less to aid them than to avoid being or appearing dependent on them” (Faulkner 2007, loc. 565/3375).

Faulkner suggests that while Nicomachean Ethics seems to imply that greatness of the soul is a desirable attribute of political leaders, Aristotle moderates that view elsewhere in his writings. In Ethics, Aristotle suggests that greatness, especially great power, is overrated: “it is possible for one who is not a ruler of land and sea to perform noble action” (Faulkner 2007, loc. 692/3375).

In more recent times, Max Weber’s argument that effective leaders must have charisma may be relevant in considering the potential role of leaders in restoring liberty. Weber argued that effective leaders must have a charismatic form of authority because that is the only form of authority capable of overcoming the constraints of organisation, legality and tradition:

“Devotion to the charisma of the prophet, or the leader in war, or to the great demagogue in the ecclesia or in parliament, means that the leader is personally recognized as the innerly 'called' leader of men. Men do not obey him by virtue of tradition or statute, but because they believe in him” (Weber 1946, p.79).

Weber argued that charismatic authority is required for leaders to be effective in their struggle against the impersonal forces of bureaucratization. It tends to appear in moments of crisis, when the leader performs a ‘miracle’ for a group that feels otherwise impotent and deeply threatened. Xavier Márquez suggests that Weber's conception of charismatic authority allows some demagogues to play a genuinely democratic role in modern societies when viewed through contemporary theories of representation (Márquez 2024).

Thus far, the discussion suggests that it is not possible to rule out the possibility that a benevolent despot could promote freedom and flourishing if he or she wished to establish supportive institutions and had appropriate leadership qualities. However, that seems unlikely to be a frequent occurrence.

 Does autocracy support economic freedom?

The point was made earlier in this series (Part II) that it is easier to identify individual political leaders who have contributed to low or falling freedom levels than those who have contributed to high or rising freedom levels. That is because political entrepreneurship tends to be less focused on individual leaders in countries where governments have greater regard for individual liberty. 

Nevertheless, the idea that autocrats have sometimes helped produce better outcomes may not be entirely fanciful. There may be some substance lying behind folklore that attributes improvements in economic freedom to autocrats such as Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

However, even if it can be shown that in some instances autocrats have fostered greater economic freedom, and that this has been followed by improvements in personal freedom, it does not necessarily follow that a period of autocracy was necessary or justified. People in the countries concerned are better placed than foreign observers to make judgements about the use of force by autocrats in particular circumstances, but the idea that autocrats are more likely to make positive contributions to economic growth than democratic leaders does not stand up to scrutiny. William Easterly tested the proposition by relating economic growth outcomes to the periods during which autocratic and other leaders were in office. He found that “leaders matter very little” (Easterly 2013, pp. 308-26).

There is also strong empirical evidence that democracy, and the personal freedom associated with it, is compatible with high levels of economic freedom.

Which democracies are supporting economic freedom?

Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok have assembled evidence that democracy and economic freedom are highly correlated. Except for Singapore and Hong Kong there are no jurisdictions with high levels of economic freedom that are not also democracies (Geloso and Tabarrok 2025, p.116). Countries which have experienced the greatest democratization (Peru, Taiwan, Portugal, Spain, and Greece) have also experienced improvements in economic freedom. There have also been substantial improvements in economic freedom in the countries of Eastern Europe which experienced democratization following the collapse of communism in 1989 (Geloso and Tabarrok 2025, pp. 125-8). Geloso and Tabarrok provide some strong arguments to explain the correlation between democracy and economic freedom that they observe.

It seems to me, however, that none of the explanations offered for the observed correlation between democracy and economic freedom provide grounds to allay concerns, discussed in the preceding essay, about the future of economic freedom in the long-standing democracies.

Economic freedom levels are beginning to slip in some of the long-standing democracies. While many of the newer democracies have been experiencing increased dynamism, the increasing entanglement of government, industry and community organisations in the long-standing democracies has been associated with a decline in dynamism.

There is not much evidence that either the progressive or conservative sides of politics in the long-standing democracies are currently offering policies to advance economic freedom. The progressive side of politics is tending to pursue social and environmental agendas without regard for their impact on economic freedom, or growth in productivity or incomes. The conservative side of politics is tending to pursue economic nationalist agendas without regard for their impact on economic freedom, or growth in productivity of incomes.

Experience suggests that substantial political support for economic freedom will return only after economic crises threaten to cause widespread misery. That raises the issue of what kind of political entrepreneurship might help to make economic freedom more secure in the long-established democracies.

Learning from previous reform experience

Some prominent political leaders in democracies have been able to pursue reforms directed toward expansion of economic freedom. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan pursued such reforms in the USA, as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain. The reforms currently being pursued by Javier Milei in Argentina seem to be similarly motivated, but at the time of writing it is too soon to judge how highly Milei’s reforms will rate in terms of broad libertarian criteria. The economic problems confronting the United States and Britain in the 1970s and 80s provided the context in which political leaders could initiate substantial changes in the direction of economic and social policies. That is even more true of the economic circumstances in Argentina prior to Milei’s election.

The reform efforts by Reagan and Thatcher can be viewed as examples of heroic leadership which increased economic freedom. However, heroic leadership of that kind is not solely the prerogative of presidents and prime ministers. Similar reform efforts in New Zealand and Australia were led by government ministers responsible for economic policy, Roger Douglas and Paul Keating respectively, with prime ministers adopting a facilitating role.

Political leaders can rarely claim to be the authors of their reform strategies. Policy development that has led to greater economic freedom has drawn heavily on the ideas of prominent academics including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, on policy analysis in think tanks and on contributions of a few journalists who understand the issues.

In some instances, advisers within government bureaucracies have also played an important role in policy development. Roger Kerr, who held the position of Executive Director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable following a career in the New Zealand Treasury, provided a highly relevant comment about the need for advisors to focus their advice on their fields of expertise rather than on politics:

“Economists of all people should be conscious that the performance of bureaucrats in trying to pick winners and losers in the policy-advice market is likely to be as unimpressive as in the industrial domain – and for much the same reasons, namely lack of information and incentives. Perceived policy constraints are not always immutable. They can be shifted by reasoned analysis and well-constructed strategies for policy change, developed by interaction between political managers and technical advisers. Second-guessing political reactions can lead to narrowing of policy options and does less than justice, in recent New Zealand circumstances at least, to the intelligence of a number of politicians, on both sides of the political fence, who have been more aware of the gravity of New Zealand’s economic problems and prepared to tell the story like it is than many of their advising bureaucrats” (Kerr 1987, pp. 144-45).

Alf Rattigan is a prime example of a public servant who played a major innovative role in driving economic reforms in Australia.  Rattigan was chairman of Australia’s Tariff Board from 1963 to 1974 when it was replaced by the Industries Assistance Commission (IAC). He stayed on as chairman of the IAC until 1976, when he retired with ill health. Rattigan used his influence in those positions to play a pivotal role in terminating Australia’s long history of industry protection, which in turn, helped open Australia to the global forces that drove further market-based economic reforms. In a lecture presented in 2016, Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large for The Australian and Australia’s most scholarly journalist, outlined the main elements that contributed to the success of Rattigan’s reform efforts (Kelly 2016). One element of Rattigan’s success was his integrity in taking seriously his legal responsibility as chairman of an independent statutory authority, in the face of opposition from the government of the day which believed that he should “accept the overall tariff policy of the government as given” and work within that framework. Another element was the ability of his professional staff to draw upon the methodology for measurement of effective rates of protection developed by Professor Max Corden. A small group of economically literate journalists played a crucial role in giving publicity to analyses demonstrating the costs of protection. Some groups, including farmers and miners, recognized that their members were disadvantaged by high levels of protection provided to the manufacturing sector and formed a free trade lobby. David Trebeck, an influential figure in the National Farmers Federation, said: “We fired the ‘bullets’ made by the IAC.” More politicians because advocates of free trade and political leaders eventually showed leadership by recognizing that “good policy is good politics”.

Unfortunately, looking back today on the economic reform efforts of the 1980s and 90s, it is apparent that the important reforms in the rules of the game made at that time have not become deeply entrenched. Political leaders obtained sufficient electoral support to implement market-friendly policies, but there does not seem to be much evidence that members of the public improved their understanding of the benefits of free markets in any of the countries in which reforms were undertaken.

Mass movements

The problem of ensuring adoption of government policies that more consistently advance economic and personal freedom is not merely a question of how to elect political entrepreneurs with their hearts in the right place to national leadership positions. Experience has shown that the longevity of reforms cannot be guaranteed even when they are supported by a strong coalition of interest groups and result in more favourable economic opportunities for a large majority of the population.

In recent years, centre-left and centre-right governments which have followed policies that are broadly consistent with relatively high levels of economic and personal freedom have become vulnerable to competition from populist political entrepreneurs who prophesy catastrophic environmental and social consequences if their radical policy proposals are not followed. Populist policy innovators on the left and right sides of politics tend to promote vastly different fears, and to offer vastly different policies. However, one common feature of those populist policy innovators is their attempt to exploit a systematic anti-market bias among electors.

The pertinent question is how the anti-market bias of public opinion can be reduced. History suggests that this has occurred to some extent in the past via complex processes involving, among other things, political entrepreneurship in social movements. For example, Joel Mokyr notes that the move toward free trade in Britain in the first half of the 19^th century involved the influence of post-Smithian political economy, the growing political power of the new industrial elite, and debates about income distribution and food supply. He writes:

“The careers of Victorian free-traders such as Richard Cobden and John Bright and the liberal Tories of the post-1815 era represent the kind of mixture of economic interests and liberal ideology that eventually secured victory for free trade” (Mokyr 2009, p. 153).

Mikayla Novak has noted the importance of entrepreneurship in propelling social movements to extend the effective domain of freedom. In that context she notes that “people such as William Lloyd Garrison, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, and Nelson Mandela” played an important role in “opposing unsatisfactory institutions and situations” although they, themselves, were not necessarily classical liberals by orientation” (Novak 2021, p. 45).

Is it possible that at some time in the future a broad social movement promoting classical liberal views could become sufficiently influential to ensure that children are offered as much tuition about the spontaneous order of the free market as they are currently offered about the workings of ecological systems in the natural environment? If that ever happens it will occur because of the actions of individuals.  As Edward W. Younkins has suggested, the task of building a free society depends on individual advocates of liberty who are “dedicated to preserving and strengthening the ideological and moral foundations of a free society”. Younkins notes that it is especially through the “numerous interactions with individuals” during their everyday lives that advocates of liberty can “transmit the freedom philosophy to the general public” (Younkins 2011, pp. 168-69).

Please see the final part of this series: Summary and Conclusions

References

Acton, Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton) Acton-Creighton Correspondence (1887) Acton-Creighton Correspondence | Online Library of Liberty

Aligica, Paul Dragos and Peter J. Boettke, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School (Routledge, 2009).

Easterly, William, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (Basic Books, 2013).

Faulkner, Robert, The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics (Yale University Press, 2007).

Geloso, Vincent and Alex Tabarrok. “Two Peas in a Pod: Democracy and Capitalism”, in Scott C. Miller and Sidney M. Milkis (eds.) Can Democracy and Capitalism be Reconciled (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Kelly, Paul., “Economic Reform: A lost cause or merely in eclipse”, Alf Rattigan Lecture (The Australian and New Zealand School of Government, 2016).

Kerr, Roger, “Ideas, Interests, Experience and the Economic Adviser”, World Economy, 10, no. 2 (1987) pp. 131-54.

Márquez, Xavier, “Max Weber, demagogy and charismatic representation”, European Journal of Political Theory (2024).

Miller, Fred D., Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics (Clarendon Press, 1995).

Mokyr, Joel, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700 – 1850 (Yale University Press, 2009).

Novak, Mikayla, Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy (Lexington Books, 2021).

Ostrom, Vincent., The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (The University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Tzu, Lao., Tao Te Ching, D.C. Lau translation (Penguin Books, 1963).

Weber, Max, “Politics as a Vocation”, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

Younkins, Edward W. Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society, Towards a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (University Press of America, 2011).

Part VI: What are the consequences of path dependence?

 This essay is one of a series exploring the topic: What impact does political entrepreneurship have on freedom and flourishing? The series commenced with a Preface which provides a synopsis of the series and explains why I think it is important to obtain a better understanding of political entrepreneurship.

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In 1848, Frédéric Bastiat famously wrote:

“The state is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else” (Bastiat 2012, p. 171).

 A couple of years later he noted that now participation in the making of law has become universal, “equilibrium is being sought in universal plunder” (Bastiat 2012, p.189).

He predicted social unrest: “people will be beating on the door of the legislative palace. The conflict will be no less bitter within it" (Bastiat 2012, p.194).

How can we explain why “universal plunder” has taken so long to become a major problem in the long-standing democracies? Part of the explanation lies in the existence of formal institutions that place constraints on legislatures. As noted in an earlier essay in this series, part of the explanation also lies in two-party systems of government in which power is usually exercised by encompassing interest groups which have an interest in promoting widespread opportunities for individuals to flourish.

However, the existence of formal rules and encompassing political parties doesn’t offer a complete explanation. What is it that has hitherto prevented governing parties from being displaced or taken over by political entrepreneurs seeking to modify the rules of the game to advantage favored interest groups?

I think the answer lies in the “path dependence” of social norms. Please recall at this point that (as noted in Part I) institutions include codes of conduct, norms of behavior, conventions, and customs as well as formal rules. As Douglass North explains:

“Path dependence means that history matters. We cannot understand today’s choices … without tracing the incremental evolution of institutions” (North 1990, p.100).

There was a time when social norms caused people in the long-established democracies to exercise greater restraint in using their democratic “rights” to obtain benefits for themselves at the expense of others. One reason was that inequality under a constitutional order in which the rules of the game were seen as fair didn’t generate tension but was seen as ipso facto also fair. Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok note that James M. Buchanan held that view (Geloso and Tabarrok, 2025).

Buchanan also identified two norms which underpin liberal democracy: that a sufficient proportion of the population can make their own choices and prefer to be autonomous rather than dependent on others; and that a sufficient proportion of the population enter relationships with others based on reciprocity, fair dealing, and mutual respect. (Buchanan 2005, p. 26).

Buchanan asserted:

“Generalized or widespread failure of persons to adhere to these norms, along with widespread recognition that others also disregard the standards, will insure that the liberal order itself must fail, quite independently from any institutional safeguards” (Buchanan 2005, p.28).

The autonomy norm has eroded as more people have become heavily dependent on government for retirement incomes and for services such as health and education. Business and community organisations have also become increasingly willing to forgo their autonomy to pursue social and environmental objectives favored by whatever government happens to be in power and to obtain a more favourable regulatory environment for their activities.

The norm of reciprocity has also eroded considerably in recent decades. Political parties increasingly base their appeal to voters on the supposed benefits a policy might deliver to groups with specific demographic characteristics, rather than pursuing broad community interests. When voters see others declaring their support for political parties which promise additional spending or regulation to benefit specific groups, they are likely to be less inhibited in behaving similarly. As more voters engage in the struggle to obtain benefits, political parties have a greater incentive to compete for the support of narrow interest groups, rather than seeking to appeal to the broader interests of voters in their roles as taxpayers and consumers.

Increasing entanglement of government, industry and community organisations has been associated with inter-related problems of increasing constraints on economic freedom, changes in business culture leading to a decline in dynamism, and rapid growth in public debt levels. Economic freedom levels in countries such as France, Britain and USA are now substantially lower than they were at the turn of the century. Much of this slippage occurred prior to restrictions on freedom imposed during the coronavirus epidemic (Fraser Institute data). Edmund Phelps has noted a decline in economic dynamism associated with corporatism (Phelps 2013, pp. 159-69). Growth of public debt is a predictable consequence of the triadic political relationships discussed earlier. To avoid disappointing current generations by constraining government spending or raising taxes, governments tend to increase public debt, thus transferring the burden to future generations.

My consideration of these matters has led me to expect fiscal crises to become more common in the liberal democracies in the years ahead and that this will lead to consideration of rule changes to raise productivity growth and require governments to live within their means (Bates 2021, pp.117-18).

However, changing the rules of the game to reduce the adverse impact of interest group politics poses a large challenge for reform-minded political entrepreneurs. The problem arises from path dependency. The culture of preferment-seeking and plunder associated with interest group politics took a long time to reach its current state, but it is now entrenched and will be difficult to overcome.

North recognized the role that political entrepreneurs play in institutional change (North 1990, pp. 86-87, 103-4). His analysis implies that their role is to reduce transactions costs associated with institutional change. (North 1990, p.138). The transactions costs of institutional change are high because of the path dependence of institutions. As institutions evolve, ideologies tend to evolve to support them. Organizations and interest groups that have grown up under existing institutions often have a stake in maintaining them (North 1990, pp.91,99). 

In his Nobel lecture, North emphasized that because of path dependence, a change in formal rules may not change economic performance in the manner expected:

“It is the admixture of formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics that shapes economic performance. While the rules may be changed overnight, the informal norms usually change only gradually. Since it is the norms that provide “legitimacy” to a set of rules, revolutionary change is never as revolutionary as its supporters desire and performance will be different than anticipated. And economies that adopt the formal rules of another economy will have very different performance characteristics than the first economy because of different informal norms and enforcement.” (North 1993).

The implications of path dependence have been further explored by Peter Boettke, Christopher Coyne, and Peter Leeson. These authors contend that the ability of a new institutional arrangement to take hold when it has been transplanted depends on that institution’s status in relations to indigenous agents in the previous time period. They suggest that institutional transplants are unlikely to stick if they are inconsistent with indigenously introduced endogenous institutions (Boettke et al. 2015).

The analytical framework used by Boettke et al. suggests that endogenous political entrepreneurs might be more successful than international agencies in bringing about institutional change. Boettke and Coyne have noted elsewhere that political entrepreneurship entails alertness to the potential for new forms of governance to overcome political and bureaucratic constraints (Boettke and Coyne 2007, pp.130-31).

That raises the question, considered in the following essay, of what other qualities reform-minded political entrepreneurs might require to bring about desirable institutional change.

References

Bastiat, Frédéric, “The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings 1843-1850, ed. Jacques de Guenin (Liberty Fund, 2012).

Bates, Winton, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing (Hamilton Books, 2021).

Boettke, Peter J., Christopher Coyne and Peter Leeson, “Institutional Stickiness and the New Development Economics”, Chapter 6 in Culture of Economic Action, ed. Laura E. Grube and Virgil Henry Storr (Edward Elgar, 2015).  

Boettke, Peter J. and Christopher J. Coyne, “Entrepreneurial Behavior and Institutions” in Entrepreneurship: The Engine of Growth, ed. Maria Minniti (Praeger, 2007).

Buchanan, James M. Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, The normative vision of classical liberalism (Edward Elgar, 2005).

Geloso, Vincent and Alex Tabarrok. “Two Peas in a Pod: Democracy and Capitalism”, in Scott C. Miller and Sidney M. Milkis (eds.) Can Democracy and Capitalism be Reconciled (Oxford University Press, 2025).

North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

North, Douglass C., ‘Economic Performance through Time,’ Nobel Prize Lecture (December 9, 1993) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1993/north/lecture/

Phelps, Edmund. Mass Flourishing: How grassroots innovation created jobs, challenge and change (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Is it too soon to be asking in what part of the world will the next golden age be located?

 

The question posed above occurred to me as I was reading the final pages of Johan Norberg’s latest book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.

Johan Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato institute. He is a historian of ideas and a prolific author. If Norberg has a fan club, I might qualify for honorary membership. I have written about some of his previous books on this blog (here and here) and have read others.

Norberg explains what he means by a golden age in these terms:

“A golden age is associated with a culture of optimism, which encourages people to explore new knowledge, experiment with new methods and technologies, and exchange the results with others. Its characteristics are cultural creativity, scientific discoveries, technological achievements and economic growth that stand out compared with what came before and after it, and compared with other contemporary cultures. Its result is a high average standard of living, which is usually the envy of others, often also of their heirs.”

The author suggests that the most important precondition for a golden age is “an absence of orthodoxies imposed form the top about what to believe, think and say, how to live and what to do.” He doesn’t present the golden ages he has identified in utopian terms. He acknowledges that countries concerned all practiced slavery, denied women basic rights and “took great delight in exterminating neighbouring populations”.

As implied in the epigraph, Norberg argues that civilizations decline when they lose cultural self-confidence. He suggests that episodes of creativity and growth are often terminated because of the perceived self-interest of people who fear change and feel threatened by it. Free speech is replaced by orthodoxies and free markets are replaced by increased economic controls. The fears of those seeking stability and predictability often become self-fulfilling.

 In my view, Norberg has done an excellent job in explaining why golden ages have emerged and disappeared at different times in different parts of the world.

However, I think there may be an omission in the author’s identification of golden ages. I will briefly discuss that before focusing on the question of whether the Anglosphere is in decline.

Identifying golden ages

Norberg discusses seven golden ages in his book. Since he doesn’t provide a summary timeline showing their duration, I asked ChatGPT to construct the following:

• Athens: 480–404 BC
• Rome: 27 BC–AD 180
• Abbasids: 750–950
• Song dynasty: 960–1279
• Renaissance Italy: 1490–1527
• Dutch Republic: 1609–1672
• Anglosphere: c. 1688 onward.

If that timeline is broadly correct, it suggests that the largest gap between golden ages occurred between the end of the golden age of Rome and the beginning of the golden age of the Abbasids. What was happening at that time? Although the golden age of Rome may have ended around 180, following the death of Marcus Aurelius, the decline and fall of the Roman empire took a few more centuries. The last emperor of the Western Roman empire was deposed in 476. Plato’s Academy in Athens apparently continued to function until 532, when the seven last philosophers left to seek refuge with the Persian king. Interest in Greek philosophy grew in Persia during the 6^th and 7^th centuries, partly because of the presence of scholars associated with schismatic Christian sects.

As I was pondering what was happening between 180 and 750, I began to wonder whether India’s golden age might have been worth discussing in this book. While visiting India last year I read William Dalrymple’s book, TheGolden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. As well as discussing India’s impact on religion and culture throughout much of Asia, Dalrymple. points out that over the period from about 250BC to AD 1200, India was an important centre of commerce and trade, and an innovator in fields such as astronomy and mathematics.

India was the source of the numerical system with 10 digits including zero, that we use today. Norberg mentions that important contribution, but Dalrymple discusses it at greater length.

Another fascinating topic discussed by Dalrymple is the close relationship between the merchant classes of early India and the Buddhist monastic movement. Dalrymple emphasizes the importance of trade between India and the Roman empire. He notes that as the Roman empire crumbled, India’s trade with Europe was replaced by expansion of its trade with south-east Asia.

Is the Anglosphere in decline?

The Anglosphere refers to those nations where the English language and cultural values are dominant. Few would dispute that over the last couple of centuries the Anglosphere, first led by Britain and then the United States, played a leading role among nations in demonstrating the benefits of liberal democracy, free markets, technological innovation, and free international trade. Life in the Anglosphere has been far from ideal even in respect of those criteria, but there can be no doubt that we have been living in an age of widespread prosperity that is without historical precedent. As Norberg points out, the whole world has benefited from the spread of golden-age conditions fostered by the Anglosphere, with global extreme poverty declining from 38 to 9 percent in just the period since 1990.

However, Norberg notes that “many ominous signs of decline are clearly present in our time”. He mentions the “hubristic overreach” of U.S. attempts to reshape the Middle East through military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial crash of 2008, and the growth of “crippling public debt”. He suggests that a series of crises, including the Covid pandemic, have fostered “a sense that the world is dangerous and that we need to protect ourselves from it”. He writes:

“Most worryingly, rich counties have experienced a major backlash against globalization and trade, and immigrants have become scapegoats, just as they were in so many other eras of decline, potentially shutting us out from our most potent source of constant revitalization.”

Norberg notes that both China and Russia “have recently taken a totalitarian turn and are working hard to devastate neighbours”. He suggests, nevertheless, that Russia and China will have a hard time trying to challenge the Anglosphere-led world order because it will be difficult for them to find reliable friends among advanced states. 

Unfortunately, in the short time since the book was written, the government of the United States has adopted an international stance that seems to be inconsistent with the continued existence of an Anglosphere-led world order. Countries that have long regarded themselves as allies of the U.S. are now forced to contemplate seriously how they can best protect their own interests if the U.S. pursues isolationist policies.

The book ends on a somewhat optimistic note. The author observes that there are roughly fifty prosperous, open societies around the world. If one of them fails, “that will not stop others from picking up the torch”. He adds:

“That prompts the question of where the next golden age will come from.”

After considering various possibilities, however, he suggests that “perhaps this is the wrong way to look at it because we now have a “truly global civilization” in which every literate person anywhere in the world can draw upon the accumulated knowledge of humanity and learn skills in any field. In that context, “no one country can hold a monopoly on the ideas that can make them prosper”.

I agree with the general thrust of that argument. The technology required for future golden ages is not deposited in a library that can be easily destroyed. However, the geographical location of societies that are open and prosperous is still an issue worth considering. It isn’t much consolation for citizens in the United States, Britain or Australia to know that their children and grandchildren may be able to draw upon the accumulated knowledge of humanity and learn skills in any field, if institutional change impinges adversely on their incentives to do such things. Opportunities for human flourishing depend on whether political entrepreneurs will restore and maintain sufficient economic freedom.

It is in that context that I ask: Is it too soon to be asking where the next golden age will be located?

I suggested an optimistic answer to that question in Chapter 6 of Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing. Looking beyond looming economic crises, I am still optimistic that the governments of most liberal democracies will eventually introduce institutional reforms to enable the drivers of progress to restore growth of opportunities.

Are declining economic growth rates likely to have undesirable impacts on social attitudes?

 

Research for an earlier essay on this blog led to the conclusion that declining economic growth rates in high income countries are likely to cause an increasing proportion of the population of those countries to feel that their standard of living is worse than that of their parents at a comparable age, and therefore to experience lower average life satisfaction. In this essay I extend that analysis to consider the social attitudes of people in the USA, Britain and Australia who feel worse off than their parents.

In the previous study I used data from the World ValuesSurvey to examine the relationship between the perceptions of respondents about their standard of living relative to their parents at a comparable age and economic growth in the countries in which they reside. That data was then linked to average life satisfaction.

The main findings were:

• Perceptions of standard of living relative to parents are positively related to past economic growth experience of the countries in which people live.
• In the high-income countries, low growth has a greater adverse impact on young peoples’ perceptions of their standard of living relative to parents than on the corresponding perceptions of old people.
• The perception of having a lower standard of living than parents at a comparable age has a substantial adverse impact on life satisfaction ratings.

These findings imply that lower economic growth rates would be likely to result in an increasing proportion of the population having lower living standards than their parents, and hence, lower average life satisfaction. The psychic costs of adjustment to lower economic growth would initially fall most heavily on young and middle-aged people.

Those findings raise questions about likely changes in social attitudes if economic growth prospects continue to decline in high-income countries, resulting in an increasing proportion of people who feel worse off than their parents were at a comparable age. This essay uses World Values Survey data to explore how some of the social attitudes of people who perceive themselves to have a lower standard of living that parents differ from those of the rest of the population.

I focus on three high-income countries – USA, Britain and Australia. The USA survey was undertaken in 2017, the British survey in 2022, and the Australian survey in 2018.

Figure 1 provides further evidence that people in the USA, Britain and Australia tend to have lower average life satisfaction if they perceive that their standard of living is lower than that of their parents.

 

Demographics

Figure 2 indicates that people who perceive themselves to be “worse off” than their parents tend to be concentrated in the 25-54 age groups.

 

Figure 3 suggests that the sex composition of those who feel “worse off” than their parents differs somewhat by age group in the countries considered, but I have no idea why. There appears to be a higher percentage of young women in that category in Australia, a higher percentage of women in the 30-49 age group in Britain and a higher percentage of older women in the United States.

 

Work and Success

Figure 4 indicates that those in the “worse off” category are less likely to agree that hard work brings a better life.

 

Attitude to Migrants and Migration

The only conclusion I can draw from Figures 5 and 6 is that Australians who feel “worse off” than their parents tend to have more negative attitudes toward migrants and immigration than those who feel better off or about the same.

 

Trust

Figure 7 suggests that a lower percentage in the "worse off" category say most people can be trusted.

Figure 8 suggests that a lower percentage of those in the "worse off" category have confidence in the justice system.

Priority given to Freedom

Figures 9 and 10 suggest that there is not much difference between the three groups in terms of priority given to freedom. Slightly fewer of those in the “worse off” category tend to give freedom higher priority than equality. Surprisingly, in Australia and Britain, slightly more of the people in that category tend to give freedom higher priority than security.

 

Government objectives

Figure 11 indicates that those in the “worse off” category are more inclined to want government to take more responsibility to ensure everyone is provided for. The percentages shown are for the top 3 ratings on a 10 point scale.

 

Figure 12 indicates that those in the “worse off” category are less inclined to give high priority to economic growth. Respondents were asked to select from a list which national aim should be given highest priority. Other items on the list include having strong defence forces and individuals having more say in decision making.

 

Politics

Figure 13 suggests that those in the “worse off” category are no more interested in politics than other people in the countries considered.

 

Figure 14 suggests that people in the “worse off” category are no more likely to consider that it is good to have a strong political leader.

 

Figure 15 suggests that people in the “worse off” category are no less likely to consider that democracy is important.

 

Figure 16 suggests that people in the “worse of” category are less likely to be satisfied with political system performance than are people in the other categories.

 

Figure 17 suggests that people in the “worse off” category are as strongly opposed to political violence as are people in the other categories.

 

Conclusions

The social attitudes of people who perceive their standard of living to be worse than that of their parents at a comparable age are similar in many respects to those of people who perceive their standard of living to be better or about the same as that of their parents.

However, there are some important differences. People who perceive their standard of living to be worse than that of their parents at a comparable age are more inclined to:

• Skepticism about hard work bringing a better life;
• Pessimism about trustworthiness of others and lack of confidence in the justice system;
• Collectivism in terms of responsibility for the wellbeing of citizens;
• Negativity about giving high priority to economic growth; and
• Dissatisfaction with political system performance.

That combination of attitudes seems likely to be self-perpetuating because it is likely to promote policy responses that will lead to lower economic growth and a further increase in the proportion of the population who perceive their standard of living to be worse than that of their parents. Adoption of more market-friendly economic policies to facilitate higher economic growth seems unlikely to occur before that course of action becomes more obviously necessary to avert major economic crises.   

Is cultural backlash a major determinant of political outcomes in the liberal democracies?

 

In recent years, a major transformation has occurred in the politics of many of the liberal democracies as major political parties have increasingly been challenged, or taken over, by populists. What has brought this about? Can it be attributed to some kind of cultural backlash?

My starting point in this essay is the analysis of Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in their book, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (2019). I then consider some problems associated with this analysis, focusing particularly on the authors’ definition of authoritarian values and some critical comments by Armin Schäfer. In the following sections, I consider the relevance of Yasha Mounk’s explanation of Tne Identity Trap, the nature of the backlash to changing economic circumstances, and John Burn-Murdoch’s outline of differences between conservatives in the U.S. and Europe in values and attitudes regarding international cooperation.

The Norris-Inglehart analysis

The book by Norris and Inglehart seemed like a good place to begin considering cultural backlash theory because Ronald Inglehart deserves to be remembered with great respect for his efforts in creating a cultural model which explains a great deal about the reasons why people from different parts of the world often hold widely different views on social and political issues. Inglehart’s cultural model has two dimensions: secular rational values versus traditional values; and self-expression values versus survival values. He documented a shift from materialist values, which emphasize safety and security, to post-materialist values, involving increasing emphasis on individual freedom, occurring as a consequence of ongoing economic growth.

Norris and Inglehart argue that the spread of post-materialist values has induced a backlash among cultural conservatives. The authors do not dismiss explanations of growing support for authoritarian populism which emphasize economic grievances associated with economic globalization, immigration, stagnant real incomes, and perceptions of growing inequality. They find that populist attitudes are strongly influenced by personal experience of economic insecurity and perceptions of the national economy’s performance. However, according to their definition, “authoritarian values” are more common among old people than young people, and are more strongly linked with the respondent’s birth cohort than with economic indicators.

The authors found that anti-immigration attitudes were more strongly linked with authoritarian and populist values than with protecting economic interests. And, even after controlling for a range of attitudes toward immigrants and economic conditions, the respondent’s birth cohort remains the most important predictor of authoritarian values.

Norris and Inglehart believe that “the combination of authoritarian values disguised by populist rhetoric” is “potentially the most dangerous threat to liberal democracy.”

To assess the threat to liberal democracy that may be posed by those values and attitudes it is important to consider how the authors define authoritarian values.

Have authoritarian values been measured correctly?

 The authors conceptualize “authoritarian” values “as a cluster of three related components, emphasizing the importance of (i) conformity (strict adherence to group conventions and traditional customs); (ii) security (safety and protection of the group against risks, justifying strict enforcement and aggression toward outsiders who threaten the security or the accepted group norms); and (iii) loyalty (supporting the group and its leaders).” They view populism “as a style of rhetoric reflecting first-order principles about who should rule, claiming that legitimate power rests with ‘the people’ not the elites.”

The main problem I have with the Norris-Inglehart definition of authoritarian values is that many of the people I know who emphasize conformity to group conventions, group security, and loyalty to the group and its leaders, would be more appropriately labelled as conservatives than as authoritarians. The conventions they seek to uphold are concerned with civility rather than oppression. They emphasize national security because they see it as necessary to avoid becoming the victims of oppression. They display loyalty to the group and elected leaders because they identify as citizens of the nation in which they live.

It seems to me that a more appropriate measure of authoritarian values is implicit in Christian Welzel’s work on emancipative values. The people who hold authoritarian values are those whose values are on the lower end of the scale of emancipative values. Welzel developed the concept of emancipate values to measure the beliefs that people hold about such matters as the importance of personal autonomy, respect for the choices people make in their personal lives, having a say in community decisions, and equality of opportunity. More information about Welzel’s research on emancipative values can be found here.

My understanding is that people who have an authoritarian personality are attracted to the possibility of oppressing others. That is the view of Hans Eysenck, who undertook some pathbreaking work on the personality predictors of political extremism. An important implication of that view is that authoritarian values are not the preserve of either the conservative or progressive side of politics.

That line of reasoning might suggest that the Norris-Inglehart analysis is more relevant to understanding a conservative backlash than the emergence of authoritarian tendencies that might threaten democracies. Nevertheless, as discussed later, there is some evidence that people who identify with the right wing of U.S. politics now have values more akin to Russians and Turks than to the supporters of right wing parties in western Europe.

How much do cultural attitudes vary by age?

In an article entitled “Cultural Backlash? How (Not) to Explain the Rise of Authoritarian Populism”, published in 2021, Armin Schäfer found that, on most issues, people in different age groups have similar cultural attitudes. His analysis suggests that older cohorts are slightly more likely to vote for authoritarian (right wing) parties but less likely to vote for populist ones. His conclusion is that generational replacement is unlikely to attenuate the rise of authoritarian (right wing) populism.

Schäfer does not dismiss cultural explanations of populism. He agrees with Norris and Inglehart that opposition to immigration is linked systematically to authoritarian (conservative) values and a lack of trust in politics.

A backlash to the illiberalism of progressives

 It is common for the spread of post-materialist values to be accompanied by conservative resistance, but much of that resistance seems to dissipate over time. Many cultural conservatives now seem to have accepted, however reluctantly, some of the social changes that they strongly opposed a few decades ago e.g. divorce, pre-marital sex and legalization of homosexuality, and they now also seem to be going through the process of accepting other social changes, such as same sex marriage.

In my view, it is the authoritarian tendencies of many progressives that has promoted a voter backlash, rather than the spread of post-materialist values. The best discussion I have read about the authoritarian tendencies of progressives has been provided by Yascha Mounk in his book, The Identity Trap, published in 2023. Mounk does not refer explicitly to “authoritarian tendencies” but the illiberalism that he discusses amounts to the same thing in my view.

In writing about what he refers to the “identity synthesis”, Mounk recognizes that its advocates are seeking to remedy serious injustices affecting marginalized groups that have historically suffered “terrible forms of discrimination”.  The identity synthesis is concerned with many different kinds of groups including those related to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.  The distinguishing feature of the identity thesis is that its advocates reject neutral rules like equal opportunity and free speech in favour of action to promote the interests of particular groups. According to this thesis, the way the state treats each citizen – and how citizens treat each other – should depend on the identity group to which they belong.

Mounk’s main point is that the identity synthesis will ultimately prove counterproductive: 

“Despite the good intentions of its proponents, it undermines progress toward genuine equality between members of different groups. In the process, it also subverts other goals we all have reasons to care about, like the stability of diverse democracies.”

The identity synthesis subverts the stability of democracies because it makes it harder for people to broaden their allegiances beyond a particular identity. It is a political trap because it makes it harder to sustain diverse societies whose citizens trust and respect each other. It “pits rigid identity groups against each other in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition.”

Much of Mounk’s book is devoted to a philosophical discussion of how the identity synthesis evolved. The story he tells is of a short march through the institutions, associated with postmodernism, rather than the long march of cultural Marxism. He suggests that since the identity synthesis is inherently about ongoing tension between different identity groups it lacks Marxism’s utopian promise of eventually abolishing all class distinctions.

There has also been a backlash to the authoritarian tendencies within the environmental movement. Although environmental activism is not part of the identity synthesis discussed by Mounk, he makes the interesting observation that in embracing “intersectionality” many voluntary organisations have broadened their missions in line with the idea that all forms of oppression are connected. He gives the Sierra Club as an example.

What about the economy?

The analysis in the preceding essay on this blog leads me to suspect that the longer-term slowdown in economic growth in the liberal democracies might be more important in generating support for populist policies than are grievances that can be related directly to import competition or immigration. Import competition and immigration may just be convenient scapegoats.

The preceding essay shows:

• The perception of having a lower standard of living than parents at a comparable age has a substantial adverse impact on life satisfaction ratings.
• Perceptions of standard of living relative to parents are positively related to past economic growth experience of the countries in which people live.
• In the high-income countries, low growth has a greater adverse impact on young peoples’ perceptions of their standard of living relative to parents than on the corresponding perceptions of old people.

A backlash to internationalism?

John Burn-Murdoch, a researcher who works for the Financial Times, recently made an international comparison of the values of people associated with different political parties in article entitled ‘Why the Maga mindset is different’ (March 7, 2025). His analysis, using data from the World Values Survey, suggests that in many respects (including attitudes to international cooperation) the values of people who identify with the U.S. right wing are closer to the values of people in Turkey, Russia, and China than to those who identify with right wing parties in Europe, or with the U.S. left. His analysis also suggests, however, that “the US Republicans of 20 years ago were no keener on autocracy than the average Canadian or Western European – and just as supportive of international co-operation.”

Perhaps that change of attitudes reflects a cultural backlash that can be partly attributed to 9/11 and the outcomes of the Iraq and Afghan wars. It may also be partly attributable to increasing dissatisfaction with the performance of international organisations, and a perception that U.S. taxpayers have been making excessive contributions to those organisations.

It is important to note that even where a substantial proportion of the population of a country endorses authoritarian values, that does not necessarily result in authoritarian political institutions. That finding emerges from some analysis published on my blog in 2023 in an essay entitled:  “To what extent do international differences in personal freedom reflect people’s values?”  The analysis uses Christian Welzel’s emancipative values data from the World Values Survey and personal freedom data from Cato. It indicates that international differences in personal freedom do broadly reflect the prevalence of emancipative values (the opposite of authoritarian values). However, there are many outliers. For example, personal freedom in China and Iran is lower than might be predicted solely on the basis of the prevalence of emancipative values, whereas personal freedom in Armenia, Georgia, Cyprus and Taiwan is higher than might be predicted on that basis.

Personal freedom in the U.S. seems broadly consistent with the overall prevalence of emancipative values in that country (including both the left and right wings). The current U.S. government is clearly seeking to implement a major change in the direction of many government policies. I am not yet persuaded, however, that its actions will have a substantial adverse impact on the institutions of liberal democracy. 

Conclusions

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue that the spread of post-materialist values has induced a cultural backlash among cultural conservatives. On that basis they suggest that the combination of authoritarianism and populist rhetoric is a threat to liberal democracy.

In my view, Norris and Inglehart were mistaken in attributing cultural backlash to the spread of post-materialist values. It would be more correct to attribute cultural backlash to the illiberalism of progressives who have been advocating what Yascha Mounk has described as the identity synthesis. The identity synthesis has provoked a backlash because it rejects neutral rules like equal opportunity and free speech in favour of action to promote the interests of particular groups that have suffered from discrimination in the past.

Economic grievances play an important role in encouraging people to support policy remedies proposed by populists. My previous research has highlighted the adverse impact that slower economic growth may have on life satisfaction. I suspect that the longer-term slowdown in economic growth in the liberal democracies might be more important in generating support for populist policies than are grievances that can be related directly to the impact of import competition or immigration.

Some recent research has suggested that over the last 20 years the values held by people who identify with the right wing of U.S. politics has moved closer to the values of people in Turkey, Russia and China than to people who identify with the right wing of politics in Europe. It remains to be seen what impact, if any, this apparent retreat from classical liberal values will have on the institutions of liberal democracy in the United States.

Addendum

Readers may also be interested in a later series of essays on political entrepreneurship.