Tyler Cowen

And I think when you get big new technologies, and this is relevant for AI, you get a lot of new arms races.

And sometimes the bad people win those arms races.

So at least for quite a while, you had Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany winning some arms races.

And they're not democratic systems.

Later you have China with Mao being not a democratic system.

And then you have a mix of bad luck.

Like Stalin and Mao, just draw the urn.

You could have gotten less crazy people than what you got.

And I agree with Hayek, the worst get to the top under autocracy.

But like, they're that bad?

Like that was just some bad luck too.

There's other things you could say, but I think we had a highly disoriented civilization, you see it in aesthetics approaching beginnings of World War I, art and music radically changing, people feel very disoriented, there's a lot up for grabs, imperialism, colonialism start to be factors, just there wasn't like a stable world order, and then you had some bad luck tossed into that, and all of a sudden these super destructive weapon systems compared to what we had had, and it was awful.

I'm not pretending that's some kind of full explanation, but that would be like a partial start.

I don't think I have a general theory.

If you want to talk about 17th century England, so they have the scientific revolution.

You have the rise of England as a true global power.

Navy becomes much more important.

The Atlantic trade route, because of the New World, becomes much more important.

Places like the Middle East, India, China, that were earlier, you know, Persia had major roles.

They're crumbling partially for reasons of their own, and that's going to help the relative power of the more advanced European nations.