Historical persistence and contingencyWhen do important features of the world persist and how contingent is the course of history?
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This profile is tailored towards students studying economics, history and sociology, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
To what extent can we exert influence on the future and how long does our influence last? Could some features of the world (good or bad) even become ‘locked-in' and inflexible to change, and in what circumstances could this happen?
There are various features of the world that seem particularly significant when trying to understand how well the world is going in the present and how the future might unfold. These include factors such as ‘democratic or authoritarian norms and behaviours, concern for human rights, concern for animal welfare, and norms conducive to scientific progress or free markets,’ and development indicators such as standards of living, technological capabilities and subjective wellbeing.
Looking at how these features have evolved throughout history and in what circumstances they have changed or persisted could help us better predict the future. The persistence of these features should also inform our understanding of the value of trying to influence them as a means of improving the world, because if a feature tends to persist for many generations, then positively influencing it is a way of improving not only present but also future lives.
An understanding of the contingency of these features – in other words, ‘how much of [a] feature’s value can be attributed to a particular agent’s decision at a particular point in time’– is also important when assessing the expected value of attempts to improve the future. For example, the values that future generations will hold may be highly important and persist for a long time, but it’s also important to understand whether we can have a significant effect on their development at this point in time.
One way in which future technological advancements may have a major impact on global wellbeing is by causing features of the world to become ‘locked in’ and inflexible to change. For example, increasingly powerful surveillance technologies could be used to uphold a totalitarian regime for far longer than it would otherwise survive. Exploring how technology could change the future is another way exploring the concept of cultural persistence could be useful. See the talk below by Ben Garfinkel, which includes a discussion of how future surveillance technologies could be used in this way.
Explore existing research
- Acemoglu, Daron, et al. (2001) The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, American Economic Review
- Beckstead, Nick (2015) The Long-Term Significance of Reducing Global Catastrophic Risk, Open Philanthropy
- Bostrom, Nick (2019) The Vulnerable World Hypothesis, Global Policy
- Comin, Diego, et al. (2010) Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 BC?, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
- Elvin, Mark (1972) The High-Level Equilibrium Trap: The Causes of the Decline of Invention in the Traditional Chinese Textile Industries, in Economic Organization in Chinese Society, Stanford University Press
- Finnveden, Lukas, C. Jess Riedel, & Carl Shulman, Artificial General Intelligence and Lock-In
- Galor, Oded & Ömer Özak (2016) The Agricultural Origins of Time Preference, American Economic Review
- Geddes, Barbara (1999) What Do We Know about Democratisation after Twenty Years?, Annual Review of Political Science
- Giuliano, Paola & Nathan Nunn (2021) Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change, Review of Economic Studies
- Hanusch, Frederic & Frank Biermann (2019) Deep-Time Organizations: Learning Institutional Longevity from History, Anthropocene Review
- Harris, Jamie (2019) How Tractable is Changing the Course of History?, Sentience Institute
- Jerbari, Karim (2021) Replaying History’s Tape: Convergent Cultural Evolution and the Prospects of Humanity after a Social Collapse
- Kelly, Morgan (2019) The Standard Errors of Persistence
- Lewis, Gregory (2018) How Fragile Was History?
- MacAskill, William, Teruji Thomas, & Aron Vallinder, The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework
- Nunn, N. & N. Qian (2011) The Potato’s Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from a Historical Experiment, Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Nunn, Nathan & Leonard Wantchekon (2011) The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa, American Economic Review
- Schulz, Jonathan F., et al. (2019) The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychology Variation, Science
- Sevilla, Jaime (2021) Persistence – A Critical Review
- Berlin, Isaiah (1955) Historical Inevitability, Oxford University Press
- Caplan, Bryan (2008) The Totalitarian Threat, in Nick Bostrom, Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford University Press
- Elvin, Mark (1973) The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Stanford University Press
- Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press
- MacAskill, William (2022) What We Owe the Future (ch. 3, ‘Moral Change’), Basic Books
- ‘Historical Necessity and Contingency’, ‘The Laws of History’, and ‘Historicism’ in Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (2008)
Find a thesis topic
If you’re interested in working on this research direction, below are some ideas on what would be valuable to explore further. If you want help refining your research ideas, apply for our coaching!
Econometrics could be a particularly useful approach to further research on cultural persistence. You could consider exploring:
- Investigating how to correct for spatial autocorrelation, as in The Standard Errors of Persistence.
- Doing open reviews and replications of existing papers.
- See Sevilla, Persistence – A Critical Review and Villalobos & Sevilla, Potatoes: A Critical Review for examples.
- More systematically investigating how the magnitude of persistent change waxes and wanes over time.
- To what extent have historical events had long term, persistent impacts?
- What are some historical examples, and were these predictable at the time?
- How much better or worse were these events than the ‘alternate’ route?
- Why are some values, institutions, and organisations extremely durable, lasting hundreds of years (e.g. academia), whereas others change frequently? What are the mechanisms that explain this?
- Have there been times in the past when values have become ‘locked in,’ becoming inflexible in a manner that has led to their long-term persistence?
- Why are some values, institutions, and organisations extremely durable, lasting hundreds of years (e.g. academia), whereas others change frequently? What are the mechanisms that explain this?
- How might increased surveillance – which is becoming more feasible with technological development – influence the longterm future positively or negatively, e.g. via reducing existential risk or making totalitarian regimes more sustainable?
- Is the existing persistence literature compelling? Does it make appropriate use of statistics? Are the data sources that this literature relies upon adequately well supported?
Further resources
- Visualizations of the significance – persistence – contingency framework gives an overview of the The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework from GPI.
- Technological advances, for example in surveillance, may increase the risk of stable totalitarian states in future. Read ‘Risks of stable totalitarianism’ by 80,000 Hours to learn more and listen to author Bryan Caplan discusses the risk of stable totalitarianism on the 80000 Hours podcast.
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If you’re interested in taking a big picture view of humanity’s history, see our profiles on the most important historical trends and moral circle expansion.
If you’re interested in exploring how researchers can help to predict the future, our profile on forecasting the long-term future is also relevant.
Contributors
This profile was last updated 7/01/22. Thanks to Toby Shevlane for first creating this profile. Thanks to Adam Bales and Jaime Sevilla for helpful feedback. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
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