Thread by @JeffreyASachs

Re. my critique here, a few people insist that I picked the one weak graph in Pinker's book and the rest are all solid. No. I stopped when I did because the deforestation figure was especially easy to attack. But many others are no less vulnerable, albeit with greater effort.

https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1206667286628749312

So at the risk of gilding the lily, let's look at one more graph -- this one purporting to show the rise of democracy. It's based on Polity IV data, which any political scientist can tell you is legit. But it also has major problems, especially for how Pinker wants to use it.

For specialists, see Treier and Jackman (2007). For everyone else, suffice to say that Polity's measures are extremely imprecise - so imprecise that they find no difference in levels of democracy between the US and Mongolia, Trinidad/Tobago, or Costa Rica.
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…

It is also useless for measuring a key variable of interest to Pinker: political liberties. That's why the US received a perfect score of 10 every year since 1946, despite Jim Crow laws. In fact, it's had a 10 since 1900 (i.e. prior to the 19th Am), iirc.

systemicpeace.org/polity/UnitedS…

But this isn't the worst of it. Many Pinker defenders will quibble with the above, so I've saved the best for last. Because all Pinker's graph really measures is the number of political units (states) with democratic governments. It tells us nothing about human progress.

Consider. If tomorrow China became a democracy and Andorra an autocracy, the plight of humanity would undoubtedly be improved, but the Polity graph would look the same. What we should REALLY care about is the pop. living in democracies, not the # of states that are democratic.

And there the numbers are not so good. According to V-Dem (a superior dataset for Pinker's purposes), roughly 2.3 billion people are living in autocratizing states, a sharp spike driven by democratic collapse/backsliding in places like Turkey and Brazil.

v-dem.net/media/filer_pu…

Now, while this pop.-focused autocratization has been ongoing since the 1990s, Pinker can rightly point out that the real spike happened the year his graph ends (i.e. 2016). Even so, V-Dem data shows that liberal democracy has been declining since 2010 and stagnant for decades.

Indeed, for some time now, all the growth (both in terms of population and aggregate number of countries) has been concentrated in the middle ground -- neither closed autocracy nor liberal democracy. We used to think that these were temporary, transitional states. We were wrong.

Even major boosters of democratization and skeptics of the Democracy in Decline Thesis, like Steve Levitsky, have warned that these mixed regimes are proving to be far more durable than we first believed.

amazon.ca/Competitive-Au…

Which has been confirmed by other observers as well. It's not a blip. It's a 15-to-20 year trend and it's growing worse.

freedomhouse.org/report/freedom…

The gist is this: Pinker wants to persuade us that the world is growing more democratic. Unfortunately, his Polity data is suspect, it does not account for population, and many (though not all) of the trends that really matter are moving in the wrong direction.

Now here's the frustrating part: This thread took effort. I'm moderately competent in the comparative authoritarianism lit. and it still took me the better part of my lunch break to wrangle this all together. So just imagine what a little more effort and expertise would uncover.

This is what I mean about Pinker's book being full of factoids, not facts. Whether it's deforestation or democracy, it is impossible to know anything of value without context and detail, neither of which he provides. So if what you want are actual facts, please go elsewhere.