EA - What can we learn from the empirical social science literature on the expected contingency of value change? by jackva

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What can we learn from the empirical social science literature on the expected contingency of value change?, published by jackva on December 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: Quickly written on vacation as I don't and won't have time to flesh this out much more but wanted to get the idea out so that others can work on this insofar as this seems important. I usually write on climate and the last time I seriously thought about value change is a while back.A missing perspective?Reading What We Owe The Future's chapter on the contingency of value change one thing that struck me was that there was -- as far as I can tell -- no reference to the rich empirical literature in political science and sociology on the drivers of value change, e.g. the work on the emergence of post-materialist values by Inglehart and the work of other scholars in this tradition, including the World Value Survey, which maps and seeks to explain value changes in societies around the world.Note that I am not claiming this literature being entirely right, more that this is a large body of literature (including criticisms) that seems very relevant to EA interest in value change, but not discussed.Introductions to this literatureEzra Klein podcast 2022: Conversation with Pippa NorrisWelzel 2021: Why the Future is DemocraticInglehart and Welzel 2010: Changing Mass Priorities: The Link between Modernization and DemocracyInglehart and Welzel 2009: How Development Leads to DemocracyWelzel et al 2003: The theory of human development, a cross-cultural analysis.These sources are quickly chosen and are biased towards Welzel (whom I was a student of in college), so don't take this as a definite treatment - just a window into this literature.The basic point of this literature is that there are good reasons to expect that value change is actually quite predictable and that a certain set of values tend to emerge out of the conditions of modernization. There is a lot more nuance to it, this is not just "old-school" modernization theory, but it is an empirically grounded update against massive contingency in the development of values, as there are predictable relationships between economic development and value change that seem to hold across a broad set of geographies and stages of economic development.To give a flavor, the abstract of Welzel 2021 puts it as follows:"Recent accounts of democratic backsliding neglect the cultural foundations of autocracy-versus-democracy.To bring culture back in, this article demonstrates that 1) countries' membership in culture zones explains some 70 percent of the total cross-national variation in autocracy-versus-democracy; and 2) this culture-bound variation has remained astoundingly constant over time—in spite of all the trending patterns in the global distribution of regime types over the last 120 years. Furthermore, the explanatory power of culture zones over autocracy-versus-democracy is rooted in the cultures' differentiation on "authoritarian-versus-emancipative values." Therefore, both the direction and the extent of regime change are a function of glacially accruing regime-culture misfits—driven by generational value shifts in a predominantly emancipatory direction. Consequently, the backsliding of democracies into authoritarianism is limited to societies in which emancipative values remain underdeveloped.Contrary to the widely cited deconsolidation thesis, the ascendant generational profile of emancipative values means that the momentary challenges to democracy are unlikely to stifle democracy's long-term rise."How it matters: different priors on the contingency of value changeI am wondering(1) whether this literature could be quite useful in forming priors about the contingency of value change and,(2) in particular, serve as useful correctiv...