Good Ancestor : A Radical Prescription for Long-term Thinking (9781615197316) by Krznaric Roman

Author:Krznaric, Roman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Pub Co
Published: 2020-10-14T15:33:08+00:00

As a first step, it’s worth taking a snapshot view of the scores of individual countries. Which nations in the world can justifiably claim to be acting with regard to future generations? The table below presents the 24 highest-ranked countries for the 2019 index. It is striking that the highest-scoring nations, such as Iceland, Nepal, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, come from a wide range of geographical regions and income levels. While wealthy OECD countries occupy many of the top spots, some of them are far down the rankings: Germany is ranked only twenty-eighth, with the UK forty-fifth and the US sixty-second. It is equally striking that China doesn’t make it into the top tier, being ranked only twenty-fifth largely due to its poor scores on measures such as carbon footprint and renewable energy (the country is still burning plenty of fossil fuels per person, despite its growing renewables sector). Singapore is even further down the league table at forty-first, partly as a result of its weak performance on renewable energy generation.

Having spent several years as a political scientist specializing in the measurement of government performance, I am well aware that the results of any index should be taken with a grain of salt.19 Data is often patchy, and each component of an index is only ever a proxy for the underlying concept it attempts to reflect. Difficulties inevitably arise with any attempt to quantify the complexities of the real world, which is why an index like the ISI functions best to show broad patterns rather than to be revealing about specific cases.20

What about the big question of whether authoritarian governments think longer than democracies? This analysis, which I conducted jointly with McQuilkin, required selecting among the large number of democracy indices created in recent years. We chose one of the gold standards among political scientists: the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index, produced at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Governments are given scores by expert assessors, who rank them on a scale of 0 to 1 based on the presence of free and fair elections, freedom of expression and information, equality before the law, civil liberties, and checks and balances among the executive, legis­lature, and judiciary. Countries that don’t make the grade are classified as autocracies. This index gauges what is commonly known as “liberal democracy” or “representative democracy,” rather than alternative forms such as “participatory democracy.”21

By plotting each country’s democracy score against its intergenerational solidarity score, we created a unique global picture of political systems and their long-term policy performance at the national level (see the following). Each index was also divided at its midpoint, enabling the classification of the countries into the four categories of “Long-Term Democracies,” “Short-Term Democracies,” “Long-Term Autocracies,” and “Short-Term Autocracies.”22

Several clear patterns are visible in the data:

Out of the 25 countries with the highest scores on the ISI, 21 of them—84 percent—are democracies. Out of the 25 countries with the lowest scores on the ISI, 21 of them are autocracies.

Out of all 60 democracies, 75

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