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Priors and prejudice
How open is our mind, really?
A few days ago, a prominent economist posted a table on Twitter. In itself this was not a particularly remarkable event, were it not for the fact that it showed the top-10 “autocratizing” countries in the world alongside their per capita economic growth rate for the last 10 years, which — with the exception of one of them (Brazil) — exceeded the world average. And this observation caused some unrest.
The tweet was entirely factual, citing official growth rate figures and a table from Autocratization turns viral, the 2021 Democracy report of the Swedish V-Dem institute, an academic research organization studying democracy around the world. The table ranks countries according to the change in their Liberal Democracy Index, a measure that looks at things like voting rights, free elections, freedom of association and expression etc. Yet, barely 12 hours later, tweet author Branko Milanović reported it had “produced apoplexy in some people”. Why should this be the case?
It’s not the facts, it’s how they make us feel
The facts themselves were easy to verify, but what appeared to arouse people was the perceived suggestion of a causal link between a drift towards autocracy and economic prosperity. (For example, one comment implied Milanović might be supporting…
