Liberalism Forever

Abstract

We argue that liberalism—market economies governed democratically—is the best approach for navigating the far future. A growing longtermist literature paints humanity’s path to good outcomes as narrow, with small errors risking value lock-in, gradual disempowerment, or other forms of permanent catastrophe. We argue that this literature underestimates the institutional dynamics that have historically steered liberal societies past similar predictions of crisis. We defend long-term liberalism by examining the standard arguments for markets and democracy and asking whether they survive the structural changes anticipated for the far future: transformative AI, space colonization, and radical economic transformation. We claim that these arguments are largely robust, and in several cases strengthened. In the far future, markets continue to aggregate information, allocate goods efficiently, and foster innovation; democratic institutions can continue to supply public goods, commit to peaceful redistribution, correct errors, and accommodate reasonable pluralism. We close by arguing that two recent longtermist governance proposals—viatopia and the long reflection—are faint-heartedly liberal: they sound liberal in the abstract but risk illiberalism when implemented. The right approach for managing the far future is not radical new institutions but adaptations of the existing liberal toolkit to meet future challenges.