Re your question: “I would be especially interested if you have ideas for other historical case studies that could inform the longtermist project.” Here’s a few ideas:
In Scott Alexander’s post Beware Systemic Change, he argued that by funding Marx, Engels brought about “global mass murder without any lasting positive change”. I’d be quite interested in an assessment of whether this is true.
Did Marx’s work really cause the mass murder, or did the countries led by Marxist dictators happen to find themselves in circumstances where despots were prone to taking over anyway, and without Marxism might an even worse ideology have driven the counterfactual dictator?
Did Marx’s thinking cause any lasting positive change? How would we conceptualise left wing politics today without him? Did he advance the concept that people have rights, even if they don’t have capital/wealth, or was that concept going to take hold anyway?
There’s probably quite a few battles which could have had world-changing consequences if the outcome had been different. The Battle of Tours of 732 was quite interesting. The Ummayad Caliphate was in the midst of spreading Islam across the known world. As they spread north from Spain, they came up against the Franks and lost at the Battle of Tours. Had this not happened, not only might the Carolingian Empire found it harder to take off, but most of Western Europe (and the US?) might be Muslim today.
The US Constitution was the first constitution that I know of that was influenced by Enlightenment concepts. It seems to have been a success (at least, the US does seem to be a successful country today, at least under some measures). Did the constitution matter, or was the US bound to succeed anyway? Did the constitution have any long term impact on the values of Americans? The right to bear arms appears, at least superficially, to have an impact on contemporary American values. Did enlightenment concepts matter?
Re your question: “I would be especially interested if you have ideas for other historical case studies that could inform the longtermist project.” Here’s a few ideas:
In Scott Alexander’s post Beware Systemic Change, he argued that by funding Marx, Engels brought about “global mass murder without any lasting positive change”. I’d be quite interested in an assessment of whether this is true.
Did Marx’s work really cause the mass murder, or did the countries led by Marxist dictators happen to find themselves in circumstances where despots were prone to taking over anyway, and without Marxism might an even worse ideology have driven the counterfactual dictator?
Did Marx’s thinking cause any lasting positive change? How would we conceptualise left wing politics today without him? Did he advance the concept that people have rights, even if they don’t have capital/wealth, or was that concept going to take hold anyway?
There’s probably quite a few battles which could have had world-changing consequences if the outcome had been different. The Battle of Tours of 732 was quite interesting. The Ummayad Caliphate was in the midst of spreading Islam across the known world. As they spread north from Spain, they came up against the Franks and lost at the Battle of Tours. Had this not happened, not only might the Carolingian Empire found it harder to take off, but most of Western Europe (and the US?) might be Muslim today.
The US Constitution was the first constitution that I know of that was influenced by Enlightenment concepts. It seems to have been a success (at least, the US does seem to be a successful country today, at least under some measures). Did the constitution matter, or was the US bound to succeed anyway? Did the constitution have any long term impact on the values of Americans? The right to bear arms appears, at least superficially, to have an impact on contemporary American values. Did enlightenment concepts matter?