A tale from Communist China

I draw a few more lessons from this (and from conversations with other survivors and escapees from horrific regimes):

6. Change is both gradual and terrifyingly fast - there is often months or years of buildup and warning, before weeks of crisis.  

7. Terrifyingly fast is not instantaneous.  It costs a lot, but one can get out if one actually believes the evidence in time.

When did you start to doubt?

In general, I think people try to time markets much more than they have skill for. Suppose you think there's a stock bubble; the temptation is to buy, hold as it rises, and then sell at the top of the bubble before everything comes crashing down. But enough people are trying to do that that you need some special skill in order to be in the leading edge, able to sell when there's a buyer. It's much less risky to just sell the stocks as soon as you think there's a bubble, which foregoes any additional gains but means you avoid the crash entirely (by taking it on voluntarily, sort of).

A similar thing happened at the start of the pandemic, where my plan was basically "look, I don't think I'm going to be especially good at the risk assessment, I want to just lock down now instead of staying open to get the marginal few weeks of meetings or hangouts or whatever," and various other friends said "look, I believe in math, I think it's just paranoia to lock down immediately instead of doing so based on a cost-benefit analysis." None of us knew it at the time, but the official tests were faulty and delayed and other testing was being suppressed, and so the numbers being used for the cost-benefit analyses were significantly underestimating the true amount of viral transmission.

Also relevant was at the start of the pandemic, there were various border closures and regional quarantines that by design had as little warning as possible. Suppose Disease City has too many cases, and also people in Disease City would want to leave if they think they're going to get locked in (because regardless of whether or not they have the disease, it's better for them to be out than in), and the regional / national government wants to lock them in; then the government want to impose the lockdown and then announce it, since that minimizes the number of people who can flee.

Noticeably, if there's a revolution in some country, it's much better for the new government to murder all of the people who would want to leave than let them leave. Contrast "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" with anti-Cuban politics in the US being driven by Cuban expatriates who felt wronged by the government they fled, or various potential leaders kept by other powers as potential puppets ready to be installed when the time is right. If more educated / capitalist Chinese had been allowed to leave China, and ended up in the US, it seems likely could have been a voting bloc much like the Cuban voting bloc, and impacted US-Chinese relations accordingly.

[As it happens, most of the people that I know who speak of the annihilation of the Armenians are themselves part of the Armenian diaspora. Out of the various genocides and purges I'm familiar with, people mostly seem interested in ones to people similar to them, and curiously uninterested in ones that are of their political enemies, or even of the political enemies of people they would like to be allied with.]

In summary, there's no fire alarm [LW · GW] for when to leave the country, in part because the situation is adversarial, and this isn't the sort of thing you should expect people to be well-calibrated on, since they don't have many examples to learn from.

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I think there's also a factor where 'the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is today.' If you expect to want to be in Canada instead of the US in 2030, say, then you might expect to prefer the timeline where you move to Canada in 2020 and live there for ten years to the timeline where you live in the US for nine and a half years and then move to Canada the night before the civil war breaks out (or whatever), and then live there for six months. If the first, you'll have been able to invest in lots of things that you expect to stick around; in the second, you might skip making useful home improvements because they aren't mobile. [Similarly, imagining our Chinese intellectuals in the 1950s, if they knew they would want to move to the US in 1965, they might have decided to get the move over with as soon as possible, since then their children might have grown up speaking English, they might have been able to get positions at universities before there was a flood of similar refugees, they might have been able to liquidate Chinese assets at more favorable prices, and so on. Most of the benefit of delaying comes from the hope that actually you won't have to move; this is why the illusory short-term positive signs are one of the most important parts of the OP.]

This story is less obvious when there's a huge difference in value between the options. If you're making net $60k a year in the US and would make net $30k a year in Canada, or whatever, each year you delay moving doubles your effective income. But if the difference is smaller, or you're weighing different psychological benefits against each other, it's probably better to get it over with than procrastinate.

I'm interested in this question as well.

Totalitarianism is not a very useful political category. Authoritarianism is a preferred concept. In general democracies tend to have larger and more effective bureaucracies. China and the Soviet Union are outliers in this regard, inaccurately suggesting that authoritarian states are necessarily large and interventionist. They are usually much less competent.

Authoritarian states can emerge from democracies. The following risk factors are observed

• Young democracies
• Presidential systems rather than parliamentary
• Poorer countries
• Countries with large natural resources. This is well established
• Weak democracies are sometimes created to protect the outgoing elites. Examples include Lebanon, Burma, Hungary, and (sort of) the US. The resulting democracies are less successful at creating legitimacy and may backslide more often. This theory is debated. See https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Articles in Journals/BJPS Article.pdf

There's coupcast model. It's not very good https://oefresearch.org/activities/coup-cast

Because the US is a presidential model with many veto points and FPTP, it is more likely to have a coup. This makes it unusual among long established democracies. Japan is also a younger democracy (first regime change in 1994).

• In 1923, a bohemian corporal attempted to seize power from the Weimar Republic. He tried again in 1933 and succeeded.
• In 1949, a coup overthrew Syria's democratic government.
• In 1953, the USA overthrew the Iranian constitutional monarchy.
• In 1954, the USA overthrew the Guatemalan representative democracy.
• In 1960, the USA overthrew the Congo's legally-elected prime minister.
• In 1964, the USA overthrew the democratic government of Brazil.
• From 1968-1972, the Panamanian military replaced the civilian government.
• In 1973, the USA overthrew Chile's democratic government.
• In 1979, the USA overthrew the democratic government of Salvador.

I liked that it provided a personal perspective into an important window of history. Whether by instinct or design, you also neatly organized it into information-decision-information-decision, which is exactly the kind of analysis we want to be able to do.

Separately from my appreciation: it fits the zeitgeist, since the US is in political crisis and modern China is and has been an important factor in world events for years.

Lastly, though I can't put my finger precisely on why, it feels relevant to the events of Petrov Day this year. Sort of the inverse, if that makes any sense: not world-ending, but personal world-ending; plenty of time to make the decision but a stupendous amount of information to consider; the consequences stretched out over years and decades rather than a few hours.

I found it mildly useful to hear about someone's experiences in this kind of situation, and it's an interesting story.

It's also a very easily digestible post.

That makes sense, but doesn't pattern-match very well onto the concerns people like Wei_Dai have about our present moment. What are the trends that people tend to focus on when they're worried about "where this is all heading?"

Bottom-up

• Attacks on reputation: cancel culture, conspiracy-peddling
• Street violence: some significant looting, occasional murder, arson, not with impunity but sometimes treated with tolerance by those not directly responsible for enforcing the law
• Polarization: accusations against individuals, institutions, and groups within society as being evil/complicit in evil or inherently good/trustworthy due to their label/affiliation/demographic/job; calls for radical restructuring of society; open division of civil society

Top-down

• Grasping for power: major political rule-breaking, disparaging basic democratic process, open attempts at voter suppression, cult of personality
• Division and disorder: between generals and President, constant churn in the White House
• Encroachments: Federal law enforcement getting involved in local protests
• Questionable loyalties: the President's refusal to divest and upcoming debts, "Putin's puppy" meme

It's tempting to jump to the worst-case nightmare scenario, but it's a more tractable and, to me, more interesting question to ask "what does one step worse look like?"

Here are some possibilities:

Bottom-up

• Weaponized false/manufactured accusations against high-status people increase in frequency and acceptance
• Protests intensify. Shaming people in their houses at night for not joining protests turns to trespassing and home invasions. Property destruction and looting is the norm, not the exception. The rate and size of protests, the frequency of deadly protests, and the number of deaths increases 50% over the course of 6 months to a year, assassination attempt
•  Polarization intensifies: Defaming categories of people becomes a part of official school curriculums a la "teach the controversy," more intense restrictions/bans/grassroots censorship on taboo topics or more categories of taboo topics, colleges see increasing proportions of local students as regional differences solidify

Top-down

• Grasping for power: open rejection of election results, major violent counter-protests by defeated side even with landslide victory, shocking repeat victory by Trump drives unprecedented protests and counter-protests along with continued corruption within the White House
• Division and disorder: disputed election leads to unanswered questions about military's role in settling a dispute
• Encroachments: Surprise Trump victory/election stealing leads to state of emergency declaration ongoing in multiple states
• Questionable loyalties: selling of state secrets by insiders in the Trump White House, Trump defects to Russia

Having done this exercise, my two main fears are:

1. A surprise Trump victory leading to military policing in liberal states. This will be obvious.
2. Intensification of protests and polarization. Less immediately concerning, but also sneakier. I would like to see attempts to quantify size and scale of violence at protests and track it over time, shifting curriculums and academic norms, and examples of accusations of violence that seem manufactured not for attention but to eliminate a specific political figure.