Is Democracy Doomed? — Alex Tabarrok

The title might be a bit too strong. A better title might be, Is democracy all it's cracked up to be? The upshot is that the marriage of economic liberalism ("free market" capitalism) and political liberalism (democracy) may not be as efficient and effective as assumed.

If much of the allure of democracy has been higher GDP per capita then the allure has been a mistake of confusing correlation for causation. A fortunate mistake but a mistake. The literature on democracy and growth implies that there is no reason to reject an alternative history in which the world’s leading industrial economy was a nondemocracy. Nor why we could not see some very rich nondemocracies in the future–nondemocracies that would be as on par with the United States as say Sweden, Denmark and Germany are today. If that happens, the case for democracy will look very much weaker than it does now as the correlation between democracy and wealth will be broken and the causal effect more evident even to those without sophisticated econometrics.

Marginal Revolution
Is Democracy Doomed?
Alex Tabarrok | Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and a research fellow with the Mercatus Center