World Politics Runs on Six Factors, Each Simple to Understand and Impossible to Predict

The daily picture of world politics is a chaos of names, summits, elections, coups, and crises, each reported as if it were a fresh event with its own causes. Step back far enough and the chaos resolves into something much simpler: a small number of factors, each one easy to understand, each one nearly impossible to predict, whose interactions produce everything we see.

I want to name the factors, because naming them changes how you read the news. What the news reports as a decision is almost always one of these factors moving.

The Question They Answer

First, what the factors are factors of. The question underneath world politics, on the timescale of decades, is whether power in a given society moves toward a more just division or a less just one. Toward the many, or toward the few. Every regime sits somewhere on that line, and every regime is moving along it, slowly or quickly, in one direction or the other.

The six factors are the things that push. Each one raises or lowers the probability that a society moves toward the just end. None of them is a person, and none of them is a policy.

The Six

Communication. How cheaply and freely can members of the society talk to one another and learn what is happening? Every increase in communication has, historically, pushed toward the many: the press, the post, radio, the network. Every regime that wants to hold power against its population attacks communication first, because it understands this factor correctly. I have argued that political change is the culmination of a change in understanding; communication is what lets understanding become common.

Education. Not schooling as such, but the fraction of the population that can evaluate a claim, read a budget, and notice when it is being lied to. Education pushes toward the many. Regimes that rely on the few therefore have a permanently divided attitude toward it: they want the engineers and not the citizens, and they get a compromise that serves neither.

Growth at the top. Economic growth concentrated in the upper part of the economy. This one is ambiguous. It creates a class with the means to demand a share of power, which historically pushed toward the many. It also creates a class with the means to buy power, which pushes toward the few. Which effect dominates depends on the other factors.

Growth at the bottom. Economic growth reaching the lowest part of the society. This one is not ambiguous. A population that is not hungry has time, attention, and something to lose, and all three push toward the many. A population kept at subsistence has none of them. Poverty is the most reliable ally of the few.

War and instability. War pushes toward the few, almost without exception. It concentrates power in the executive, justifies the suspension of ordinary rules, silences dissent as disloyalty, and builds the apparatus of control that outlasts the war. Peace pushes the other way, slowly, by letting the other factors work. This is why regimes that depend on the few so often find a war, and why the enemy within is discovered when no external one is available.

Foreign influence. What the powers outside the society want, and how hard they push for it. This factor has no fixed direction. Outside powers have supported the many when it suited them and the few when it suited them, and the record of the last century suggests they have supported the few rather more often, because the few are easier to deal with.

Why They Are Easy and Hard at Once

Each factor is easy to understand: you can explain the effect of war or of literacy to a child. Each is nearly impossible to predict: nobody can say when a war will start, when a new medium will appear, when growth will reach the bottom of a society or stall at the top.

And the interactions are worse. Communication plus education pushes hard toward the many; communication without education produces a population that can be reached by anyone with a message, which can push either way. Growth at the top plus war produces an armed elite; growth at the bottom plus peace produces a middle class. The combinations are few enough to list and too many to forecast.

Which leads to the observation I find most useful. In retrospect, every major political shift is easy to explain in terms of these six. In prospect, none of them is. That asymmetry is not a failure of analysis. It is what a system of a few simple factors with strong interactions looks like from inside.

What This Does to the News

Read a report of an election, a coup, or a treaty, and ask which factor moved. Usually the answer is obvious once asked. A regime fell because communication outran its ability to control it. A democracy slid toward the few because a war arrived, or because growth stalled at the bottom while continuing at the top. A treaty was signed because a foreign power's interest changed.

The names in the report are the surface. The leaders are attributed the change because leaders are what the report can photograph. Underneath, six things were pushing, and one of them pushed harder than the others that year.

If you want to know where a society is going, do not watch its politicians. Watch its literacy, its communications, whether its poor are getting richer, and whether it is at war. Those will tell you, not precisely and not on schedule, but far more reliably than anything anyone in office says.