Key world events of the last decade

Here I list some major world events of the last 10 years, with a significant emphasis on them having a 'warning shot' quality, and the groups of people and ideas or memes that have been most responsible for these events.

1. The rise of authoritarianism in China and India (~2015):

• Why? The failure to anchor China and India as responsible stakeholders in the liberal international order is a profound lapse in Grand Strategy; specifically, the inability to translate economic integration into political liberalization or strategic convergence has replaced a potential timeline of global cooperation with one of deepening authoritarianism and rivalry.
• Key (western) actors: Xi, Modi, Western foreign policy establishment and their lack of a coherent vision of what Hal Brand calls 'Grand Strategy'.
• Key Ideas or Memes: 'The End of History'- Fukuyama.

2. Increase in Populism/polarization (2016):

• Why? Brexit, Trump, and resurgence of EU populism, have caused global distraction and the breakdown of the unipolar world order. This has prevented a stronger US/EU alliance from cooperating on pushing for more liberal democracy and free markets around the world.
• Key actors: Liberals and technocrats causing too much migration and free trade too quickly, reducing incomes in the lowest deciles and causing populism (cf. David Autor's China Shock literature). Conservatives agitating the populous and failing to redistribute the gains from trade and migration.
• Key Ideas or Memes: 'More free trade and more migration raises all boats': This meme ignores the fact that trade and migration can reduce incomes in the lowest income deciles and cause populism (cf. David Autor's research on the China Shock literature). We could have had more free trade and more migration under the curve without the populist backlash, had we phased it in more slowly.

3. The development of the transformer (2017) and its popularization via ChatGPT (2022):

• Why? This event has massively increased investment and thus sped up AI (though it might have also mitigated the risk of a compute overhang). It was also a warning shot for AI risk, increasing concern about future catastrophes, and significantly increased funding for AI safety/strategy/policy.
• Key actors: Mostly Google: Approximately 85% of the innovations causing the recent AI boom came from Google. Also, OpenAI: ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer product ever.
• Key Ideas or Memes: 'Scale is all you need', Bing's Sydney.

4. Covid-19 pandemic (2020):

• Why? Over and above Covid direct impact, the covid response also caused significant economic slowdown. Covid has also been a warning shot for potentially worse future pandemics and other global catastrophic risks. Covid has has reduced normalcy bias, a cognitive bias that leads people to minimize threat warnings. It's hard to think of another event in recent history that caused such drastic changes to day-to-day life, even in the West.
• Key actors: Conditional on the lab leak hypothesis being true: CCP/ Xi. Alternatively, the policy establishment for not having better pandemic preparedness and modelling of the impacts of covid and the effects of the policy response on the economy
• Key Ideas or Memes: In the aftermath of covid in particular, but even before, Bill Gates spread the idea that 'Synthetic biology can create pandemics worse than covid' (e.g. Gates provided funding for the Nuclear Threat Initiative's biosecurity program way back in 2008). Lives Vs. The Economy' when everything is commensurable.

5. The Ukraine war (2022):

• Why? Over and above the catastrophic direct impact of the war, the war was a wakeup call that great power competition is not theoretical, but all too real. It lead to significant rearmament globally.
• Key actors: Putin.
• Key Ideas or Memes:'Fukuyama's 'The End of History' theory is now over' / 'The End of the Unipolar World Order'