It's possible for liberal western values to exist there. They don't, but the fact that they could still supports what I'm saying.
Whereas in somewhere like Somalia, there is no way they could ever have a liberal western democracy. Basically liberal values are made possible by democracy, but no one adopts democracy in order to have liberal values. People adopt democracy because it's a good way to mediate disputes about how the rules surrounding private property should work, but if people don't have much of value in the first place or any clear path to accrue wealth then it wouldn't make any sense to have a democracy to manage that process.
So the development is still economic it's just not merely about "amount of wealth" but about the process in which the wealth was created too.
A self-made guy with a 1 billion wealth is more likely than not a savvy businessman.
A guy who won 1 billion in the super-lottery is not - even though both have 1 billion.
> For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future
Which is rather the opposite of what you're saying, particularly if "unsustainably borrowing from the future" refers to things like fossil fuels.
While your changed hypothesis matches empirical data better than the original hypothesis, I think you have to be careful in how you interpret it. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands have large amounts of fossil fuels, yet are very culturally liberal, even compared to neighbors like Germany. So it doesn't seem to be the case that the presence of natural resources turns cultures away from liberalism, though that's probably not what you meant anyway.
There's the question of the direction of causality. The comment I responded to only considers one direction, but could the other direction not be an important factor? Is it that wealthier societies develop certain kinds of cultures, or is it also that certain kinds of cultures tend to develop more wealth, even in the absence of vast locally available natural resources? For example, if we had an alternative timeline in which Saudi Arabia had no oil yet was rich, isn't it plausible that they'd also have a culture that focuses on scientific inquiry, education, and economic freedom, not because those things are a result of wealth but because they are a prerequisite for it in the absence of natural resources.
There is obviously a relationship between economy and culture, but the relationship is not one-way, and it's far from simple.
