The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

The Leviathan vs. the Market

A crucial debate in economics and social science concerns the balance between the state and the market. How much should the state intervene in the economy? What is the right scope and extent of regulation? Which activities should be left to markets and which others should be the purview of the state? The textbook economic answer is that the state should intervene only under clearly delineated circumstances. These include the presence of “externalities,” which arise when actions by individual actors have major consequences for others that are not mediated via markets, paving the way for excessive levels of some activities such as pollution; the provision of “public goods,” which are goods from which everybody benefits, such as infrastructure or national defense; and situations in which there is pervasive “asymmetric information,” meaning that some market participants will not be able to accurately judge the quality of the products and services they are trading. They include as well the presence of monopolies that need to be regulated to prevent them from charging excessively high prices or engaging in predatory activities to drive out their competitors. Critically, government intervention is also needed for social insurance or redistribution to limit inequality. An important tenet of the textbook approach is that when working to influence the distribution of income in the economy, the state should minimize its impact on market prices and instead rely on taxes and transfers to achieve its objectives.

This is consistent with The Road to Serfdom, where Hayek advocated limits on the scope of the state in the economy because markets are more efficient at allocating resources. But critically, Hayek went further and also argued that the increase in the power and involvement of the state can have adverse political implications. Even if some of Hayek’s conclusions were neither fully compelling nor have been borne out by the political developments of the intervening decades, the way he approached the problem broke considerable new ground. Perhaps Hayek’s most brilliant insight is that the balance between the state and the market isn’t just about economics; it is about politics (and we are not saying this just because it is one of the main implications of our conceptual framework as well). The vital challenge is to make sure that the state can increase its capacity to meet society’s needs but still remain shackled. That necessitates new ways in which society is empowered to monitor and control the state and elites. So the diagnosis of beneficial state interventions is not just about economic trade-offs, but also about the interventions’ political implications. It’s not just about state capacity, but about who controls and monitors that capacity and how it will be used.

In this light, the real institutional innovation in Sweden, and subsequently in other Scandinavian nations, was not just creating a more interventionist, redistributive state but doing so under the auspices of a coalition including businesses and the great majority of workers organized in politically active trade unions, which imposed tight shackles on the state. On the one hand, as we have noted already, the involvement of businesses, including the biggest corporations in Sweden, meant that the Swedish welfare state never went in the direction of wholesale nationalization of industries or abrogation of markets. On the other hand, the pivotal role that trade unions played in this process enabled much greater popular participation in politics, stacking the cards against the hijacking of the now more powerful state institutions by elite interests. This coalition and the Red Queen effect enabled the Swedish political system to reorient itself when some of the regulations went too far in the 1970s and then again in the 1990s.

There are three other vital lessons from the Swedish experience for understanding the balance between the state and the market. The first is a corollary of what we have already argued. When conditions necessitate new responsibilities for the state, this expansion must be accompanied by new ways for society to participate in politics, monitor the state and bureaucrats, and pull the carpet from under the new programs if necessary. This means that a lot of the debate about the proper scope of markets and governments fails to grapple with the most defining question—even though Hayek long ago identified the critical importance of this question. Can we keep the Leviathan under control even with its new responsibilities and newly acquired powers? Do the costs of introducing new checks on the Leviathan, especially when these will not be automatically forthcoming due to the Red Queen effect, outweigh the benefits from the additional state intervention?

From this perspective, the reason why the government should not regulate the prices of most goods isn’t because these prices are set perfectly by markets (or, in the terminology of economics, because there are no externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, or distributional concerns), but because the political costs of the state widening its remit would be too high, either because of the additional precautions this requires or because of the heightened risk of spinning out of the corridor. This line of reasoning implies that the state should intervene only when the benefits from intervention are larger than the political costs of intervention. More important, it also shows that interventions and activities that set in motion powerful (positive-sum) Red Queen effects are much more likely to be socially beneficial. So it is preferable for the state to provide social insurance and broad-based services and coordinate bargaining between employers and employees while getting both trade unions and businesses involved (which is likely to empower the Red Queen, as in the Swedish case) than to engage in specific, often opaque government regulations and corrective actions in narrow areas like sugar or steel tariffs (in the way that Paper Leviathans dealt with social demands, as we saw in Chapter 11).

The second lesson is that some apparently inefficient aspects of the economy might have a useful social role after all. One such aspect is trade unions themselves, which are often viewed with great suspicion, because one of their main objectives is to push for higher wages for their members even if this makes it harder for non-members to find jobs. Indeed, we have seen that even in the Swedish context, trade unions have at times pushed for excessively high wages. This suspicious attitude is more than shared by many policy makers in the United States, who have sought to undermine the power of unions. Partly as a result of these policy attitudes (and partly because of the decline of manufacturing employment), today union membership is much lower in the U.S. economy, especially in the private sector, than it was in the heyday of labor unions in midcentury, after the rights of workers to organize in unions, engage in collective bargaining, and go on strike were recognized with the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935. Similar declines in the power of labor unions have been ongoing in other advanced economies. Whether the opposition to trade unions makes sense on purely economic grounds is debatable. But an essential role of trade unions is political; they are central for maintaining a partial balance of power between well-organized business interests and labor. The decline in the power of unions over the past several decades may thus have been one of the factors tilting the balance of power in U.S. society in favor of large corporations. The more important point for our framework is that, in evaluating the role of various policies and institutions, we must take into account the supporting arrangements that seek to create a balance and thus help keep the Leviathan and the elites shackled.

The third important lesson is about the form of government intervention. Here we diverge more sharply from Hayek and the textbook answer in economics. They maintain that it is always better to refrain from meddling with market prices, and if the government wishes to create a more equitable division of income, then it should let the market work and use redistributive taxation to move toward the desired distribution. But this way of thinking incorrectly separates economics from politics. For the Leviathan to take market prices and the distribution of income as given and just rely on fiscal redistribution to achieve its objectives might translate into very high levels of taxes and redistribution. Wouldn’t it be better, especially from the viewpoint of controlling the Leviathan, if market prices could be altered so as to achieve some of these objectives without as much fiscal redistribution? This is exactly what the Swedish welfare state did. The social democratic coalition was built on the corporatist model wherein trade unions and state bureaucracy directly regulated the labor market. This generated higher wages for workers and meant that there was less need for redistribution from the owners of capital and corporations to labor. It also generated wage compression so that the distribution of income among laborers was more equal. As a result, there was less need for redistributive taxation, even if quite a bit of that also took place in the Swedish economy to finance the generous welfare state. Much of this was not designed or planned in advance. Nevertheless, our framework highlights one reason things came to be organized this way; by ensuring that wages were higher and more compressed, and thus departing from what an unfettered market outcome might have been, the state avoided the need for even greater fiscal redistribution and taxation. With the fiscal role of the state diminished, keeping the state in check became a more feasible objective.

Unshared Prosperity

Many Western nations, not least the United States, are facing fundamental economic exigencies today. The political response so far has been closer to the zero-sum Red Queen than the type of dynamic we saw in the Swedish cow trade, which involved the development of novel coalitions and institutional architectures to deal with new challenges. But the latter path is open to most countries in the corridor, and the first step in supporting it is to understand what these new challenges are. These challenges are the focus of the next three sections.

Two of the most powerful engines of economic prosperity over the last several decades have been economic globalization and the rapid introduction of automation technologies. Economic globalization has increased the volume of trade, and outsourcing and offshoring have enabled the production process to be distributed around the world to take advantage of lower cost of production for certain tasks and goods. Both developing and developed nations have benefited from this globalization process. The spectacular growth of economies such as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s and of China in the 1990s and 2000s would not have been possible without globalization. Nor would we have enjoyed the lower prices of hundreds of products ranging from textiles and toys to electronics and computers. We saw in the previous chapter that globalization impacts how narrow the corridor is and the prospects for some of the nations outside the corridor to move into it. But its effects on the economics and politics of developed nations have been more complicated because of how the gains from globalization have been shared, or more to the point, have failed to be. Though much economic policy advice emphasizes how everybody benefits from economic globalization, the reality has been different both in the United States and in Europe, where corporations and the already well-off have seen their incomes rise, while workers have experienced much more limited gains and in some cases lower wages and job losses. This is in fact what economic theory predicts: globalization creates winners and losers, and when it takes the form of integration of an advanced country with a less advanced economy abundant in low-skill, low-wage labor, workers—and especially less skilled workers in the advanced economy—lose out.

The other powerful engine of economic prosperity, technological change, has had similar effects. Technological progress increases productivity and expands the range of products available to consumers, and has historically been at the root of sustained economic growth. At times, it has also been the tide that has lifted all (or most) boats. From the 1940s to the mid-1970s in the U.S. economy, there was rapid productivity growth along with growth of earnings of all education groups, all the way from workers with less than high school education to those with postgraduate degrees. But the bewildering array of new technologies that have transformed workplaces over the past thirty years appears to have had quite different effects. Many of these technologies, including much more powerful computers, numerically controlled and then computerized machines, industrial robots, and more recently artificial intelligence, have automated the production process, allowing machines to take over tasks that were previously performed by workers. By its nature, automation favors capital, which is now used more extensively in the form of the new machines. It also tends to favor skilled workers relative to the less skilled, whose tasks are being taken over by machines. Not surprisingly, therefore, new automation technologies have had sweeping distributional consequences.

The combined effects of globalization and automation have led to divergent fortunes. In the United States, the pattern of broad-based wage increases ceased after the late 1970s and was replaced by a widening gap between the workers at the bottom of the earnings distribution and those at the top. For example, while the (inflation-adjusted) earnings of men with postgraduate education increased by almost 60 percent since 1980, those of men with high school education or less declined by more than 20 percent. In the course of the last three and a half decades, the real take-home pay of less skilled workers has fallen precipitously.

The same period has also witnessed declining job creation in the American economy. U.S. manufacturing employment fell by about 25 percent from the mid-1990s, while the overall employment-to-population ratio has declined significantly since 2000. Similar trends are visible in several other advanced economies, even if the staggering decline in the real earnings of less educated workers is unique to the U.S. labor market.

There is general agreement that both automation and globalization have been major contributors to these trends. Employment and earnings losses are concentrated in areas, industries, and occupations that used to specialize in activities that either have been automated or have witnessed a rapid expansion of imports from developing economies, particularly China. Estimates in the literature suggest that imports from China alone may have reduced employment in the U.S. economy by over two million jobs, and the adoption of industrial robots, one salient example of new automation technologies, may have led to the loss of as many as 400,000 jobs. In both cases the majority of the effects were felt by workers at the lower end of the skill distribution.

Wall Street Unhinged

Economic globalization and automation are not the only trends contributing to high levels of inequality. The rapid deregulation of several industries in the United States, accompanied by more modest changes in other developed economies, has been a major contributor to inequality as well. Particularly important in this process was financial deregulation.

The financial industry in much of the world was highly regulated during the several decades following World War II, so much so that in the United States banking occupations came to be viewed as typical white-collar jobs, and their pay reflected this, typically hovering around the same level that workers would receive in other sectors. The bedrock of the postwar financial system in the United States was “Regulation Q,” which restricted interest rates on savings accounts, limiting competition between different financial institutions, as well as interstate branching restrictions that prevented banks from competing for deposits in multiple states. These restrictions were augmented by the Glass-Steagall Act, which was enacted in 1933 and separated retail banking (mainly deposit taking and lending) from the riskier business of investment banking (which focused on such things as underwriting, mergers and acquisitions, financial derivatives, and trading). In this regulated environment, the bureaucratized and comfortable jobs in banking came to be described by the “3-6-3 rule”—take deposits at 3 percent interest rate, lend them at 6 percent interest rate, and hit the golf course by 3 p.m. This started to change in the 1970s, particularly after Regulation Q was abolished in 1986, paving the way to a significant rise in concentration in banking. Together with greater concentration came a huge shift toward riskier activities, such as financial derivatives including interest rate swaps (where one party to the financial contract makes payments to the other depending on whether a benchmark interest rate is below or above a threshold) or credit default swaps (where payments are made depending on whether a debtor defaults). Even though the financial sector was branching into riskier activities, the rising political power of banks blocked any new regulations and in fact pushed for further deregulation. With greater concentration, fewer regulations, and more aggressive risk-taking came greater revenues and profits. Between 1980 and 2006, the financial sector grew from 4.9 percent of gross domestic product in the United States to 8.3 percent, and its profits rose 800 percent in real terms, more than three times the growth of profits in the nonfinancial sector.

In a powerful feedback cycle, greater size and profits led to increased political power. By 2006, the financial sector was contributing $260 million to political campaigns, up from about $61 million in 1990. The consequence of this was continued and bolder financial deregulation. Other important pillars of post–Great Depression financial regulations were dismantled, beginning with the 1994 Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act which relaxed interstate banking regulations and opened the way to a series of mergers leading to the formation of gargantuan banking corporations such as JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, and Bank of America. In 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act demolished most of the remaining barriers between commercial and investment banking. During the same period, even as complex financial derivatives were spreading, bankers strenuously opposed new regulations. As a result, the huge growth in collateralized debt obligations based on mortgage-backed securities (which created synthetic securities of different risk profiles from large pools of mortgages) and credit default swaps took place almost entirely outside any regulatory framework. This was one of the reasons why an insurance company, the American Insurance Group (AIG), could sell massive amounts of credit default swaps and take on a vast amount of risk. With this wave of deregulation in place, the cycle continued, and profits in finance grew.

Deregulation in finance contributed to inequality. Megaprofits on Wall Street not only added to the more unequal distribution of income between owners of major financial institutions, including hedge funds specializing in risky investments for wealthy clients, but boosted overall inequality because high-level managers and traders in the financial industry started receiving huge pay packages and bonus payments. The earnings of workers and executives in finance, which had tracked those of their counterparts in other sectors until 1990, started diverging sharply thereafter. By 2006, workers in finance were receiving 50 percent more than their counterparts, while executives in the financial industry were receiving a staggering 250 percent more than executives with similar qualifications employed in other industries.

An indicator of this aspect of inequality is the share of national income accruing to those in the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, which respectively represent the very rich and the very very rich, among whom owners and executives of financial corporations are heavily overrepresented. The top 1 percent of Americans received around 9 percent of national income in the 1970s. By 2015 this number had increased to 22 percent. The increase has been even more striking for the share of the top 0.1 percent, which went up from around 2.5 percent in the 1970s to almost 11 percent of national income in 2015.

The second challenge is related to the allocation of resources. Finance, by transferring funds from savers to those with new ideas and investment opportunities, plays a vital role in improving the efficiency of economic activity. But when it becomes concentrated, specialized in risk-taking, and protected by its political power, it can conversely become a source of widespread inefficiencies. By the time of the 2007–2008 crisis, the financial industry had moved far in this direction. Excessive risk-taking was rooted in the unregulated competition in finance that was encouraging many institutions to lend recklessly and take risks in their own trading divisions in order to raise the rates of return they could promise to investors. It was also fueled by the belief of many in the leading financial institutions that the government and the Federal Reserve Bank would not let them go under even if their investments failed abysmally (and they weren’t proven wrong). It was ultimately the collapse of such risky investments that spurred the financial crisis, which then morphed into a global economic downturn. Though the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and tighter regulations by the Federal Reserve System have attempted to limit the extent of such risk-taking and the negative consequences of financial losses on the economy, this has been at best a partial success. The financial industry, relying on its powerful lobbying, has resisted and prevented the full implementation of these regulations and often has sought to dial them back. Meanwhile, the sector has in fact become more concentrated. The share of the five largest banks in the U.S. financial system, which increased from 20 percent in 1990 to 28 percent in 2000, stands above 46 percent in 2019.

Supersized Firms

Greater concentration has not been confined to finance. Together with general deregulation and new technologies has come a huge increase in economic concentration in many sectors, and especially in online services, communications, and social media. The size of the largest companies relative to the rest of the economy is at an all-time high. The tech giants Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have a combined market value (as measured by their stock market valuations) equivalent to over 17 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. The same number for the five largest companies in 1900, when policy makers and society became alarmed about the power of large corporations, was less than 6 percent. This huge increase in concentration appears to have several causes. The most important is the nature of the technology of these new companies, which creates what economists call “winner take all” dynamics. Take Google, for instance. Founded in 1998, when there were already several successful search engines for the Internet, Google quickly distinguished itself because of its superior search algorithm. While its competitors, such as Yahoo! and AltaVista, ranked websites by the number of times they included the term being searched for, the founders of Google, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, came up with a much better approach when they were graduate students at Stanford University. This approach, which came to be called the PageRank algorithm, ranked a web page according to its relevance estimated from how many other pages also mentioning the search term linked to this website. Because this algorithm was much better at suggesting relevant websites to users, Google’s market share of Internet searches grew quickly. Once it had a large market share, Google could use more data from user searches to refine its algorithm, making it even better and more dominant. These dynamics got stronger once data from Internet searches started being used for artificial intelligence applications, for example, for translation and pattern recognition. Early success also brought more resources to invest in research and development and acquire companies that were developing technology that would be useful to Google’s further expansion.

Winner-take-all effects were also at the root of the meteoric rise of Amazon, whose early growth as an online retailer and platform made it more attractive to sellers and users, and of Facebook, whose popularity as a social media platform critically depends on the users’ expectations that their friends are joining as well. Though the nature of the winner-take-all considerations are somewhat different for Apple and Microsoft, they are no less important, because once again the value of their products depends on their overall popularity and widespread adoption in the population.

Even if the nature of the technology of the Internet age has been a defining factor in the rise in economic concentration, the inaction of regulatory agencies, particularly in the United States, has been a major factor too. This contrasts with what we have seen in U.S. history at similar junctures. When several companies reached similarly dominant positions at the turn of the twentieth century, administrations influenced by the progressive agenda came to power and started taking action to break them up, as we saw in Chapter 10. Today there are no similar institutional or policy proposals on the agenda. It is of course true that many of these companies have grown rapidly because they have offered new, better, and cheaper products. This does not obviate the concerns over increased concentration, especially with the prospect that companies that dominate markets will at some point exercise their monopoly power, charge higher prices, and start choking off innovation. The rise in economic concentration has been a major factor in the increase in inequality, too, not just because the owners and major shareholders of these corporations have become very rich but also because their employees have seen their wages increase relative to those working in other industries.

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The economic trends we have briefly described—economic globalization and automation, the growth of finance, and the rise of supersized firms—pose urgent challenges for the United States and several other advanced economies for at least three reasons. The first is their inequality implications, which we have already emphasized. The second is economic efficiency. Some see our epoch as the golden age of technology, and yet income and productivity growth for at least the last two decades have been disappointing despite the spectacular rise of globalization and fascinating new technologies. The causes of this disappointing productivity growth are not well understood. They may well be related to the trends we have outlined. Globalization and rapid automation bring benefits, but their recent rise may have been at the expense of other technological advances that would have contributed to productivity and prosperity even more. Excessive growth in the financial sector and inefficient risk-taking have probably been quite costly because they have created instability in the economy (think of the financial crisis) and diverted resources that should have gone into other sectors and innovation toward finance (think of the smartest graduates going to hedge funds and investment banking instead of innovation, science, or public service). The huge increase in economic concentration has also likely undermined efficiency by both hamstringing competition and distorting the new technologies being adopted and developed.

The third challenge is related to trust in institutions. The Shackled Leviathan doesn’t just need a balance of power between state and society. It also needs society to trust institutions. Without trust, citizens won’t protect these institutions from the state and the elite, and the Red Queen becomes much more zero-sum. Without trust, institutions will not be able to mediate conflicts in society (as in interwar Germany). Rising inequality, sluggish employment growth, the enormous profits in finance, and huge firms that remain unregulated all contribute to the feeling that the economy is rigged and the political system is complicit in this process. This feeling was certainly strengthened by the financial crisis and its aftermath, which witnessed government bailouts of banks partly responsible for the crisis while poor households facing bankruptcy received little help. Worse, as in our discussion of Weimar Germany, segments of society that are falling behind economically and losing trust in institutions are prime targets for movements that seek to destabilize the political system and tear down the balance of power between state and society that underpins life in the corridor. Such movements have been, predictably, in the ascendancy of late.

Inequality, unemployment, low productivity and income growth, and loss of trust in institutions were among the factors that made the period of the Great Depression such a fertile ground for political instability. Though the crisis engulfing advanced economies today is not as extreme as the Great Depression, given the parallels we cannot afford complacency.

Avoiding the Zero-Sum Red Queen

We have seen two diametrically opposed responses to the Great Depression. The first, the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany, was an example of a zero-sum Red Queen, where each side competed to undercut the other without any compromise. The second, illustrated by the Swedish response, entailed greater involvement and empowerment of the state, while society also became more capable and better organized to control the state. This societal mobilization was bulwarked by a new coalition supporting the new institutional architecture. The response of many Western nations today is closer to Weimar Germany’s than Sweden’s, with the elites fighting to defend their advantages and those in the most precarious positions succumbing to the allure of autocrats, and polarization and intransigence becoming the order of the day. Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of interwar Germany? Or can we prevent the Red Queen from turning completely zero-sum? Can we also heed Hayek’s warnings and avoid “serfdom”?

Let’s start with the good news. As we emphasized in Chapter 13, the Red Queen is more likely to get out of control when the corridor is narrower. Here the United States and many other Western nations are in a better situation because their diversified economies built on manufacturing and services, very limited role of coercion (recall Chapter 14), lack of dominant groups diametrically opposed to democracy (like the Prussian landed elites), and their recent history of uninterrupted democratic politics translate into a wider corridor. But neither the width of the corridor nor stability in the corridor can be taken for granted. The width of the corridor is bolstered by democratic, participatory institutions. If these institutions lose people’s trust, the corridor narrows and the ability of society to handle conflicts is diminished. And the Red Queen can get out of control even in a wide corridor if it turns resolutely zero-sum.

Let’s revisit the Swedish experience during the Great Depression to see how to avoid such a zero-sum response. Three pillars of the Swedish response were critical. The first pillar was that the whole project was built on a broad coalition composed of workers, farmers, and businesses. The workers’ movement, represented by the trade unions and the SAP, far from undercutting other interests, attempted to strike a compromise with them.

The second pillar was a range of economic responses, both short-term and institutional. These responses involved taking measures to stimulate the economy as well as a series of reforms to redistribute income toward those who were suffering unemployment, loss of earnings, and poverty. They proceeded to institutionalize these measures by developing a social democratic model in which the state would mediate the negotiations between employers and workers in order to ensure industrial peace. They also founded a generous welfare state for making prosperity more equally shared.

The third pillar was political. Deepening state capacity was embedded in a political system in which there were powerful societal controls on both the state’s activities and the relationship between the political and economic elites. These controls were helped by the universal nature of the programs, which strengthened the social democratic coalition, by the fact that the administrative capacity of the state developed rapidly in the process of managing the welfare state, and by the direct involvement of the trade unions in the operation of key programs. All of this was in turn undergirded by the earlier political reforms that had significantly democratized Swedish politics.

The first lesson from Sweden is obvious: Engineer compromise and find ways of building a broad coalition to support the Shackled Leviathan and the new policies. This of course may be much harder once politics becomes highly polarized, as we have witnessed in the German case. The hope is to find some common ground before it’s too late. In this context it’s important that both the right and the left in the United States and many Western nations today agree that the trends we have highlighted here—rising inequality, disappearing jobs, the dominance of Wall Street, and economic concentration—are problems. The challenge is that there is less agreement about solutions. But this is not unusual. New coalitions often necessitate new ideas, perspectives, and institutional innovations. We now discuss where these might come from, focusing on the U.S. case for specificity.

Let’s start with coalition building. The challenge is similar to the one that the Federalists faced. The compromises they came up with, even if costly in some dimensions, as we emphasized in Chapter 10, may be useful again. One leg of this compromise was to transfer significant powers to the states (so that local communities would have some say in the process). Given the differences in the economic and political problems and tolerance for government involvement across states, the same compromise may be necessary today too. Another leg was the public-private partnership. This had the virtue of getting the private sector involved and reassured as the state’s capacity expanded. Though a similar compromise is necessary in the current U.S. context, there may be need for the institutional architecture to move beyond the current version of the public-private partnership model, as we’ll discuss momentarily. Finally, incorporating Hayek’s concerns from the beginning would help. This would mean that any social compact entailing greater state involvement and a stronger social safety net should reaffirm a significant increase in the ability of society to monitor the state. Even though Swedish society was less suspicious of state interventions, this is exactly what happened in Sweden in the 1930s.

On the economic front, the nature of the challenges makes it evident that a multipronged expansion in the responsibilities and the capacity of the state is necessary. The responsibilities that the state, especially the American state, must begin shouldering include designing and operating a more generous and comprehensive social safety net, which will protect individuals who are not benefiting from the major economic changes. Policies aimed at improving the social safety net need to be complemented by others that improve job creation and the earnings of workers and help them transition into new jobs. One example of this is the U.S. earned income tax credit, which effectively subsidizes low-wage workers by making their earnings less heavily taxed. It will have to involve a rethink of the U.S. educational system, which has become outmoded not only because it has not kept up with the needs of the changing economic landscape, but also because it has come to reflect the inequities in society, failing to provide a level playing field for most Americans. It will need to develop tighter, bolder, and more comprehensive regulations for many businesses, including the financial industry and the tech sector. To top it off, the recent U.S. experience highlights the fact that excessive reliance on the public-private partnership model is a drawback when building a modern welfare state. The successful operation of welfare and social insurance programs necessitates a deepening of the administrative capacity of the state. This doesn’t mean no role for the private sector, but it requires a more autonomous, capable, and authoritative civil service.

Another lesson from the Swedish experience (confirmed by the Danish, Norwegian, and British cases) is to move welfare programs in a more universal direction, encouraging society at large to embrace them and be involved in their monitoring. Subsidies to specific industries or specific types of workers do not typically achieve this objective. Times of major economic and social change offer an especially fertile ground for the introduction of universal benefits, because they require broad-based programs, which can then forge a popular coalition in their support. Possible reforms to deal with the adverse effects of economic globalization, automation, and other economic changes, as well as investments in education to enable more effective and equitable use of these opportunities, must be similarly broad-based and could be designed to furnish their own powerful coalitions.

Once again building on the Swedish experience, we can argue that it would be a mistake to rely just on the tax policy and direct redistribution to pursue these objectives. Rather, it would be preferable to design labor market institutions that directly move the economy toward a more equally shared distribution of the gains from economic growth, such as better opportunities for workers to engage in collective agreements, minimum-wage legislation, and other policies to increase pay. Such policies would both reduce the burden on the state (and thus make it easier to control it) and also contribute to a broader coalition in favor of maintaining these programs.

The same factors suggest that it may be necessary to redirect the path of technological change. Technology’s path and impact on the economy are not predetermined. The anemic rate of productivity growth today signals that all may not be well on this front. One problem is the declining support of the U.S. government for fundamental research and corporate R&D since the end of the Cold War. Reversing this decline would certainly be an important step in encouraging faster productivity growth. Moreover, the emphasis over the last several decades has been on rapid cost-saving, which has encouraged greater automation. It’s not far-fetched to think that this focus on automation has not generated sufficient productivity growth. A social consensus on making the gains from economic growth more equally shared may motivate investments in technologies that will not simply automate existing tasks but also generate new opportunities for workers with different skills to contribute to production. If this can be achieved, the result will not only be a more equitable distribution of income and jobs and less need for fiscal redistribution, but also higher productivity as human skills are better utilized.

In politics, the challenges are no less formidable. Beyond securing a coalition around the economic reforms and institutions, it is imperative to rein in the excessive influence of private interests via campaign contributions and lobbying, which have reached astronomical proportions over the past two decades. Hence the concern that a larger state will do the bidding of economic elites is not a distant threat for the U.S. political system; it is already here. Yet the enormity of this problem means that both the left and the right in the United States agree that such capture is a problem (even if their favorite solutions differ). Our short list of political reforms to counter these threats include the following. The first is to curtail campaign contributions and limit the impact of lobbying. Specific measures to bring greater transparency to the relationship between firms, lobbyists, and politicians may be particularly important, since accounts of how politicians become faithful servants of certain industries or interests often involve meetings hidden from the public eye and poorly monitored revolving-door arrangements in which regulators and politicians are later hired by the private sector at very attractive salaries.

A second reform is to increase the autonomy of the civil service. Ending the cozy relationship between lobbyists and the state is an obvious first step. But more important, more fundamental reforms reducing the ability of new administrations to make political appointments for all high positions in government agencies would increase the autonomy of the civil service and help prevent its political capture.

Other necessary reforms include actions to reverse several trends that have reduced the representativeness of the U.S. political system, in particular via redistricting, which since the early 2000s has created scores of electoral districts that are safe for one of the two major parties.

Even more important than specific policy reforms is a general increase in the mobilization of society, and here too there is fairly broad agreement in the United States. One of the features of nineteenth-century American society that most fascinated Tocqueville was people’s willingness to organize and form associations outside the government. This not only enabled them to solve specific societal problems but also created popular pressure on political decision making. The decline of these types of associations has been much emphasized in recent years. Though the extent and exact causes of this decline are debated and not all organizations have an important political role, a new vigor in the type of associations that are capable of keeping the state and powerful elites in check is essential. This is even more the case because labor organizations, which often counteract the influence of economic elites, have become much weaker over the last several decades. This decline highlights the need for alternate forms of organizations that can enable new pathways into politics for both industrial workers and other citizens. An open question is whether (and how) such organizations can effectively shoulder the role that trade unions played in the past. We return to this question at the end of the chapter.

Learning from the Swedish success in building a diverse coalition to support and monitor the expansion of the state’s capacity should not be read as a recommendation that the United States or other Western countries blindly emulate and copy the details of what Sweden started doing more than eighty years ago. To start with, the coalitions that can undergird positive Red Queen dynamics in the United States will have to be very different from the coalitions of workers and peasants in the Swedish cow trade. They will have to involve different regions, different ideological groups, and different ethnic groups. Because the United States is still the world’s most innovative country in a range of leading industries, such as software, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and high-tech engineering, it must pursue a different organization from what Sweden pursued in the 1930s. But securing opportunities and incentives for business dynamism and innovation does not contradict creating a better safety net and welfare state. It does not contradict helping mobilize society to keep the state in check. It certainly does not contradict developing a capable state either, especially since the involvement of the American state in science and research has been a mainstay of the innovative energy of the American economy. This can be seen from the activities of the U.S. government as a major purchaser of high-tech equipment and also as the primary financier of research via organizations such as the National Science Foundation and with generous tax credits for research expenditures. The question then is how the United States and other Western nations can redirect economic activity toward creating a more equitable division of resources, while keeping the state shackled. Some clues about an answer are provided by considering the problem of monitoring the state when it is dealing with security threats.

Leviathan’s War on Terror

The template of how the state can expand its capacity to deal with new problems while remaining shackled also applies to non-economic challenges. Some of the most critical demands that citizens make of their states are about security. Indeed one powerful incentive to engage in state building is the search for a centralized authority to enforce laws, resolve conflicts, and guarantee security. But as the world changes, so does the nature of security challenges.

That became abundantly clear to most Westerners on the morning of September 11, 2001, when nineteen hijackers from the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda took control of four U.S. commercial flights and crashed two of them into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, while another one was flown into the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., and the final one was brought down in a field in Pennsylvania as passengers fought the hijackers. The overall death toll was 2,996, with over 6,000 people injured. Though of course the world had seen its fair share of murderous terrorist attacks and hijackings before September 11 and Western states had dealt with the various security challenges of the Cold War for some decades, the scale and audacity of these attacks shocked the public. Most citizens and government agencies interpreted this as the beginning of a new world of security threats that had to be confronted, with great urgency. Even if further large-scale attacks have been averted in the intervening eighteen years, this diagnosis has largely been proven right, as there have been many smaller-scale attacks and several foiled attempts engineered by similar organizations, most notably the so-called Islamic State. We thus have a clear example of society calling for an increase in state capacity and activism to confront new challenges.

These calls have been answered, and U.S. security agencies have grown massively and expanded their responsibilities. But as we already pointed out in Chapter 10, this hasn’t happened under the control of society, as became painfully clear in June 2013 when the media began to report some of the secret documents released by Edward Snowden revealing the existence and functions of the classified surveillance programs of the federal government. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, which allowed for direct access to Americans’ Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Skype accounts. We also learned about a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over millions of Americans’ phone records to the National Security Agency (NSA); about Boundless Informant, a data-mining program collecting metadata information on billions of e-mails and phone calls; and about XKeyscore, a computer system that allows for collection of “almost anything done on the internet.” Snowden revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of e-mail and instant-messaging contact lists, searching e-mail content, tracking and mapping the location of cell phones, and undermining attempts at encryption. As Snowden put it, “I, sitting at my desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal e-mail.” After Snowden’s revelations, Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, argued:

Snowden’s disclosures are a true constitutional moment … Edward Snowden has done more for our Constitution in terms of the Fourth and First Amendment than anyone else I know.

Perhaps all of this is a tempest in a teacup. Maybe it’s unavoidable that in fighting serious terrorist threats security agencies must act secretly, collect massive amounts of data, and ignore privacy concerns, and let some in the media complain loudly. Maybe.

Let’s turn to the Danish experience to gain a perspective. In 2006 the European Union issued a Data Retention Directive concerning “the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks.” The Danish government decided to expand on the directive and published a law going far beyond what was slated, including an obligation for “session logging” which required providers to store information on users’ source and destination IP addresses, port numbers, session type, and time stamp. In response, Privacy International, a nonprofit organization that monitors and defends privacy around the world, downgraded the country to a score of 2.0 (extensive surveillance societies) from its previous level of 2.5 (systemic failure to uphold safeguards). This places Denmark 34th among the 45 countries included in the study. Most Danes don’t seem bothered, however. They trust that the Danish government will not use their IP addresses, port numbers, session types, and time stamps to snoop on them, suppress their freedom of speech, or imprison them because of their political views. In April 2015 the European Court of Justice concluded that Danish data retention practices were “a particularly serious interference with fundamental rights,” but the Danish public was not up in arms and did not demand the cessation of the data retention practices.

The difference between the Danish and U.S. responses is not that the Danish government did not aggressively deal with similar security threats. It was that it did this while maintaining the trust of Danish society. This turned on two critical factors. First, while the U.S. program was secret and kept expanding without oversight, the Danish data retention policies were clearly announced to the public and were not subject to mission creep. Second, the Danes started with basic trust in their institutions and believed that their government would not use the information against them or for extraordinary rendition and torture, like the CIA did in the aftermath of September 11. Both of these factors suggest that the Danes believe, for good reason, that the data collected by their government would not threaten the shackled nature of their state. Not so with the American public, precisely because the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA have a habit of acting in unchecked, sometimes unscrupulous ways.

There is therefore a strong parallel between how the Shackled Leviathan might have to deal with new security threats while remaining shackled and how it may have to respond to new economic challenges. This parallel is rooted in the critical importance of institutional and other restraints keeping the Leviathan in the corridor. Society’s trust in the state is a reflection of these restraints. From this perspective what was problematic in the response by the NSA and the CIA to new security threats wasn’t their expanding responsibilities and activities, but the secret and unmonitored ways in which they went about organizing them. The programs revealed by Snowden were supposed to be monitored by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts, but the courts functioned secretly as well and were often no more than a rubber stamp. Not the right way to keep the shackles on or build trust.

*

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We started in Chapter 1 with some famous predictions about how most countries will move toward liberal democracy, anarchy, or dictatorships. Yuval Noah Harari’s warning that digital dictatorship was on the horizon for much of humanity was perhaps the most ominous, and the Chinese “social credit” system and the NSA’s aggressive surveillance programs add credence to Harari’s predictions. But as we have argued, there is no reason to expect that all or most countries will inexorably move toward the same type of political or economic system. It will be the prevailing balance between state and society that determines their paths. The Danish alternative to the same security threats underscores this point. When security threats are met with expanding and unmonitored powers of the state, abuses are much more likely to occur and the danger of a digital dictatorship increases. When the same actions are taken in plain sight and society can monitor whether these powers are being misused, the balance of power underpinning the corridor is reaffirmed. This reaffirmation encourages the use of new technologies in a way that is much more consistent with the principles of the Shackled Leviathan, even if these technologies could compromise privacy. The way new technologies will be deployed and whether they will disrupt the balance of power is not preordained. It is our choice.

Rights in Action: The Niemöller Principle

It is not just difficult to create a Shackled Leviathan. It also takes hard work to live with it. We have suggested a few specific ways in which society can be strengthened in the presence of a growing Leviathan. The most critical idea is to leverage society’s mobilization. But how do you achieve that in practice? Are there organizational avenues to help society expand its capabilities and control over the state and elites? We believe the answer is yes. It relates to the ideas from the previous chapter—to build on the protection for the rights of citizens against all threats, including those from the state, the elites, and other citizens.

Rights are intimately connected to our notion of liberty as protection of individuals from fear, violence, and dominance. Though fear and violence have been the main drivers of people fleeing their homes, dominance—the inability of individuals to make choices and pursue their lives according to their own values—is often as stifling. Rights are fundamentally ways for society to encode in its laws and norms the capacity of all individuals to make such choices in their lives.

The emphasis on rights extends back at least to John Locke as well as to Thomas Jefferson’s statement concerning “rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Our modern conception is shaped by the Universal Declaration of Rights of the United Nations adopted in 1948. William Beveridge anticipated these ideas in a 1945 pamphlet, Why I Am a Liberal, in which he wrote:

Liberty means more than freedom from the arbitrary power of Governments. It means freedom from economic servitude to Want and Squalor and other social evils; it means freedom from arbitrary power in any form. A starving man is not free.

The Universal Declaration similarly asserts:

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.

Article 23 proceeds:

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

FDR was also articulating similar notions. In 1940 and 1941, he emphasized “four essential freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In his State of the Union address of 1944 he went further and stated:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

He then listed the essential rights as “the right to a useful and renumerative job”; “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”; “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad”; “the right of every family to a decent home”; “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”; and “the right to a good education.” FDR had in the past been willing to abridge some of these rights and freedoms, for example, with the internment of Japanese citizens from 1942 to 1945, and he had worked with Jim Crow laws in the South. (One African American’s reaction to FDR’s four freedoms is telling: “White folks talking about the Four Freedoms, and we ain’t got none.”) His conversion to the importance of rights signals how the mood was changing on both sides of the Atlantic.

What is remarkable in these statements are two tenets of the conception of rights: they are universal and general (and in this they go far beyond the Declaration of Independence, which did not cover slaves and was unclear on women), and they recognize the importance of individuals being able to realize their choices. Thus threats of violence and restrictions on freedom of thought or speech against any group are violations of rights, and so is preventing people from exercising their religious activities (or lack thereof) or sexual preferences. But equally important, taking away the means of earning a decent living is a violation as well, because this too will create a form of dominance. This latter dominance is rooted not just in the fact that abject poverty would make it impossible for people to pursue a meaningful life, but also in the realization that under such circumstances, employers can demand work in unpleasant, demeaning, or highly disempowering conditions (remember the Dalit manual scavengers in Chapter 8).

This conception of rights is crucial for the liberty not just of men and the majority; but of women; of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities; and of people with disabilities and impairments. Enshrining these rights creates clear limits on what the state and powerful elites in society can and cannot do. Taking away the ability of people to organize, argue their case, or pursue their way of life is beyond the limits of what anybody can do when these rights are clearly protected. So is creating conditions that force people to be economically subservient and dominated.

Herein lie the beginnings of a transformative power for society. If clearly delineated boundaries on what the state cannot do are recognized universally, encroachments of these boundaries can create the spark for a broad-based societal mobilization to stop the state’s creeping overreach. Recognizing minority rights as universal is crucial, because without such recognition, only the specific minorities whose rights are currently being violated will complain and protest—with no mobilization or response, as in the disorganized, fragmented societies in India (Chapter 8) and Latin America and Africa (Chapter 11). Universal recognition of rights creates the basis for broad coalitions.

The importance of this idea was anticipated by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who in a poem composed in the 1950s pithily captured why it was so easy for the Nazi state to quickly dominate German society. The most well-known version of the poem, engraved at many of the Holocaust memorial museums and often recited at remembrance events, reads:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out

because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left to speak for me.

So in Niemöller’s account it was the lack of universal recognition of very basic rights that was at the root of the inability of German society to rise up to the Nazis, who could deal with and eliminate each group separately, without mobilizing a broad coalition within German society to stand up to them. This turned out to be a particularly bad way of defending the corridor.

These ideas too were to some degree anticipated by FDR, who in the same State of the Union address of 1944 emphasized the importance of a diverse set of rights for everybody, and for good measure quoted Benjamin Franklin’s statement from 1776, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Turning this logic on its head, to the extent that society can make a broad set of (reasonable) rights more universal, it will be better placed to organize and match the state’s expanding power. It is noteworthy that these rights as expressed by the Universal Declaration include access to gainful employment, because this creates room and incentives for different parts of society, motivated by economic considerations and grievances, to come together in a broad coalition and organize to resist despotism. These challenges may be particularly vital in the future as the labor movement may never regain its previous influence, as we have already discussed. A (civil) society organized around rights is one alternative.

*

—

Many of us living in democratic countries with assertive societies and high-capacity states are immensely fortunate compared to those suffering under the yoke of a Despotic Leviathan or surviving under fear, violence, and dominance without any state institutions to protect them. Nevertheless, living with the (shackled) Leviathan is a work in progress. Our argument has been that the key to making this more stable and less likely to spin out of the corridor is to seek to create and re-create the balance of power between state and society, between those who are powerful and those who are not. The Red Queen effect is there to help us, but ultimately society’s power is about society’s organization and mobilization.

*

—

In October 2017, women started speaking up about the sexual harassment and assault they had been subjected to by men with power over them. It began with the allegations against the towering movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. On October 5, actress Ashley Judd added to the accusations. On October 17, actress Alyssa Milano adopted a term coined by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 and tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” An avalanche of tweets followed and a social movement was born. Even if we are nowhere near full equality and protection for women around the world, because people have rallied against the violations of these most basic rights, it has become quite a bit more difficult for the powerful to harass, demean, and assault women in government, companies, and schools. Laws started to change in response, for example, with New York State’s new sexual harassment prevention law.

Human progress depends on the expansion of the state’s capacity to meet new challenges and combat all dominances, old and new, but that won’t happen unless society demands it and mobilizes to defend everybody’s rights. There is nothing easy or automatic about that, but it can and does happen.

Societal mobilization: The death of suffragette Emily Davison.

Hobbes’s Leviathan.

Norms controlling hierarchy: The ostracism of Themistocles.

Norms against hierarchy: A Tiv diviner.

The Absent Leviathan: The trash piles up in Lebanon.

The will to power builds a navy in Hawaii.

The Shackled Leviathan: The Allegory of Good Government.

The consequences of a Shackled Leviathan: The Effects of Good Government.

Another consequence of a Shackled Leviathan: The invention of tortillas.

The Shackled Leviathan’s law from below: The Salic Law.

The Bayeux Tapestry.

Breaking the cage of norms.

Failed experimentation: Galileo’s celatone for calculating longitude.

When the Chinese people were in control: The Xunzi.

The Despotic Leviathan is watching: Tiananmen Square.

Trapped in the cage of norms: Dalit manual scavenging.

Redlining in St. Louis.

The economics of the Despotic Leviathan: Coffee workers in Guatemala.

Latin America’s caste system.

The Ikhwan in the Najd.

Saddam Hussein finds religion.

The zero-sum Red Queen: The towers of Bologna.

Moving into the corridor South Africa–style: Mandela giving the Rugby World Cup to Springbok captain Pienaar.

Moving into the corridor Lagos-style: Pay your taxes!

Moving into the corridor Bogotá-style: Mockus the supercitizen.

The international state system: Robert Mugabe, the WHO’s “goodwill ambassador.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We have accumulated a large number of intellectual debts in writing this book. The most important ones are those to our coauthors who have worked with us on various aspects of the research we build on in this book. We thank Maria Angélica Bautista, Jeanet Bentzen, Davide Cantoni, Isaías Chaves, Ali Cheema, Jonathan Conning, Giuseppe De Feo, Giacomo De Luca, Melissa Dell, Georgy Egorov, Leopoldo Fergusson, Juan Sebastián Galan, Francisco Gallego, Camilo García-Jimeno, Jacob Hariri, Tarek Hassan, Leander Heldring, Matthew Jackson, Simon Johnson, Asim Khwaja, Sara Lowes, Sebastián Mazzuca, Jacob Moscona, Suresh Naidu, Jeffrey Nugent, Nathan Nunn, Philip Osafo-Kwaako, Steve Pincus, Tristan Reed, Juan Diego Restrepo, Pascual Restrepo, Dario Romero, Pablo Querubín, Rafael SantosVillagran, Ahmed Tahoun, Davide Ticchi, Konstantin Sonin, Ragnar Torvik, Juan F. Vargas, Thierry Verdier, Andrea Vindigni, Sebastian Vollmer, Jon Weigel, Alex Wolitzky, and Pierre Yared for their creativity, hard work, and patience.

We would particularly like to thank Joel Mokyr, who organized a two-day book conference at the Center for Economic History at Northwestern University in March 2018. For over twenty years Joel has been an intellectual inspiration, academic role model, and source of immense professional support, and it’s hard to imagine what our careers would have been like without him. At the conference we received penetrating feedback from all of the participants: Karen Alter, Sandeep Baliga, Chris Blattman, Peter Boettke, Federica Carugati, Daniel Diermeier, Georgy Egorov, Tim Feddersen, Gary Feinman, Gillian Hadfield, Noel Johnson, Lynne Kiesling, Mark Koyama, Linda Nicholas, Debin Ma, Melanie Meng Xue, Suresh Naidu, John Nye, Pablo Querubín, Jared Rubin, Ken Shepsle, Konstantin Sonin, David Stasavage, John Wallis, and Bart Wilson. We are grateful to Bram van Besouw and Matti Mitrunen for taking notes at this conference and helping us keep track of the freewheeling discussion.

This is probably the moment to also mention the scholars who have influenced the trajectory of our research over the past two decades, particularly Lee Alston, Jean-Marie Baland, Robert Bates, Tim Besley, Jared Diamond, Robert Dixon, Richard Easterlin, Stanley Engerman, Jeffry Frieden, Steven Haber, Joe Henrich, Ian Morris, Douglass North, Josh Ober, Neil Parsons, Torsten Persson, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Kenneth Sokoloff, Guido Tabellini, Jan Vansina, Barry Weingast, and Fabrizio Zilibotti.

We received very useful comments on various chapters from Siwan Anderson, David Autor, Peter Diamond, Jon Gruber, Simon Johnson, Lakshmi Iyer, Ramzy Mardini, Mark Pryzyk, Gautam Rao, Cory Smith, David Yang, and Anand Swamy, and we are grateful for their time and erudition. Chris Ackerman and Cihat Tokgöz read the entire manuscript and provided extensive comments, suggestions, and advice.

We have presented versions of the ideas here in many different seminar settings over the past few years, including the Nemmers Lecture at Northwestern, the Munich Lectures, the Kuznets Lecture at Yale, the Richard Stone Lecture at Cambridge, the Sun Chen Lecture in Taipei, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Lecture at Toulouse, the Guillermo O’ Donnell Memorial Lecture at Notre Dame, the Linowes Lecture at the University of Illinois (Urbana–Champaign), the Oxford Development Studies Annual Lecture, the ABCDE Keynote Address at the World Bank, and the Annual Social Ontology Conference at Tufts. We received many useful comments and suggestions and would like particularly to thank Toke Aidt, Gabriel Leon, and Min-Jeng Lin.

Superb research assistance was provided by Tom Hao, Matt Lowe, Carlos Molina, Jacob Moscona, Frederick Papazyan, and Jose Ignacio Velarde Morales. Toby Greenberg has been invaluable as our photo editor. Alex Carr, Lauren Fahey, and Shelby Jamerson provided invaluable editorial suggestions and corrections.

We are also eternally grateful to our partners, Asu Ozdaglar and Maria Angélica Bautista, for their support, encouragement, and patience.

Last but not least, we are deeply grateful to our agent, Max Brockman, and our editors, Scott Moyers and Daniel Crewe, and the assistant editor at Penguin Press, Mia Council, for their commitment to this project and very useful suggestions. All remaining errors are of course ours.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

The main arguments in this book are related to many areas of research, and we cannot do justice to all these ideas in this brief essay. We thus focus on some of the most related research here and refer the reader to Acemoglu and Robinson (2016, 2019) for a discussion of the broader literature and our connections to and differences from it.

Most centrally, we build on our previous work on the importance of balance between state and society in Acemoglu (2005) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2016, 2017). We also build on a large literature on the role of institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001, 2002, 2005a, 2005b; Acemoglu, Gallego, and Robinson, 2014; North, Wallis, and Weingast, 2011; Besley and Pearson, 2011; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012).

Our book is centrally about the development of state capacity, which has been studied by many social scientists. We sharply differ from the modal emphasis in this literature, which is on the importance of the state setting up its control over society and over violence as a precursor to the development of democratic institutions, civil society, and political rights (e.g., Huntington, 1968; Tilly, 1992; Fukuyama, 2011, 2014; and also Besley and Persson, 2011). Rather, we argue and document that society’s mobilization and contestation of power is critical for the development of democratic and participatory institutions and in fact a capable state. This perspective in turn builds on Acemoglu and Robinson (2000, 2006) as well as Therborn (1977) and Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992). But our argument here is much broader because it brings in the organization of society and associations (inspired by Tocqueville, 2002, and Dahl, 1970); because it stresses the role of norms in this power struggle (partly borrowing from the anthropological literature, such as Bohannan, 1958, as well as Scott, 2010); because, inspired by Migdal (1988, 2001), it recognizes that “weak states” will result when these norms are too strong and prevent the emergence of political hierarchy and autonomous state institutions; and because it also incorporates how the agenda over which political contestation takes place changes, potentially strengthening society, as state institutions develop (as proposed by Tilly, 1995, and Acemoglu, Robinson, and Torvik, 2016).

Finally, our overall approach is also inspired by several important academic works. These include: Mann’s (1986) definition of the despotic power of the state (similar to ours as the state not being accountable to society); Moore’s (1966) approach to linking the origins of different political regimes and types of state-society relations to historical economic and political circumstances, such as presence or absence of labor coercion, and the resulting social coalition; North and Thomas’s (1973) thesis about the “rise of the West”; Engerman and Sokoloff’s (2011) work on the historical roots of comparative development in the Americas; Pincus’s (2011) analysis of the Glorious Revolution; Bates’s (1981) theory of the comparative political economy in Africa; Flannery and Marcus’s (2014) synthesis of archaeological and ethnographic evidence and their account of the emergence of complex society; and Brenner’s (1976) emphasis on the role of power relations between landowners and peasants in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

PREFACE

The quotations from John Locke can be found in Locke (2003, 101–2, 124).

The testimonies from Syria are all from Pearlman (2017, 175, 178, 213).

The excerpts from Gilgamesh are taken from Mitchell (2004, 69–70, 72–74).

The 2018 UAE Gender Equality Awards, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jan/28/uae-mocked-for-gender-equality-awards-won-entirely-by-men.

See Holton (2003) for the women’s suffrage movement in Britain and the empowerment of women and the facts we use.

CHAPTER 1. HOW DOES HISTORY END?

The contrasting arguments made by Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kaplan, and Yuval Noah Harari are presented in Fukuyama (1989), Kaplan (1994), and Harari (2018). We quote from Fukuyama (1989, 3), and Kaplan (1994, 46).

The text of the 2005 Constitution of the DRC can be found at http://www.parliament.am/library/sahmanadrutyunner/kongo.pdf.

A useful overview of the rebel groups of the Eastern DRC is provided by the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-20586792.

On Congo as rape capital of the world, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8650112.stm.

Kaplan’s description of Lagos is from Kaplan (1994, 52).

The quotes from Wole Soyinka are from Soyinka (2006, 348, 351–54, 356–57).

The description of bodies under the bridge is from Cunliffe-Jones (2010, 23).

For Lagos disappearing under rubbish, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/281895.stm.

The quotes from Philip Pettit come from Pettit (1999, 4–5), and see also the development of his ideas in Pettit (2014).

The seminal paper on the violence of hunter-gatherer societies is Ember (1978); we refer here to the work of Keeley (1996) and Pinker (2011); see specifically the data in Pinker’s Figure 2-3 (53). On the homicide rates of the Gebusi, see Knauft (1987).

All quotes from Hobbes are directly from Hobbes (1996, Chapters 13, 17–19: “continual feare,” 89; “from hence it comes to passe,” 87; “In such condition,” 89; “men live without” and “to submit their Wills,” 120).

On Eichmann we quote Arendt (1976, 44–45).

Heidegger is quoted from Pattison (2000, 33–34).

The stories about the Great Leap Forward come from Jisheng (2012, 4–5, 18, 21, 24–25). For the story of Luo Hongshan, see Chinese Human Rights Defenders (2009); we quote from p. 5. Freedom House (2015) reports on the “black jails” and the “community corrections system.” The “Four Clean-ups” is discussed at https://chinamediaproject.org/2013/10/17/xi-jinping-playing-with-fire/.

Cruickshank from Cruickshank (1853, 31); Bonnat from Wilks (1975, 667).

Rattray is quoted from Rattray (1929, 33). The stories of Goi and Bwanikwa are from Campbell (1933, Chapters 18 and 19). Spilsbury is quoted from Howard (2003, 272). Miers and Kopytoff, eds. (1977), is an important collection on the nature of “freedom” in precolonial Africa.

Ginsburg (2011) provides an introduction and analysis of the Pashtunwali from a legal point of view. Our quote is taken from the translated Pashtunwali at http://khyber.org/.

Facts about the early history of Wyoming are from Larson (1990); we quote from pp. 42–47, 233, 275. A good treatment of the Johnson County Range War is Johnson (2008).

CHAPTER 2. THE RED QUEEN

There are many superb treatments of classical Greek history and the development of Athenian institutions that are relevant for this chapter. We build particularly on Ober (2015a), Morris (2010), Hall (2013), Osborne (2009), Powell (2016), and Rhodes (2011). On political institutions, see in particular the essays in Brock and Hodkinson, eds. (2001), and in Robinson (2011).

See Finley (1954) for a characterization of Dark Age Greek society. Plutarch (1914), “Theseus” and “Solon,” is the source for the life of Theseus and Solon; our quotes come from the relevant chapters. The constitutions of Athens are listed and analyzed in Aristotle (1996), and this book is an invaluable source for the whole chapter, for example, on the nature of the state built by Cleisthenes. All our Aristotle quotes are from it. On what remains of Solon’s laws, see Leão and Rhodes (2016), Draco’s homicide law is reproduced on p. 20. Hall (2013) is excellent on the bureaucratized nature of Solon’s reforms. See Osborne (2009) on Solon’s land reforms. Important essays on Athenian political development are Morris (1996) and Ober (2005). Forsdyke (2005, 2012) analyzes Greek norms and their institutionalization. On the fiscal institutions developed by Cleisthenes, see Ober (2015b), Van Wees (2013), and Fawcett (2016). On how laws were enforced in Athens, see Lanni (2016) and Gottesman (2014).

Gjeçov (1989) collected the Kanun. We quote from pp. 162 and 172 of this book.

The U.S. Bill of Rights is online at https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say.

The Federalist Papers are all available on the Internet at https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers.

Madison is quoted from Federalist no. 51. Our discussion of the Constitution follows Holton (2008), Breen (2011), and Meier (2011). Madison’s “divide and rule” letter is quoted from Holton (2008, 207). Jefferson is quoted from Jefferson (1904, 360–62). Tocqueville is quoted from Tocqueville (2002, Vol. 1, Part 2, Chapter 4, and Vol. 2, Part 2, Chapter 5).

On the U.S. Civil War, see McPherson (2003). On the development of the economy and politics of the U.S. South after the Civil War, see Woodward (1955) and Wright (1986).

Alice’s race against the Red Queen is from Carroll (1871, 28–30).

The classic ethnographic survey of the Tiv is Bohannan and Bohannan (1953). See Lugard (1922) for the most famous statement of his philosophy of indirect rule, and see Perham (1960) for a comprehensive biography. See Curtin (1995) on the incidence of stateless societies in West Africa at the time of European colonial conquest and Osafo-Kwaako and Robinson (2013) for some basic correlates. The Lugard quote is from Afigbo (1967, 694), and Afigbo (1972) is the seminal study of the warrant chiefs. Quotes from Bohannan are from Bohannan (1958, 3, 11). Akiga’s observation is from Akiga (1939, 264).

The concept of illegibility is from Scott (2010). A good overview of communalism in Lebanon is Cammett (2014). On the communal affiliations of Beirut football teams, see Reiche (2011). For prize tweets on the Lebanese parliament, see https://www.beirut.com/l/49413.

On the frequency of parliamentary meetings, see https://www.yahoo.com/news/lebanons-political-system-sinks-nation-debt-070626499—finance.html, which also quotes Ghassan Moukheiber. The Facebook post from the YouStink movement can be found at https://www.facebook.com/tol3etre7etkom/posts/1631214497140665?fref=nf&pnref=story. On the YouStink movement, see https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/25/theres-something-rotten-in-lebanon-trash-you-stink.

On Route 66 and sundown towns, see Candacy Taylor (2016), “The Roots of Route 66,” at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-roots-of-route-66/506255/.

On Tiananmen Square, see Lim (2014). On Liu Xiabo’s life, see Jie (2015). On the Weiquan movement, see Pils (2014). The story of Zhao Hua is from Dan Levin (2012), “A Chinese Education, for a Price,” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/asia/in-china-schools-a-culture-of-bribery-spreads.html.

Pei (2016) contains detailed information about the sale of offices.

On uncertainty and possible exaggeration about Chinese GDP growth, see https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/19/what-is-chinas-actual-gdp-experts-weighin.html, and also https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/chinas-economic-data-an-accurate-reflection-or-just-smoke-and-mirrors for an overview. For a survey of business economists on the accuracy of China’s GDP statistics, see https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-survey-chinas-growth-statements-make-u-s-economists-skeptical-1441980001. On Li Keqiang’s statement on unreliability of Chinese GDP statistics, see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-wikileaks/chinas-gdp-is-man-made-unreliable-top-leader-idUSTRE6B527D20101206.

CHAPTER 3. WILL TO POWER

There is a vast scholarly literature about the life of Muhammad and Islam. Our treatment of his life follows Watt (1953, 1956), published together in an abridged version in Watt (1961). There are many very good treatments of this period of history, for example Hourani (2010), Lapidus (2014), and Kennedy (2015). The Constitution of Medina is quoted from Watt (1961, 94).

On the notion of an “edge,” see Flannery (1999). See Flannery and Marcus (2014) for a development of the idea.

Our description of the battle of Isandlwana comes from Smith-Dorrien (1925, Chapter 1, “The Zulu War”). On the rise of the Zulu state see Eldredge (2014), Wright and Hamilton (1989), and Morris (1998). We quote from Eldredge (2014, 7, 77). Henry Flynn is quoted from Flynn (1986, 71). A seminal analysis of the Zulu state is due to Gluckman (1940, 1960). Ritter (1985) records the scene of Shaka with the witch doctors in Chapter 10.

The study of state formation in the Hawaiian Islands starts with the seminal work of Kirch (2010, 2012), which influenced our discussion. Kamakau (1992) is essential, and see in particular his discussion of Liholiho’s abolition of the eating taboo. Our quote from David Malo is from his book (1987, 60–61). Breaking of taboos is discussed in Kamakau (1992). Handy, “in its fundamental,” is quoted from Kuykendall (1965, 8); Handy (“Mana was exhibited”) and Kepelino are quoted from Kirch (2010, 38, 40–41). Kuykendall (1965, 68) is the source for the contemporary description of Liholiho breaking taboo.

On Georgian history and political economy, see Wheatley (2005) and Christopher (2004). Our approach to the rise of Shevardnadze follows Driscoll (2015).

CHAPTER 4. ECONOMICS OUTSIDE THE CORRIDOR

Colson is quoted from Colson (1974, Chapter 3). On the clan system of the Plateau Tonga, see Colson (1962).

Turner (2007) provides an overview of the conflict in the Congo, and the description of the attack on Nyabiondo comes from pp. 135–38 of his book.

On begging and poverty among the Tonga, see Colson (1967). Our quote comes from pp. 53–56.

Bohannan and Bohannan (1968) is the seminal treatment of how the Tiv organized their economy; we quote from Chapter 16. Akiga’s story is published as Akiga (1939).

The sources cited in the previous chapter give a good overview of the basic political history after the rise of the Islamic state. We cite from Ibn Khaldun (2015) and Al-Muqaddasi (1994). See Watson (1983) on innovation in agriculture. On trade in the Islamic empires, see Shatzmiller (2009) and Michalopoulos, Naghavi, and Prarolo (2018). On the economy of the Middle East, see Rodinson (2007), Kuran (2012), Blaydes and Chaney (2013), Pamuk (2014), Özmucur and Pamuk (2002), and Pamuk (2006). Pamuk (2006) presents historical data on real wages illustrating that by the late medieval period real living standards were already significantly lower in the Middle East than in Western Europe.

The 1978 constitutional clause that refers to the splintered paddle is available here: http://lrbhawaii.org/con/conart9.html.

Our discussion of despotic growth in Hawaii uses the same sources as in the previous chapter, especially again the work of Patrick Kirch, who also uses the metaphor of a “shark going inland.” Fornander is quoted from Kirch (2010, 41). See Kamakau (1992) on Kamehameha’s state building. See Kirch and Sahlins (1992) on the sandalwood trade, and the contemporary visitor; Mathison and Ely are quoted from Kirch and Sahlins (1992, Chapters 3 and 4).

“The Land of Zululand” is from Eldredge (2014, 233). The quote from Gluckman is from Gluckman (1960), cited in the previous chapter.

The analysis of economic growth in Georgia is based on the same sources as in the previous chapter.

CHAPTER 5. ALLEGORY OF GOOD GOVERNMENT

There is a large scholarly literature on the Sienese frescoes and their political meaning and the Italian communes more generally. Rubinstein (1958) and Skinner (1986, 1999) are seminal analyses of the frescoes. Wickham (2015) provides a lucid recent introduction to the communes and their origins. Our discussion of Milanese political names is drawn from his book. Waley and Dean (2013) is a very useful introduction to the Italian communes, as is the more demanding Jones (1997). Bowsky (1981) and Waley (1991) provide detailed discussions of Sienese institutions.

Bishop Otto is quoted from Geary, ed. (2015, 537).

The oath of the Nine is from Waley (1991, Chapter 3).

Benjamin of Tudela is quoted from Waley and Dean (2013, 11).

The discussion of Milanese names comes from Wickham (2015, Chapter 2).

For the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, see Thompson (2012). On the Champagne fairs, see Edwards and Ogilvie (2012).

On the medieval commercial revolution, see Lopez (1976) and Epstein (2009). Mokyr (1990) and Gies and Gies (1994) are excellent overviews of the development of medieval technology. Our data on the populations of the thirty largest cities are from DeLong and Shleifer (1993). See Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002) for a defense and use of historical urbanization data as a proxy for economic development. The data on urbanization come from Bosker, Buringh, and van Zanden (2013), and see Buringh and van Zanden (2009) on book production and literacy. See Goldthwaite (2009) for data on Florence, and Fratianni and Spinelli (2006) and Pezzlo (2014) for broader economic and financial trends. Mueller (1997) has a detailed discussion of the nature of bills of exchange.

The life of Francesco di Marco Datini is recorded in Origo (1957), from which we quoted the story of how Datini got rich in the Canary Islands (3–4). The significance of the life of Saint Godric as a representative story of the social origins of merchants was emphasized by Pirenne (1952); here we quote from the biography of Godric written by his contemporary Reginald of Durham (1918).

Our interpretation of the Zapotec state draws heavily from the research of Richard Blanton, Gary Feinman, and Linda Nicholas; see in particular Blanton, Feinman, Kowalewski, and Nicholas (1999) and Blanton, Kowalewski, Feinman, and Finsten (1993). Blanton and Fargher (2008) extend the arguments about the bottom-up construction of many premodern polities. The story about tortillas is from Flannery and Marcus (1996), who present a slightly different and less consensual account of the formation of the Zapotec state.

CHAPTER 6. THE EUROPEAN SCISSORS

Our view of the history of Europe has been influenced by Crone (2003) and by Hirst’s (2009) brilliant book, which emphasizes the unique confluence of different factors in the early Middle Ages. We also heavily rely on Wickham’s (2016) analysis of the role of assembly politics. See also Reuter (2001), Barnwell and Mostert, eds. (2003), Pantos and Semple, eds. (2004), and especially Wickham (2009, 2017). On the “communal revolution,” see Kümin (2013) for an overview and the influential writings of Blickel (1989, 1998).

Gregory of Tours (1974) is the basic source for the early Franks, and from it we draw the description of Clovis’s coronation and the scene of the threatened hair cutting (123, 140, 154, 180–81). Murray (1983) and Todd (2004) discuss what we know of the organization of early German society. Wood (1994) provides an overview of Merovingian history. Hincmar of Reims’s relevant writings are reproduced in Hincmar of Reims (1980). We quote his description of an assembly (222, 226). Tacitus’s description of German assemblies is from Tacitus (1970, 107–112).

Eich (2015) provides an overview of the development of the Roman bureaucracy. See also Jones (1964) and Kelly (2005), who discusses the writing of John Lydus; see Chapter 1.

The Salic Law is quoted from Yale’s Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/salic.asp. See also Drew (1991, 59, 79–80, 82–83). Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean (2011) is a comprehensive overview of Carolingian history; see also Nelson (2003). There is a great deal of academic controversy about the exact nature of the relationship between the Roman and Frankish state; see Wallace-Hadrill (1971, 1982), Geary (1988), James (1988), Murray (1988), Wolfram (2005), and Wickham (2009, 2016).

The collapse of Roman York is described in Fleming (2010). See also her description of post-Roman York on p. 28. On the role of assembly politics in Anglo-Saxon Britain, see Roach (2013, 2017) and Maddicott (2012), whose book profoundly influenced our interpretation of English political history. Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s observations are reproduced in Byrhtferth of Ramsey (2009); we quote from pp. 73, 105, and 107. Bede (1991) is quoted from p. 281. There are many fine overviews of Anglo-Saxon history; our account rests on Stafford (1989) and Williams (1999). Ælfric of Eynsham is quoted from William (2003, 17).

Early English legal codes are translated and reprinted in Attenborough, ed. (1922), and its sequel Robertson, ed. (1925). We quote from Attenborough (1922, 62–93). Hudson (2018) is very good on early English law, and his book also importantly influenced our interpretation.

There are many excellent books on 1066 and the Norman invasion; see, for example, Barlow (1999). On English feudalism, see Crick and van Houts, eds. (2011), and in particular the chapter of Stephen Baxter.

We quote from Bloch (1964, 141, and Chapters 9 and 10).

For the Assize of Clarendon, see http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/assizecl.asp.

Richard FitzNigel is quoted from Hudson (2018, 202).

The text of the Magna Carta is reproduced by Yale’s Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/magframe.asp. See also Holt (2015).

Our interpretation and evidence on state formation in early modern England heavily builds on Braddick (2000), Hindle (2000), and Pincus (2011). See also Blockmans, Holenstein, and Mathieu, eds. (2009). Davison, Hitchcock, Keirn, and Shoemaker, eds. (1992), discuss the imagery of the grumbling hive. The quote is from Mandeville (1989), whose poem is readily available on the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fable_of_the_Bees#The_poem.

See Hindle (1999) on Swallowfield. He reproduces the resolutions in full. The legal cases we reproduce are from Herrup (1989, 75–76; see Chapter 4). Goldie (2001) emphasizes the importance of the number of officeholders in eighteenth-century Britain; our numbers come from his article.

On the origins of European parliaments, see Bisson (2009) as well as Bisson (1964) for Languedoc, and his edited volume of readings (1973). See also Marongiu (1968), Myers (1975), and Graves (2001) for overviews of the history of European parliamentary institutions and the chapters in Helle (2008) on Scandinavia. See Kümin and Würgler (1997) for the analyses of Hesse. See also Guenée (1985) and Watts (2009).

Our discussion of Icelandic history draws on Karlson (2000) and the chapters of Helle (2008); see Miller (1997) on the persistence of the feud.

Angold (1997) and Treadgold (1997) provide overviews of the relevant Byzantine political history. Procopius is quoted from Procopius (2007). Lopez (1951) is the source for the “dollar of the Middle Ages.” Laiou and Morrisson (2007) provide a very useful overview of relevant economic history.

Our discussion of the Red Queen effect in eighteenth-century Britain follows Tilly (1995), and all quotes are from Chapter 1. Brewer (1989) is the seminal study of the British state in the eighteenth century.

Lawes quoted from Edgar (2005). Blackstone quoted from Montgomery (2006, 13).

Caroline Norton’s “The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of ‘Custody of Infants,’ Considered,” is at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008723154. Her letter to the Queen is from http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/norton/alttq/alttq.html. We also quote from Wollstonecraft (2009, 103, 107) and Mill (1869, Chapter 1).

The material on the British Industrial Revolution draws from Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). Mokyr (1990) provides an excellent overview of the technological breakthroughs during the Industrial Revolution. On longitude all our quotes come from Sobel (2007, Chapters 3, 5, 7).

CHAPTER 7. MANDATE OF HEAVEN

There are many excellent surveys of Chinese history in English; the most definitive is the multivolume Cambridge History of China, and also very useful is the six-volume Harvard University Press history. Spence (2012) is superb for the early modern and modern periods. Dardess (2010) is a nice terse overview of much political history. See Mote (2000) for an exhaustive study of the imperial state. Von Glahn (2016) is a unique recent overview of the economic history of China up until the collapse of the imperial state and also includes much of the relevant political and social history.

Quotes from Confucius come from Confucius (2003, 8, 193). Mengzi is quoted from Mengzi (2008). The Xunzi is quoted from Xunzi (2016).

Ji Liang is quoted from Pines (2009, 191). Zichan is quoted from Pines (2009, 195).

Our interpretation of early Chinese state building and its long legacy follows Pines (2009, 2012); see also his translation of the book of Lord Shang (Shang Yang, 2017); we quote from pp. 79, 178, 218, 229–30, 233. Our interpretation is also influenced by Lewis’s trilogy (2011, 2012a, 2012b). See Lewis (2000) for the comparison between Greek city-states and the Chinese polities of the Spring and Autumn periods. Bodde and Morris (1967) is an important volume on Chinese law that emphasizes the fusion of legalist and Confucian elements and the absence of the rule of law, and see also Huang (1998) for seminal work on how the Qing legal system functioned and its legacy today in China. Perry (2008) is a very interesting interpretation of the Chinese “social contract” and its endurance over time, even into the Communist period. Von Glahn (2016) tracks the successive attempts to reimpose the well-field system. On T’an-ch’eng County during the Ming, see Spence (1978, 6–7). On the Ming sea ban, see Dreyer (2006). The Ming-Qing transition is analyzed by Farmer (1995) and Wakeman (1986). See Kuhn (1990) on measures against people who refused to adopt the Manchu hairstyle and the Chinese state’s reaction to the “soul stealers.”

The passage from Wang Xiuchu is from Struve (1998, 28–48); see also the discussion in Rowe (2009). Extracts of Wu Jingzi’s novel The Scholars are reproduced in Chen, Cheng, Lestz, and Spence (2014, 54–63), which also reproduces the crimes and wealth of Heshen. Zelin (1984), von Glahn (2016), and Rowe (2009) emphasize how the fiscal deterioration of the Qing state undermined its ability to provide public goods such as infrastructure. Rowe (2009, Chapter 6) details the crimes of Heshen.

Our discussion of Hankou comes from Rowe (1984, 1989), heavily influenced by the critique of Wakeman (1993); see also Wakeman (1998).

The seminal work on Chinese lineages is Freedman (1966, 1971), and we quote from 1966 (Chapter 3, and see pp. 80–82). See also Beattie (2009) and Faure (2007) on the lineages of southern China, and Watson (1982).

The facts about the comparative economic growth of China are not in dispute among economic historians. The notion of the “reversal of fortune” comes from Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002). Though Wong (1997) and Pomeranz (2001) argued that in fact China, or at least the most developed parts of it such as the Yangtze River valley, had standards of living in the eighteenth century similar to the most developed parts of Western Europe, subsequent research has not supported their claims. Broadberry, Guan, and Li (2017) provide a synthesis of work on historical measures of average living standards suggesting that while Song China had the highest levels of income per capita in the world in the medieval period, they subsequently stagnated, with fluctuations, for example, falls during the Ming and late Qing. In their data, income per capita in China was about one-third of that in the Netherlands in 1800 and only 30 percent of the British figure. Even the focus on the Yangtze as the relative comparison doesn’t change the big picture, with Bozhong and van Zanden (2012) finding average living standards there to be about half of the contemporary Dutch level in the 1820s. Other evidence corroborates these facts, for example Allen, Bassino, Ma, Moll-Murata, and van Zanden (2011) show real wages were significantly lower in urban China. These facts make Wong and Pomeranz’s broader arguments less compelling because they proposed that what created the economic divergence between Western Europe and China was the favorable location of coal in Europe and the accessibility of land in European colonies. But the evidence does not support the presence of the Malthusian trap in China. For example, there were large increases in population during the Tang-Song transition. These arguments are problematical in many other ways. Early industrialization in Britain, for example, used waterpower, not coal power. Also the mechanisms linking abundant colonial land to economic growth are not clear.

Our interpretation of the slow growth of China after the Song dynasty is partly conventional (e.g., on the antidevelopmental policies of the Ming, or the early Qing, see Liu, 2015, and von Glahn, 2016), and is similar to the work of Faure (2006) and Brandt, Ma, and Rawski (2014). See Morse (1920) for the facts we cite about the weakness of public good provision. These works recognize the presence and importance of markets in early modern China but also present copious evidence for politically motivated impediments to economic growth. We also draw on material from Hamilton (2006), and see also Brenner and Isett (2002). This work follows in the tradition of earlier scholars such as Wright (1957). Our example of the reluctance to build railways comes from Wang (2015). The academic literature of the long-run development of China started with the work of Max Weber, who focused on the cultural differences with Europe, and that of Karl Marx, who developed the notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” (see Brook, ed., 1989, for perspectives on this idea). Subsequently China was characterized as “despotic,” e.g., by Wittfogel (1957), a term that historians had no problem using to describe the imperial state even recently (e.g., Mote, 2000; Liu, 2015).

A lot of work on the absence of capitalism in China focuses on the salt merchants. Our examples of how they transitioned into government service come from Ho (1954), and see also Hung (2016) for the Pan family. Other work on the salt merchants is Zelin (2005).

The Wenzhou model is discussed by Liu (1992), and the quote “Collectivization had been turned” is from p. 698.

Huang (2008) gives the examples of the Township Village Enterprises and the Xiushui market in Beijing. For evidence about rural discontent and the land tax, see O’Brien and Li (2006), and O’Brien (2008). On the reluctance of the Communist Party to admit capitalists, see Nee and Opper (2012).

On modernization theory, see Lipset (1959). On the contrary evidence to this, showing that countries that become richer or “modernized” are not automatically becoming democratic, see Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008, 2009).

“Leave no dark corner” is from Carney (2018). See Human Rights Watch (2018) on the repression of the Uighurs.

CHAPTER 8. BROKEN RED QUEEN

The story of Manoj and Babli comes from Dogra (2013). There is a large literature discussing the meaning, history, and importance of caste in India. Seminal general works include Hutton (1961), Dumont (1980), and Smith (1994). Very useful are the large number of ethnographic village studies that give a feel for how caste works in reality, for example Lewis (1965), Srinivas (1976), Parry (1979), and Béteille (2012), and how it influences politics. The modern academic literature tends to stress the large impact that colonialism had on the caste system (e.g., Bayly, 2001, Dirks, 2001, and Chatterjee, 2004). Though this is plausible, the system is indisputably ancient, and it is this feature that is more important for our analysis. There is a small economics literature examining the economic effects of caste that is divided between arguing that in an otherwise imperfect world with many market failures and problems, caste identity can provide useful benefits, such as facilitating insurance and contract enforcement (e.g., Munshi, 2017), and arguing instead that caste is a potent source of inefficiency in economic relations (e.g., Hoff, 2016). Our view is much closer to the latter; see for instance the work of Edmonds and Sharma (2006), Anderson (2011), Hoff, Kshetramade, and Fehr (2011), and Anderson, Francois, and Kotwal (2015), but goes beyond these interpretations in emphasizing the implications of caste for politics and the inability of society to make the state accountable and responsive.

Kautilya is quoted from Kautilya (1987, Chapter I, section ii). On the three orders of European society, see Duby (1982), and Britnell’s analysis is presented in Britnell (1992).

Ambedkar’s quote “a multi-storyed tower” is from Roy (2014). Ambedkar’s other quotes are from Ambedkar (2014). The Dalit worker interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Ahmedabad is quoted from Human Rights Watch (1999, 1).

All the quotes from Béteille (2012) are from Chapter 5. See Srinivas (1994) for his essays on the notion of “dominant castes.” On Thillai Govindan, see Matthai (1915, 35–37), Human Rights Watch (1999, 31–32); other quotes come from the same Human Rights Watch report (88, 93, 98, 114).

Gorringe (2005, 2017) is an excellent overview and analysis of the contemporary attempts by Dalits to exercise political power in Tamil Nadu. For Blunt’s analysis, see Blunt (1931). The data are from Chapter 12; see in particular the Appendix, pp. 247–52. On the persistence of caste and occupation to today, see Deshpande (2011), who makes a strong argument for the enduring economic relevance of caste. See Shah, Mander, Thorat, Deshpande, and Baviskar (2006) on the persistence of untouchability.

The description of the Jajmani system in Karimpur is from Wiser (1936) and the two quotes from Wiser and Wiser (2000) are from pp. 18–19 and 53. Dumont (1980, 97–102) gives a nice overview of the Jajmani system, including a useful summary of Wiser’s book.

There are many good general overviews and narratives of ancient and medieval Indian history and we have relied on Thapar (2002) and Singh (2009). There is nevertheless quite a bit of disagreement among scholars over how to interpret many of the ancient institutions. For example, see the controversy over what happened at the assembly known as the vidatha (see Singh, 2009, 188). On the ancient republics, see Sharma (1968) and in particular Sharma (2005). The Atharva Veda is quoted from Sharma (2005, 110). For different wergeld amounts and the legal system more generally, see Sharma (2005, 245). The discussion of the Licchavi state comes from Sharma (1968, 85–135), and see also Jah (1970), who differs in some interpretations. For instance, Jah argues that Licchavis had universal male suffrage; on this we follow Sharma, whose views seem to be closer to the scholarly consensus. See Kautilya on gana-sanghas (1987). The Digha Nikaya is quoted from Sharma (2005, 64–65). Kautilya on the origins of kings is from Kautilya (1987). Important works on the origins of states and monarchies in northern Indian are Thapar (1999) and Roy (1994), who particularly emphasizes the connection to the varna system, as does Sharma (2005).

Asoka’s sixth Rock Edict is quoted from Hultzsch (1925, 34–35). The discussion of the Chauhans is from Thapar (2002, 451).

Basic works on southern Indian society and the political system in the medieval and early modern period are Subbarayalu (1974, 2012), Stein (1980, 1990), Veluhat (1993), Heitzman (1997), and Shastri (1997). Stein proposed the notion of a “segmentary state” as a model for state-society relations in the south of India and his ideas and evidence have heavily influenced our own interpretation of the relevant history. The description of the election and local political institutions comes from Thapar (2002, 375–77) but is widely quoted. The two inscriptions concerning the activities of assemblies in canal building are quoted from Heitzman (1997, 52). Subbarayalu (1974) provides an exhaustive analysis of nadus based on inscriptions and cites the composition of all the nadus in the Chola Mandalam.

There is a large, older literature about the extent to which village assemblies predominated in India historically. Nobody doubts the evidence about the gana-sanghas, or Tamil Nadu, especially in the Chola era. Elsewhere there is a lot of debate. Some scholars have argued that village assemblies and many of the institutions were prevalent everywhere in India, e.g., Mookerji (1920), Majumdar (1922), and Malaviya (1956). Others, like Altekar (1927) argue that they were really restricted to the south, though he includes Karnataka as well as Tamil Nadu (see Dikshit, 1964, for corroborating evidence from Karnataka). He argues that elsewhere in western India, such assemblies were less institutionalized and much more informal. Wade (1988) is useful on the enormous heterogeneity on the extent of participation at the local level in India. Mathur (2013) is an accessible overview of panchayats with an emphasis on their postindependence functioning.

A useful introduction to the organization of the Mughal Empire is Richards (1993); Chapters 3 and 4 of that book provide a good introduction to the bureaucratic organization of the state and its interaction with rural society. Habib (1999) is authoritative on the organization of the rural economy in the Mughal period; see Chapter 4 on village communities and Chapter 5 on zamindars.

The Fifth Report from the Select Committee is quoted from the original (1812, 85). Metcalfe is quoted from Dutt (1916, 267–68). The quotes from Matthai’s book (1915) come from pp. 18, 20, with the Report of the Indian Famine Commission also quoted there, p. 77.

Our analysis of the politics of state capacity in Bihar has been heavily influenced by the study of Mathew and Moore (2011). Our facts about underspending, vacancies, and Bihar politics come from their paper. The World Bank is quoted from World Bank (2005). The government of Bihar is quoted from Mathew and Moore (2011, 17). There are several useful biographies of Lalu Yadav, see particularly Thakur (2006). Witsoe (2013) is a superb analysis of the antidevelopmental politics of Lalu Yadav. See Kremer, Chaudhury, Rogers, Muralidharan, and Hammer (2005) for the data on teacher absenteeism. The notion that state and society in India coexist without really interacting is implicit in much literature, e.g., Thapar (2002), and Mookerji (1920) makes a clear statement of this thesis.

CHAPTER 9. DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

This chapter is based on the theoretical ideas developed in Acemoglu and Robinson (2017).

Machiavelli is quoted from The Prince (2005, 43). The Voltaire quote about Prussia is often used, but its original source is unclear. Montenegro quotes are from Djilas (1958, 3–4).

The most famous statement of Tilly’s ideas on the relation between warfare and the state is Tilly (1992). See also the essays in Tilly, ed. (1975). The notion that interstate warfare drove state formation originally comes from Hintze (1975), and Roberts (1956) developed the notion of the military revolution. This idea is extensively discussed in the recent work of economists Besley and Persson (2011) and Gennaioli and Voth (2015). See Pincus and Robinson (2012, 2016) for a different view on the British case.

On Swiss history, see Church and Head (2013) and Steinberg (2016). Sablonier (2015) is also an excellent relevant overview. More specific academic works focused on the origins of Swiss political institutions include Blickell (1992), Marchal (2006), and Morerod and Favrod (2014). The Federal Charter of 1291 in English can be found at https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/federal-council/history-of-the-federal-council/federal-charter-of-1291.html. See Clark (2009) for an overview of relevant Prussian history, and Ertman (1997) is very useful on Prussian state building. Rosenberg (1958) is the classic treatment in English. Carsten (1959) and Asch (1988) focus on how the development of the state undermined the power of representative institutions in Germany. See Blanning (2016) for a recent superb biography of Frederick the Great; our quotes from Georg Wilhelm and Frederick William I are taken from there, as is the quote from Elliot.

Roberts (2007) provides an overview of the relevant history of Montenegro. The books of Djilas (1958, 1966) are essential reading, and we quote from these works. Boehm’s main study of feuding is in his 1986 book; see also his 1982 book. We quote from 1986, p. 182. Peter I’s legal code is quoted from Durham (1928, 78–88), and “Of old sat freedom” is from Durham (1909, 1). Braudel is quoted from Braudel (1996, 39). Marmont is quoted from Roberts (2007, 174).

“Continued attempts” is quoted from Simić (1967, 87). “It was a clash” and “The imposition” are from Djilas (1966, 107, 115).

Havel’s quote is from Havel (1985, 11).

Our treatment of the post-Soviet divergence is influenced by Easter (2012). Kitschelt (2003) provides a very interesting interpretation. Castle and Taras (2002) and Ost (2006) are excellent on the politics of the Polish transition, as is Treisman (2011) on the recent history of Russia. Urban, Igrunov, and Mitrokhin (1997) discuss the failure of a popular politics to emerge in Russia. See Freeland (2000) and Hoffman (2002) for overviews and for the rise of the Russian oligarchs. Notable criticism of Russia’s privatization came from Black, Kraakman, and Tarassova (2000) and Goldman (2003). The quotation from Bertolt Brecht is from his 1953 poem “The Solution,” https://mronline.org/2006/08/14/brecht140806-html/.

Alexander Litvinenko’s letter, from which we quote, is available here: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-418652/Why-I-believe-Putin-wanted-dead-.html.

See Driscoll (2015) on the Tajik civil war. See also Collins (2006) for the importance of clans in understanding the politics of Central Asia. Saodot Olimova is quoted from her book. We also quote from Gretsky (1995).

We quote extensively from Menchú’s (1984) harrowing book.

Good overviews of the relevant history of Central America are Dunkerly (1988), Woodward (1991), and Gudmundson and Lindo-Fuentes (1995). Wortman (1982) is good on the transition from colonial rule. Williams, (1994), Paige (1997), Yashar (1997), Mahoney (2001), and Holden (2004) all give excellent political economy histories of the relevant period, and our numbers of army size and of teachers in Costa Rica are from the latter book. Gudmundson (1986, 1997) first documented that coffee smallholding was a consequence of nineteenth-century policy, rather than a colonial legacy. Cardoso (1977) is an influential essay on the Costa Rican coffee economy. Sarmiento is quoted from Dym (2006), who emphasizes the importance of towns as political players in Central America. See Karnes (1961) on the political economy of this diversity. Data on coffee prices, exports, and trade volumes are from Clarence-Smith, Gervase, and Topik, eds. (2006). McCreery (1994) is the definitive work on labor coercion in Guatemala in the context of the coffee economy. See Pascali (2017) for econometric evidence consistent with our hypothesis of the divergence between Guatemala and Costa Rica.

Sarmiento is quoted from Dym (2006, xviii).

Woodward on Carrera is from Woodward (2008, 254).

CHAPTER 10. WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH FERGUSON?

Details of the behavior of the Ferguson Police Department are from the Department of Justice (2015) report. BBC (2017) reports the findings on post-traumatic stress disorder in Atlanta. Our treatment of the inapplicability of the Bill of Rights to the states follows the seminal study of Gerstle (2015), from which we took the quote from Associate Justice Field (p. 78). Ansolabehere and Snyder (2008) is an important book about the political consequences of the Warren Court decision. Amar (2000) is good on the Bill of Rights more generally, and see McDonald (2000) on states’ rights. There is a great deal of important research by historians, sociologists, and political scientists on the historical nature of the American state. A good place to start is Novak (2008) and the contributions of his commentators, particularly Gerstle (2008). See also King and Lieberman (2009). Much of this literature debunks earlier notions that the American state was “weak,” and it has shown in many ways that the state developed a great deal of infrastructural power in many dimensions even in the nineteenth century. Orren and Skowronek (2004) is an excellent overview of the work by political scientists, and important works are by Skowronek (1982), Bensel (1991), Skocpol (1995), Carpenter (2001), and Balogh (2009). Baldwin (2005) is an interesting discussion of the simultaneous existence of state strength and weakness. The notion of a “state out of sight” (Balogh, 2009), or a “submerged state” (Mettler, 2011) that is invisible is a salient idea in this literature as is the idea that the state had to work by finding a balance and synthesis with the private sector (see also Stanger, 2011).

On the U.S. Constitution, see the references and discussion in the bibliographic essay for Chapter 1. The idea that state “incapacity” was used as a way to make sure that the state would not violate people’s rights is advanced by Levinson (2014). See also Novak and Pincus (2017) on the origins of the strong American state.

The Mapp v. Ohio judgment is at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/367/643.html.

We quote from Morgan (1975): “having little interest” (238), and “if any slave resist” (312).

See John (1995, 1997) on the importance of the post office, and see Larson (2001) on infrastructure more broadly and Duran (2012) for the economic impact of the transcontinental railway. Acemoglu, Moscona, and Robinson (2016) provide econometric evidence that the creation of post offices and appointment of postmasters stimulated patenting and thus innovation in the nineteenth-century United States. The quote from Zorina Khan is from that paper, and also see Khan (2009).

“There is an astonishing” is from Tocqueville (2002, 283).

Abernathy is quoted from Eskew (1997, Chapter 7). Robert Kennedy and Judge Frank Johnson are quoted from McAdam (1999, Chapter 7). Lyndon Johnson’s speech is available at http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/johnson.htm.

Hacker (2002) is an important analysis of the way the American state combines public with private provision and he also advances important arguments about why this creates, in our language, a “dark side.” The quote from a spokesman for the National Dairy Producers Corporation is from his book. He does not relate this, however, to the architecture of the state in the way we do. Balogh’s (2015) notion of an “associational state” is closely related. Alston and Ferrie (1993, 1999) is an important analysis of how southern politicians blocked New Deal legislation that threatened their economic interests and autonomy. See also Novak (2017) on the New Deal state. Friedberg (2000) analyzes how the public-private model of the American state had important implications for the way the Cold War was fought; see also Stuart (2008). Our example of how the federal government uses the legal system to implement policy is drawn from Farhang (2010), and see Novak (1996) on the importance of the legal system in the early construction of the capacity of the American state.

Hinton (2016) provides the background to Johnson’s Great Society program.

Rothstein (2014) is a brilliant analysis of how Ferguson got to be Ferguson, and he discusses the history of racist federal policies; see also the broader argument in Rothstein (2017). Gordon (2009) presents a detailed history of segregation and urban decline in St. Louis. Loewen (2006) is an important history of “sundown towns,” and Aaronson, Hartley, and Mazumder (2017) provide econometric evidence of the long-run negative impact of redlining.

The quotations are from Rothstein (2014).

For the District of Columbia v. Heller judgment, see https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/opinion.html. On explicit racial terminology in the FHA underwriting handbook, see https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Federal-Housing-Administration-Underwriting-Manual.pdf.

Data on poverty rates can be found at https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm. For data on healthcare coverage, see http://www.oecd-library.org/docserver/download/8113171ec026.pdf?expires=1514934796&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=565E13BC154117F36688F63351E843F1 [inactive]. For data on proportion of national income spent on healthcare, see https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS [inactive].

Weiner (2012) provides an excellent history of the FBI, on which our discussion draws. See Weiner (2008) on the CIA, and Edgar (2017) on the NSA and the Snowden revelations. The Church Committee report of 1975 can be found at https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/investigations/ChurchCommittee.htm.

On Keith Alexander’s “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?,” see https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa.

President Eisenhower’s farewell address can be found at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.

CHAPTER 11. THE PAPER LEVIATHAN

The notion of “patients of the state” comes from Auyero (2001), and all the evidence from our first section is from his important book. We quote from pp. 10, 20, 71–72, 83, 85, 99, 109, 120. For Weber’s notion of the “iron cage,” see Weber (2001). All his observations about bureaucracy are from Weber (1978); we quote from pp. 220–21 and 214. Useful introductions to his writings on these topics are Camic, Gorski, and Trubek, eds. (2005), and Kim (2017). For the concept of gnocchi in Argentina, see BBC (2018a), and for President Macri’s measures against nepotism, BBC (2018b). The IMF’s censure and its lifting are discussed in International Monetary Fund (2016); on the decision by The Economist to stop reporting the Argentine data, see The Economist (2012). Auyero (2001) is a seminal study of “clientelistic politics,” which is closely related to the issues we discuss here.

The discussion of the Paper Leviathan draws on the synthesis of the political economy of Colombia in Robinson (2007, 2013, 2016). This in turn is based on the studies of Acemoglu, Bautista, Querubín, and Robinson (2008), Mazzuca and Robinson (2009), Acemoglu, Robinson, and Santos (2013), Acemoglu, García-Jimeno, and Robinson (2012, 2015), Chaves, Fergusson, and Robinson (2015), and Fergusson, Torvik, Robinson, and Vargas (2016). See Acemoglu, Fergusson, Robinson, Romero, and Vargas (2016) for “false positives.” Weber’s definition of the state is in his essay “Politics as a Vocation,” reproduced in Weber (1946).

The history of the road to Mocoa is from Uribe (2017), and we quote from pp. 29, 33, 45, 124–25, 128–30, 163.

For Moreno, see Robinson (2016); for the paramilitaries of the Magdalena Medio, see Robinson (2013, 2016); the latter quotes Isaza (18–19). For rioting miners (30), Brigard Urrutia (29), Batallón Pedro Nel Ospina (21). See also Bautista, Galan, Restrepo, and Robinson (2019).

Bolívar’s “These gentlemen” is quoted from Simon (2017, 108).

Bolívar’s letter to General Flores is reproduced in Bolívar (2003), which also contains his address to legislators at the time of the presentation of his constitutions for Bolivia and the constitution itself. Gargarella (2013, 2014) are fundamental interpretations of Latin American constitutionalism in the nineteenth century and how (and why) it diverged from the U.S. case. Simon (2017) is a very stimulating comparative analysis. In particular he emphasizes what he calls the conservative-liberal fusion that created constitutions that were more centralized and allowed greater presidential powers than in the United States. These constitutional differences were part of a path-dependent equilibrium rooted in Latin America’s colonial past. The quote from Castilla is taken from Werlich (1978, 80); that of Portales is from Safford (1985). See Engerman and Sokoloff (2011) for a seminal argument about the divergent development between North and South America. See also Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) on this divergence.

Dalton (1965) is the seminal study of the political economy of Liberia; we quote from pp. 581, 584, and 589 of his paper. See Killick (1976) on Ghana, pp. 37, 40, 60, 231, and 233. Bates (1981) is the seminal study of how politics mitigates against the provision of public services. He was the first to propose some of the mechanisms that we develop here. We quote pp. 114 and 117 of his book. Appiah is quoted from Appiah (2007).

See Mamdani (1996) on indirect rule in Africa. See Acemoglu, Reed, and Robinson (2014) for empirical evidence on the local development effects of indirect rule. More broadly, see Acemoglu, Chaves, Osafo-Kwaako, and Robinson (2015) and Heldring and Robinson (2015) for arguments about the intensity within which indirect rule has persisted in Africa, and Acemoglu and Robinson (2010) for how indirect rule fits into a broader account of African underdevelopment.

BBC (2013) reports the complete failure of students in the context of the University of Liberia’s entrance exam.

CHAPTER 12. WAHHAB’S CHILDREN

Our interpretation of Middle Eastern history and the relationship between state and society there has been heavily influenced by Jean-Philippe Platteau’s seminal book (2017). There are many good books presenting overviews of the history we discuss. Our analysis of Saudi Arabia and the relationship between Saud and al-Wahhab is based on Corancez (1995), Commins (2009), and Vassiliev (2013), but there are many other good analyses, e.g., Steinberg (2005), Zyoob and Kosebalaban, eds. (2009), and the classic Philby (1928). Mouline (2014) is particularly good on the contemporary situation.

Rommel is quoted from Liddell Hart (1995, 328). “When morning came” is quoted from Vassiliev (2013). “Let him speak here” is quoted from Doughty (1888), and Burckhardt from Buckhardt (1830, 116–17). “Abd al-Aziz to the Arabs of the tribe of ***” is quoted from Corancez (1995, 9).

The decision to overthrow King Saud is quoted from Mouline (2014, 123).

Al-Ghazali is quoted from Kepel (2005, 238). On pro-U.S. fatwas, see Kurzman (2003), from which we cite the 1990 Saudi fatwa issued after the invasion of Kuwait.

For the fire in the Mecca girls’ school, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1874471.stm. Male paramedics: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middleeast/2014/02/06/Death-of-Saudi-female-student-raises-uproar.html. A nice summary of restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia is on CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/27/middleeast/saudi-women-still-cant-do-this/index.html. “For a woman,” “God Almighty,” and “deficient reasoning and rationality” from Human Rights Watch (2016); see also Human Rights Watch (2008). Bursztyn, González, and Yanagizawa-Drott (2018) on men’s attitudes to female labor force participation in Saudi Arabia. On the issue of women driving, see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-women-drive.html.

“A grief-stricken Saddam” quoted from Mortimer (1990). Saddam “the banner of jihad and faith” quoted from Baram (2014, 207–208). Platteau (2017) has an incisive analysis of the relationship between Saddam and religion; see also Baram (2014), Helfont (2014), and Dawisha (2009). An English translation of Osama bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa can be read at https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2010/MVZ203/OBL___AQ__Fatwa_1996.pdf. Platteau (2011, 245).

CHAPTER 13. RED QUEEN OUT OF CONTROL

There is a vast scholarly literature on the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Our account is based on Kershaw (2000) and Evans (2005), but we have also used Shirer (1960), Bracher (1970), Lepsius (1978), and Winkler (2006). Myerson (2004) provides an analysis of the faults of Weimar political institutions. See Mühlberger (2003) and King, Rosen, Tanner, and Wagner (2008) for analyses of voting data to identify who voted for the Nazi party. Still powerful are the contemporary testimonies of Germans who supported Hitler collected by Abel (1938). Tooze (2015) is an excellent overview of the political fallout from World War I. Berman (2001) is a useful overview and interpretation of the pre-Weimar imperial political system in Germany.

Wels is quoted from Edinger (1953, 347–348). The 1930 Nazi election manifesto is quoted from Moeller (2010, 44), and Elsa Herrmann from Moeller (2010, 33–34). An English translation of the Weimar Constitution is available at http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php. Berman (1997) pointed out that the rise of the Nazis tapped into the dense civil society of Weimar Germany, and Satyanath, Voigtländer, and Voth (2017) showed that this correlation was quite general.

For Hitler’s Berlin Sports Palace speech, see Evans (2005, 324). Hitler’s public address of October 17, 1932, is quoted from Evans (2005, 323). Goebbels’s announcement is quoted from Evans (2005, 312). Ferdinand Hermans is quoted from Lepsius (1978, 44). On Hitler’s trial after the Beer Hall Putsch and related quotes, see Kershaw (2000, 216). Evans’s “a rainbow coalition of the discontented” is quoted from Evans (2005, 294).

Fritzsche is quoted from Fritzsche (1990, 76).

Mussolini is quoted from his “Doctrine of Fascism” speech, which can be found at http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html. Herman Finer’s quote is from his Mussolini’s Italy, which can be found at https://archive.org/stream/mussolinisitaly005773mbp/mussolinisitaly005773mbp_djvu.txt.

Our analysis of the overthrow of Chilean democracy follows the seminal study of Valenzuela (1978). His book formed part of a comparative project in political science on the collapse of democracy edited by Linz and Stepan. The conclusions are summarized in Linz (1978).

Angell (1991) is a good overview of the history of the era we focus on and Constable and Valenzuela (1993) provide an excellent treatment of the military dictatorship that followed the coup of 1973. Baland and Robinson (2008) present empirical analyses of the political impact of the introduction of the secret ballot in 1958. Senator Martones is quoted from Baland and Robinson (2008, 1738–39). Brian Loveman is quoted from Loveman (1976, 219). For an analysis of state building under the Frei administration, see Valenzuela and Wilde (1979). They and Valenzuela (1978) tend to interpret the Frei program as disastrous, since the attack on clientelism undermined the ability to make deals when Allende came to power. Our interpretation sees it as a natural part of the Red Queen effect.

Lord Stanley is quoted from Kitson-Clark (1951, 112), and David Ricardo is quoted from Ricardo ([1824], 1951–1973, 506).

Kennedy’s speech launching the Alliance for Progress can be found at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1961kennedy-afp1.asp.

The text of Allende’s Statute of Guarantees can be found at http://www.papelesdesociedad.info/IMG/pdf/estatuto_de_garantias_democraticas.pdf.

The interview of Salvador Allende by Régis Debray can be found at https://www.marxists.org/espanol/allende/1971/marzo16.htm. The 1972 speech by the secretary general of the Communist Party is quoted from Valenzuela (1978, 68). The editorial from El Mercurio is quoted from Valenzuela (1978, 69). A second quotation from El Mercurio is quoted from Valenzuela (1978, 93).

Carlos Altamirano is quoted from Valenzuela (1978, 94). The Senate committee report on covert action in Chile can be downloaded at https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2010-009-doc17.pdf. The quotations are from pp. II.10–11 and IV.31.

Good analyses of the collapse of the Italian republics are Dean (1999), Waley and Dean (2013), and Jones (1997). The proceedings of the 1264 meeting in Ferrara are from Waley and Dean (2013, 180–81); see also Dean (1987) for a deeper analysis of politics in Ferrara. There is some disagreement among scholars over whether this really was a free election. Jones (1997, 624) reports one chronicler as writing that “the whole proceeding was a charade, engineered by a cabal of Este party notables … who packed the city and public square with armed followers and outsiders.”

The declarations of the consortia in Perugia are quoted from Waley and Dean (2013, 132–33). For Benjamin of Tudela’s observations about Genoa, Pisa, and Lucca, see Benjamin of Tudela (1907, 17). For the Blacks and the Whites in Pistoia, see Waley and Dean (2013, 137–38). See Jones (1997, Chapter 4) on the continued power and privileges of feudal elites after the rise of the commune. For the oath of the Capitano del Popolo in Bergamo, see Waley and Dean (2013, 142–43). For the legal powers of the Popolo in Parma: Waley and Dean (2013, 152). On Buoso da Dovara and Uberto Pallavicino, see Jones (1997, 622).

Machiavelli is quoted from The Prince (2005, 35).

The discussion of how there is popular support for the dismantling of checks and balances draws on Acemoglu, Robinson, and Torvik (2013); Rafael Correa is quoted from p. 868 of that paper.

CHAPTER 14. INTO THE CORRIDOR

Plaatje (1916) is quoted from Chapters 1 and 2.

On the general history of South Africa, see Thompson (2014). On the Native Land Act, see Bundy (1979), and on the color bar and wages, see Feinstein (2005).

See Feinstein (2005, p. 55) for the Holloway commission. The Select Committee of Native Affairs is quoted from Bundy (1979, 109).

Moeletsi Mbeki is quoted from https://dawodu.com/mbeki.pdf. On Black Economic Empowerment, see Southall (2005), Cargill (2010), and SantosVillagran (2016). On the 1995 Rugby World Cup Final and the exchange between Mandela and Pienaar, see https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2007/jan/07/rugbyunion.features1.

Our discussion of the rise of Japanese militarism and its postwar political system draws on Dower (1999), Buruma (2003), and Samuels (2003). The details of Kishi’s role in pre-and postwar Japan draw on Kurzman (1960), Schaller (1995), and Driscoll (2010).

Bonner Fellers is quoted from Dower (1999, 282). Article 9 of the Japanese constitution and Hirohito’s New Year’s statement are from the same source, pp. 394 and 314.

Zürcher (1984) and Zürcher (2004) are the best sources on the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. For overviews of recent Turkish history, see Pope and Pope (2011) and Çağaptay (2017). For a discussion of recent economic and political changes and their economic implications, see Acemoglu and Üçer (2015). For the “Black Turks, White Turks” quotation from Erdoğan, see https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/erdogans-decade.

On Erdoğan’s speech, see http://www.diken.com.tr/bir-alman-kac-turke-bedel/.

On journalists jailed in Turkey, see https://cpj.org/reports/2017/12/journalists-prison-jail-record-number-turkey-china-egypt.php.

On the number of people purged after the failed coup attempt, see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/world/europe/turkey-erdogan-purge.html and https://www.politico.eu/article/long-arm-of-turkeys-anti-gulenist-purge/.

The best analysis of the developments in Lagos since 1999 is de Gramont (2014). See Williams and Turner (1978, 133) on the 1976 Nigerian constitution drafting committee.

On Bogotá, see the essays in Tognato (2018). Devlin (2009) and Devlin and Chaskel (2009) provide a good overview of the improvements in Bogotá. Caballero is quoted from Devlin (2009). Mockus’s “as if he had vomited” is quoted from Devlin and Chaskel (2009).

On the history of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, see Simpson and Hawkins (2018). The quote “To avoid following Zimbabwe” is from http://www.researchchannel.co.za/print-version/oil-industry-empowerment-crucial-sapia-2002-10–21.

The quote from Moses Finley is from Finley (1976).

An overview of South Korea’s industrialization and transition to democracy can be found in Cummings (2005).

For an excellent history of the Congo Free State and the reactions to it, see Hochschild (1999), where our quotation of Casement’s diary comes from. The full Casement Report can be found at https://ia801006.us.archive.org/14/items/CasementReport/CasementReportSmall.pdf. On the international human rights movement, see Neier (2012).

On the role of Amnesty International in the UN resolution against female genital mutilation, see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2012/11/fight-against-female-genital-mutilation-wins-un-backing/.

On Robert Mugabe’s appointment as WHO’s “goodwill ambassador,” see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/22/robert-mugabe-removed-as-who-goodwill-ambassador-after-outcry, and http://theconversation.com/robert-mugabe-as-who-goodwill-ambassador-what-went-wrong-86244.

CHAPTER 15. LIVING WITH THE LEVIATHAN

Hayek’s introduction to the U.S. edition, the quotations therein, and an excellent discussion by Bruce Caldwell can be found in Hayek (2007). The quotations are from pp. 71, 148, 44, and 48. On the Beveridge Report, see Beveridge (1944) and also Baldwin (1990, 116), where we quote James Griffiths.

On the “cow trade” and the rise of Swedish social democracy, see Baldwin (1990), Berman (2006), Esping-Andersen (1985), and Gourevitch (1986). The quotations come from Berman (2006) and Esping-Andersen (1985). See also the chapters on education and housing policies in Misgeld, Molin, and Amark (1988), and we quote from p. 325 of this book. Moene and Wallerstein (1997) develop a model of the connection between wage compression and innovation. See Swenson (2002) for an analysis of the preferences of capitalists with respect to the welfare state.

Our discussion of the role of coalitions is related to the seminal study of democratization by O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986).

On the effects of automation on wages and inequality, see Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018). On the implications of globalization, see Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013). The numbers on wage growth by different education groups and inequality in the U.S. labor market come from Acemoglu and Autor (2011) and Autor (2014). The numbers on the share of the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent in U.S. national income are based on Piketty and Saez (2003), and the updated numbers are obtained from https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/ (and refer to numbers that include capital income). Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Price (2015) and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) discuss estimates of the effects of trade with China and robots on U.S. employment.

Our discussion of reforms in the U.S. financial system is from Johnson and Kwak (2010). On the relative earnings of workers and executives in the finance industry, see Philippon and Reshef (2012). The share of six largest banks in the sector are computed from the Global Financial website.

Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson, and Van Reenen (2017) provide evidence that large firms have contributed significantly to the increase in the share of capital income in GDP, while Song, Price, Güvenen, Bloom, and von Wachter (2015) show that the contribution to inequality of high-productivity firms paying higher wages to their workers has increased over time, especially at the top of the earnings distribution. The market value of the five largest firms relative to GDP in 1990 and today is computed from Global Financial.

On how the institutional structure of one country cannot be directly copied by another one, see Acemoglu, Robinson, and Verdier (2017).

For Snowden’s revelations, see Edgar (2017), and for the Danish government’s “session logging,” see https://privacyinternational.org/location/denmark.

Beveridge’s quote is from Beveridge (1994, 9).

For Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address see http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html. For the comment on Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” see https://books.openedition.org/pufr/4204?lang=en. The quote on African Americans’ lack of freedoms related to Roosevelt’s speech is from Litwack (2009, 50). For the Universal Declaration of Rights of the United Nations, see http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf.

SOURCES FOR MAPS

GENERAL SOURCES

Location of cities from Geonames, https://www.geonames.org/.

Recent administrative divisions from GADM (Database of Global Administrative Areas), https://gadm.org/data.html.

Rivers from Natural Earth, http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-physical-vectors/10m-rivers-lake-centerlines.

Map 1: Asante Kingdom from Wilks (1975). Yorubaland and Tivland from Murdock (1959).

Map 2: Athenian demes from Osborne (2009). Borders of the Trittyes from Christopoulos (1970).

Map 3: Bureau Topographique des Troupes Françaises du Levant (1935) and Central Intelligence Agency (2017).

Map 4: Sarawat Mountains from Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission Consortium for Spatial Information (CGIAR-CSI), http:/srtm.csi.cgiar.org.

Map 5: Tongaland and Zululand from Murdock (1959). Provinces of South Africa in 1910 from Beinart (2001).

Map 6: Puna Coast from Evergreen Data Library, https://evergreen.data.socrata.com/Maps-Statistics/Coastlines-split-4326/rcht-xhew.

Map 7: GADM, https://gadm.org/data.html.

Map 8: Shepherd (1911).

Map 9: Falkus and Gillingham (1987).

Map 10: Feng (2013).

Map 11: Ho (1954).

Map 12: Mauryan Empire from Keay (2000). Ashoka Pillar and Rock Edicts from Geonames, https://www.geonames.org/.

Map 13: Holy Roman Empire from Shepherd (1911). Brandenburg and Prussia from EarthWorks, Stanford Libraries, https://earthworks.stanford.edu/catalog/harvard-ghgis1834core.

Map 14: Trampoline of Death from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, https://www.hotosm.org. Middle Magdalena and Sibundoy Valley from Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi, https://www.igac.gov.co.

Map 15: Clower, Dalton, Harwitz, and Walters (1966).

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