Reading Snippet - Why Nations Fail (14)

How I would abridge this book

I would start with the concept pluralism, meaning that each person is a unique individual as opposed to singular identities in which certain attributes are used to put people into broad segments, ignoring all the other numerous attributes. Because each person is unique, the ideal society and rules and policies is different for each person. This gives importance to 'freedom/liberty' so that people can express themselves and be themselves without being interfered, but at the same time there must be common rules to control this freedom and ensure one person's freedom does not encroach other people's freedom.

This 'freedom dilemma' leads to the concept of 'government', and the importance of having a centralised government that can enact laws and provide administrative services - these laws and administrations allow individuals to live in close proximity with each other and have the conflicts resolved.

The next concept is that of human nature, i.e. the tendency of being greedy and wanting more economically (income, assets). The Central government positions become attractive due to the official power and privileges they confer, and the ability of apportioning economic benefits via such powers - this links political power with economic benefits. People with political power would use the power to gain economic benefit, while economically privileged people would try to gain political influence to secure their economic privileges. This can come in the form of revoking property rights, granting monopolies, heavy taxation, slavery etc.

If this kind of situation is un-mitigated, a small 'elite' with extensive political and economic power would emerge, and the intricate linkages would make it hard to break. This will lead to divergence in society in the powerful 'elite' and the powerless 'commoners', and the elite would find it easy to extract economic values from the commoners. This reduces the incentives for the commoners to work or innovate as any gain would be taken away. A stagnant society results.

In this type of society, either the elites try to steal power from each other to become more powerful, or some commoner groups attempt to revolt & replace the elite. In the former case, the civil wars would destroy what's left of the government and removes all the fruits of people working together; in the latter case, the society repeats itself. This is an easy path and world history is littered with examples.

To break away from this mould, the society needs to re-distribute the power, so that the government is centralised but not absolute - they must be empowered to provide administration, but there must be effective checks & balances to prevent abuse. This means the mechanisms of democracy - constitution, independent judiciary, administration & civil service, law-making group, and universal suffrage.

However, 'democracy' is a set of mechanisms, and itself alone would not prevent falling back to the historical cycles - again, there are numerous historical examples. Education & literacy alone wouldn't solve the issue. The key concept here is the society's recognition of pluralism, so that there is little incentive for people to form into factions and try to gain absolute power for their own faction. Only with this concept embedded in mainstream society and reflected in political institutions, would democratic mechanisms serve their purpose - creating an inclusive society that would uphold individuals' liberties without creating a lawless & messy society.

The historical examples such as Glorious Revolution, French revolution, Meiji reformation are good illustrations, especially when compared with their preceding revolution attempts. All these changes require a broad coalition attempting to make a change, without attempting to out-win each other afterwards. This is a rudimentary manifestation of pluralism.

Finally, to explain why some countries broke from the mould faster than the rest, we can introduce the concept of 'critical juncture', which are opportunities for fast and upside down changes to happen. However, caveat that history is not pre-determined and any gains could be reversed.