Balance of power: states, societies and the narrow corridor to liberty
Incorpora video
Balance of power: states, societies and the narrow corridor to liberty
This talk will argue that the foundations of institutions that protect individual liberty and create an environment conducive to economic growth are not in clever institutional designs or top-down development of state institutions. Rather, they emerge from the involvement of society in politics in a way that balances the power of state institutions and elites. This precarious balance, when it is achieved, unleashes a powerful process of building of state capacity and development of society's capability to institutionalize its involvement in politics. The corridor leading to such institutions is narrow because of the difficulty of creating this balance and staying the course despite myriad conflicts and gridlocks.
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no positivity the sous-vide ammos a colleague at Oh professor small you can hear me I can hear you very well can you hear me yes please so did I say well that this new book that you're writing it's a second time of your of your work as with the Y the nations fail or I'm saying something wrong it's it's it's it's a continuation but a very different one so you'll get a better sense of it at the end of this presentation so please you see if you wanna go through and yeah so promote a termini Antonio's pier in Virgo Farah Karen police to te karere sumo blue Sewell Cunha delle cose Akira is in she Sarah tempo 4m 1 kV ferryman furikake dimande so please Bravo glutes on roughly 30 minutes III want I want to leave please can you close your feet video because yes I will I will once I start but so you can see my my slides right ok then I'm gonna click into it ok perfect so today I'm going to talk about technology and the future of Liberty but in the process of trying to address this question I will also summarize some of the main points of the new book that James Robinson and I have the narrow corridor state societies and the fate of Liberty which will come out in September 2019 so so I'm gonna start with a definition of Liberty which follows what philosopher Philip Pettit defines as dominance or the opposite of it so dominance is to live at the mercy of another having to live in a manner that leaves you vulnerable to some ill that the other is in a position to arbitrarily imposed subject to arbitrary sway so in other words Liberty is to be under the power of an individual this power could be political it could be economic or it could be social and I'll talk about all three of them and Liberty is the lack of domination from from these sources and of course freedom from the threat of violence because that's the most pernicious form of dominance that you can imagine so the question that I want to address in this talk as I go along is whether the future is bright or bleak for liberty and as a corollary of that also for democracy which really proposes some type of Liberty at least in political and social domains for people to be able to participate in the product democratic process so if you look at the recent history there have been so many predictions about these issues that it's a little bit mind-boggling so Francis Fukuyama famously predicted the end of history in 1989 as the Berlin Wall was coming down with an unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism and and his definition of political and economic liberalism may not be exactly the same as what I've defined liberty but it's obviously related issues but things haven't looked so well for this prediction even though what Samuel Huntington called the third wave of democracy was afoot in 1989 and many countries were turning Democratic in Latin America and partly in Asia and Africa you know over the last ten or so years as particular starting from around 2006 2007 there have been a reversal of democracy so from the data from the Freedom House for example this is the number of countries where you have improved and declined democracy scores and you see that since 2006 every year there has been worse performance in democracy in more countries than than those that have improved their democratic scores this contrasts very sharply to Samuel Huntington's a third way where many more countries were democratizing so just five years later after Fukuyama Robert Kaplan predicted coming of Anarchy with violence spreading throughout the world a modern version of Hobbes's poor nasty brutish and short lives as everyone fights against every man without a powerful state what hobbes called the leviathan this is sort of the anarchy of his modern version of it in fact if anything this looks a little closer to what has happened recently so if you look around the world sees like this which is this is the state of a city of Raqqa and Syria in October 2017 completely ruined by bombing and the dominance of Islamic state you know those have been much more common over the last ten years and and other forms of human suffering and collapses of state institutions and and so a very different sort of word so this is in Mosul in Iraq the same sort of thing on their Islamic state and why has this happened it has happened for a very very familiar reason a reason that Thomas Hobbes would have recognized because the state has collapsed so these are the helmets of rocky soldiers that they threw as they were running away in and as as the Islamic state fighters were approaching musel's so it was a collapse of state institutions that precipitated the sort of the chaos and violence and lawlessness exactly like Robert Kaplan had predicted but in fact perhaps the prediction that most people would sympathize with more is one that many people have been making over the last five six years most recently social scientists you all know a Harare that it's the revenge of technology AI technology and other things perhaps social media are bringing the age of digital dictatorship so this is another prediction perhaps in the spirit of many in the past where technology of the age is viewed as sharply determining the nature of society most famously Marx said the hen mill gives you society with the feudal lord the steam mill gives you society with the industrial capitalists perhaps today i and social media give you society with the digital Big Brother so which prediction I'm sorry so if you want to sort of look for evidence for that that's also correct it takes very different forms so this is this is a Burmese Bangla Bangladeshi border on the way to the biggest refugee camp in the world which is not in Lebanon it's not in in Turkey it's not anywhere in Europe but it's in the bazaar in Bangladesh it's the raw ginger people who fled well why what were the revenger people fleeing well they were fleeing a systematic attack of ethnic cleansing but what's interesting about it is that it was organized by the support of the army so it was state institutions it was nothing like what Kaplan had predicted it wasn't lawlessness it was directed from above and sort of in line with her Ari's sort of predictions it was actually organized via social media so the the state institutions use links to social media and and other online tools organize regular people to participate in attacks and expulsion of the rojan Jeff so so it obviously is a complex picture but but what people have at the back of their mind when they hear digital dictatorship it's more this this one which is Tiananmen Square with all the facial recognition cameras now actually I'm not sure whether these cameras are working but there are facial recognition cameras that are working in Xinjiang province so the sort of the digital dictatorship using technology is not just a far-fetched dream Orwellian nightmare actually rather than dream but but it's actually a reality in many parts of China and the one that you know again you might have heard is the all-seeing state or controlling data for example through the social credit score which every individuals every action online and offline is logged on into a database that determines their credit score social credit score and their social credit score determines what jobs they get whether they can travel what apartments they get what universities they get into and also lots of permissions even including in their social lives so this looks like sort of the type of evidence that would bolster the case of Harare now which one of these predictions is going to be perhaps all of them perhaps none of them well what what do I mean by that well first of all it might well be that there is no uniformity of row across countries that different countries are going to tend to different equilibria and also that none of them are going to be as simple as these bleak or sometimes hopeful predictions are painting so perhaps how technology affects the future of Liberty depends on how we use technology so that's the idea that I want to develop on the basis of the framework from the book but to do that I'm gonna start with a historical precedent to thinking about these issues to the best of my end James's knowledge the first account of thinking of these issues is actually in the first tab tablets of written work in human history the Sumerian tablets from 4200 years ago from this from from the from the area called Arak which tell the story of the mythical King Gilgamesh king of Uruk now the Gilgamesh problem is super interesting because the tablets start telling of the wonderful things that Gilgamesh has done see how its ramparts glean like copper in the Sun climbed a stone staircase approached the temple and and it's it's no King has equaled in size or beauty and you see sort of a sense of public service provision lots of opportunities created by a well-run well created well operated city under the Leviathan like gaze of Gilgamesh but a few more paragraphs and you see that the situation is not as good as it first appears there are there is a obvious fly in the ointment it's despotism the tablets continue who is like Gilgamesh what other king has inspired such all who can say I alone rule supreme the city is in his position he struts through its arrogant his head raised high trampling its citizens like a wild bull he does whatever he wants no one dares to oppose him so I've put these passages in particular in red because if you read that you cannot be struck you cannot be but struck by the similarity to the definition of dominance that I gave at the beginning so Gilgamesh is dominating society is too powerful he does what he wants everything comes out of his power and nobody has Liberty even though the city has amazing public services beautiful monuments and and and and and and lots of other good things so this is gonna be very related to the idea of despotism as we develop it it's a situation in which society has no say and it's too weak relative to the power of the state or the elite or the ruler now but English or the epic of gilgamesh also starts developing a way of dealing with this despotism problem so in particular bothered by the guild by Gilgamesh's dominance citizens cry out to the heaven of a new the god of the sky and they ask her to stop this despotism so on who comes up with a solution to contain Gilgamesh and this is a solution you may think of as the first instance of checks and balances or the doppelganger solution it is to create a double for Gilgamesh his second self and more a man who equals his strength and courage a man who equals his stormy heart a new hero and let them balance each other perfectly so that Iraq has peace so this double Enkidu is the embodiment of the modern notion of checks and balances that Montesquieu or Madison would have would have sympathized with so the way to prevent the state or elites or the ruler being too powerful is to create another body or another person who is as powerful and will contain and balance out the other but in fact we'll see this is not a great solution despite the fact that many people around the world including the majority of social scientists keep on talking about it and why not well actually the epic of gilgamesh also has the has the has the has the solution to that you know what happens is that Enkidu at first fights Gilgamesh and there is some amount of containing but actually read a few paragraphs more and you see that Enkidu and Gilgamesh gang up together and they start getting into mischief together against lots of people and lots of things that the gods want to do the problem of the checks and balances impose like doppelganger on society is that you know who will control Enkidu how are you gonna prevent Enkidu and Gilgamesh getting together and doing all the bad things that Gilgamesh could have done by himself but even worse and if that's not the case all that fighting between Enkidu and Gilgamesh that can't be great elite fighting is one of the main causes of state collapse throughout history so we have to look for a solution somewhere else and this is what in the book we call shackling the Leviathan rather than come up with a doppelganger who's powerful can contain contain Gilgamesh much better to have the citizens society itself control the despot and this is what we're going to call shackled Leviathan once the Leviathan is shackled this not only paves the way to Liberty and starts weakening the forces for dominance but it also changes the process in which state institutions start functioning it transforms the nature of politics and to do that I'll give you one picture just to explain the key idea this is people in the streets of Germany welcoming immigrants actually it's before Alcala Merkel had taken the decision to welcome the immigrants so these people are protesting in the streets to force the government to change its policy to force the government to take on more responsibilities now this may not strike you as unusual but that's partly because we live in unusual times in the grand scheme of human history for most of human history most people would have not even thought that a they could pour into the streets and demand things from the state and be it would not have occurred to them that they should do that not to ask the state to leave them alone but to actually ask the state to take on more responsibilities such as you know welcoming 1 million people and locating them somewhere in the car or settling them somewhere in the country provide education jobs and services and so on and so forth so this is a very very unusual thing when in most history people have actually as I'm going to show in a second have fought to prevent the state from becoming powerful or and when the state was powerful they just fled from it and if they fought against the state that was to ask the state not to do certain things like tax them or conscript them into the army but this is something that occurs when the relationship between state and society changes and this change I'm going to argue it's critical for the emergence of liberty and ending of dominance so without further ado let me summarize the key conceptual framework of the book which I then I'm gonna use in a second to explain the how we might most interestingly think about issues of Technology and Liberty so what we have here is on the horizontal axis we have the power of society this is generally a norm based power how you organize solve the collective action problem in order to fight against elites or prevent the emergence of hierarchies I will illustrate it but it could also be institutionalized power use civil society organization non governmental organization democratic process procedures protest media and so on on the vertical axis we have the power of the state and also sometimes merging with the power of the elites that control the state and when that power of the state is large relative to the power of society you have the despotic Leviathan not so different from what Thomas Hobbes imagined but for the reasons that already was obvious from the pictures that I showed you that's not going to be a Leviathan that's going to further Liberty it's going to control society it's going to monitor society it may use digital dictatorship or just the old fashioned a military dictatorship or whatever but it's going to repress society when power of society is very high relative to the power of the state then you're going to have what we call the absent Leviathan the state either is not going to exist or we're if it exists it's going to be so powerless that it cannot do any of the things that we associate with the state but in that narrow corridor in the middle when the power of the state and society are balanced then you have something very different that's what we call the shackled Leviathan and it is in that corridor that Liberty evolves over time and I will talk about that evolution in a second but there are two issues that I want to emphasize already at this point the first is that in this corridor things are not static the arrows are meant to communicate the idea that as you are and remain in the corridor as as nation or a society you are seeing both the power of the state and the strength of society increase the power of the state is increasing because it's becoming better able to enforce its laws bureaucratically more sophisticated more capable of shouldering new responsibilities including dealing with refugees for instance dealing with economic problems social security insurance unemployment insurance dealing with security threats but at the same time in that corridor differently from everywhere else and differently from much of human history society is getting stronger in a commercial way and it's doing so both through its institutional and norms and it's doing so in order to be able to keep the power of the state in check in order to keep the state and the elites shackled so it's a dynamic process and it's the evolution of Liberty so when you are in the corridor there is no guarantee that at every point in time things are going to be honky-dory wonderful everybody is gonna be happy when you first enter the corridor there might be a lot of violence Liberty might still be sustained a car tailed but over time there are forces in the corridor that bring this type of picture which is people feel empowered enough to force the state to do what they want and to ask the state to take on more responsibilities to protect people themselves included or the people who are disadvantaged in society and change the economic picture as well because they feel capable of controlling the state and they trust that they can control the state so that it's not going to use its additional power its new responsibilities to turn into the despotic Leviathan and then the second point this picture already makes it clear that all of these predictions that people make are not really on target it's not that everybody is gonna go through despotism it's not clear that everybody's gonna go through anarchy it's not that everybody is gonna go through unabashed victory of economic and political Liberty the arrows in this picture emphasize that there are multiple stable points that you can end up with as society that's despotic under the same conditions you can end up with a society that has a very weak state and close to anarchy and you can end up with a society that develops the sort of shackled state institutions that are themselves nevertheless quite sophisticated that's in the corridor so different regions in this phase diagram lead to different states society relations and there is no technological determinism it really depends on our choices but then this picture really begs the question why not enter the corridor why doesn't every society immediately want to try to enter the corridor so when you look at the south east corner here there are the societies with the absolutely vital why don't they jump into the corridor what prevents them so I want to explain that not because that's of historical importance it is of huge historical importance because the great overwhelming majority of human qualities created throughout history our stateless societies that really were in that southeast corner but more importantly the reason why I'm going to explain it is because it also gives us clues about how the corridor works and to do that I'm gonna start in this part of East Nigeria which is called the Tim land and what's interesting about Tim land and the people who inhabited the Tim is that they're not remarkable so far as we know they are like many other stateless societies that have been in human history what's perhaps slightly unusual about them is that they cover a huge area that they engage in many different activities including agriculture but what's really most unusual about them is that anthropologists have studied them very well because in the first half of the 20th century when the country was still a British colony and Paul and Laura Bohan on a couple of anthropologists husband-and-wife team of Hunter colleges went and lived with them for a decade and got to understand how to society worked and there are many interesting aspects to it but the one that I want to emphasize that's the one written on this slide is that almost every norm in TIF society was directed against limiting inequality and in particular limiting political hierarchy and political inequality so this was true of economic institutions that prevented trade on sale of many goods because that would empower certain people and create wealth inequalities but even more it was true of their social norms so papa Hans words men who had acquired too much power were whittled down by means of witchcraft accusations and the key thing was the distrust of power of the TIF whenever an individual or a group became too powerful they had such distrust of what they would do with that power that they immediately found ways of undermining that power and it was this distrust of power that made it impossible for the TIF to develop state institutions because if you want to have state institutions you know in this corridor here you need the power of the state to be at least some minimal amount so that the state can impose its laws it can get things done it can resolve disputes and conflicts it can impose certain economic choices and regulations but the two were so distrustful of power that they never let that happen now that distrust of power may appear as debilitating paralyzing but it's not it's not because that distrust of power is there in every human society but it takes different forms under the despotic Leviathan it gets suppressed under the opposite Leviathan it becomes dominant and prevents political hierarchy but under the shackled Leviathan it takes a different institutionalized form that fuels the development of institutions if you want to call them democratic institutions you may do so institutions that would keep the elites and the powerful in check and there is no better way of illustrating that than the first set of democracies that humans probably developed in Athenian society so Athenians starting in fifth century BC developed not only a very powerful state capable of providing huge number of social services public services money regulation redistribution of land a sort of insurance system orphanage and so on but did that under the context of a democratic politics and and that democratic politics was actually built on the same sort of distrust of power that the TIF had but the difference between the Athenians and the TIF was that the Athenians find a way of turning that distrust of power into an institutionalized direction that would then enable the emergence of the shackled the violin and the best way of seeing both of these aspects is to understand one of their institutions that that of ostracism so under the reforms of Christ eNOS Athenians introduced the ostracism law and the ostracism law essentially was it was a tool for Athenians to ostracize powerful individuals getting too big for their boots too dominant in society and the way that this this worked was that there would be a vote in the assembly and if the majority said there should be an ostracism then every Athenian citizen would write the name of a person on a piece of broken shard called ostracon hence their name ostracism and here what you're seeing is a piece of broken shard here with the name of Timmy stockless and who is Timmy stockless well he's the closest thing that Athenians had ahead to a hero the person who single-handedly pushed for an Athenian Navy and then commanded that Navy to Dahmer to to defeat the Persians saving athens but at some point Athenians thought he was getting too powerful too involved in politics and pushing his own agenda and he they ostracized him for 10 years away from Athens so it's the same distrust of power that led to the ostracism law or the use of the ostracism law but through an institutionalized way couched in a democratic set of institutions now the next thing that I want to introduce and this is the last piece of the conceptual framework and then I'll come back to apply the conceptual framework is that actually when Robert Kaplan and Thomas Hobbes 500 years before him and many other thinkers you know thousands of years before Thomas Hobbes were were warning us about against anarchy and often just like Kaplan and Thomas Hobbs calling for a powerful state to prevent that they were actually painting an only half true or 1/4 true picture of statelessness so contrary to what Hobbes said and what Kaplan warned of you know the the opposite of state isn't uncontrolled violence war of every man against everyone as Thomas Hobbes called it it is actually a society without a state but still with some well understood rules which we often call social norms or norms so most societies developed norms that govern conduct resolve and prevent disputes and impose their own social hierarchy often with women at the bottom actually and sometimes certain ethnic groups or minorities at the bottom and these norms typically not always but typically work very well and control violence so stateless societies aren't deficient because they are always highly violent but they are often not conducive to Liberty because these norms are actually quite stifling and that's why we call the cage of norms they are inimical to Liberty for two complementary reasons first of all the way that they prevent conflict and they resolve disputes is by creating very restricted choices so if you go to tiff society many things cannot be done you cannot trade this you cannot do that activity you cannot do this activity that's very common in any society for which we have archaeological or graphic evidence that there are many many many many traditions that customs that prevent lots of economic social actions but also these norms create deep ingrained social hierarchies so one place where you can see those social hierarchies is in India so 200 million Indians even though the Indian Constitution bans it are still the Dalits or the Untouchables art of the caste system they are the lowest in society they're not allowed to interact intermingle with the rest so even as recent as late 20th century Dalit children were not allowed to go to schools because they would pollute the environment four four four four four people twice born the people in the higher echelons of the caste and they are forced to not only remain separate from society but also into the worst social and economic positions in life so for instance manual scavenging which is the removal of human feces human excrement and removal of dead animals and as many as perhaps 2 million people currently work as manual scavengers almost completely come from Dalits so this is just one aspect of social hierarchy that has nothing to do with the state the state actually bans it it doesn't even ask whether people what people's caste is because the Indian Constitution partly written by Ambedkar who was himself a Dalit was very much trying to remove the social caste system because it thought that it was inimical to liberty and it was inimical to India's economic development they were absolutely right I'm Beth Kara's analysis was completely on point but of course these norms were so powerful that a weak state like in India couldn't do much about it so therefore where we come to the key about the the the corridor so the thing about the corridor is that what you are seeing is this process if we go back is this evolution of Liberty which is that overtime Liberty is evolving both with the power of the state and power of society getting stronger state and society running fast with each other in order to keep up with each other what we call Red Queen and as a result the shackled Leviathan is developing capabilities that the despotic Leviathan cannot so if you look at this picture you're seeing that the shock of the violence arrow is going to much higher level of the power of the state so much greater level of bureaucratic capacity that even very strong despotic leviathans like China would be able to achieve and the other thing that the lavas are the shackled Leviathan and the Red Queen process can do and is doing and it's again the power of the state it's much more powerful in undoing these norms so if you look at the norms like the Dalits in one form or another they existed in every society so occupations were based on hereditary passage in in in many countries in Europe but these things started disintegrating as the state became stronger it started imposing laws taking on the issue of dispute resolution itself it started creating markets and technologies for the for existing social hierarchies to to start collapsing so now we're seeing the two two drivers of Liberty one is empower society so that it becomes capable of ending dominance in economic and political spheres and secondly create a set of laws and rules and economic opportunities that start dismantling the cage of norms so then the question is you know what creates strong States and again I started by talking about like Marx about the nature of Technology lots of geographies cultures and so on they have been very greatly emphasized in the literature but in fact our framework says that those things have been emphasized in the wrong way in the social science literature why well let me illustrate that with one of the very famous ideas in political science due to Charles Tilly States made war and war made the state so strong States emerge when states will fight wars because states have to be strong to fight the wars but actually when you look at the history you see there are many states that fight wars and become strong and become a shackled Leviathan but there are many instances where States fight wars and as a result of it they become despotic and when they become despotic over time they become weaker so Switzerland in European history is for instance a set of Canton's getting it together into a confederacy to become stronger and becoming into the corridor but Prussia under Frederick William the first actually reorganizing itself in a more despotic way and and actually coming out of the corridor and ultimately becoming weaker in many ways than it could have done otherwise so this sort of emphasizes one other important idea of the literature of the order of the model here which is that the devil is in the detail that the same impulse is leading to a demand for greater state capacity will have very different effects they will have conditional comparative statics depending on the prevailing balance of power between state and society so let me then now apply this to technology in the future of Liberty so it's really an application of these ideas that I have highlighted because Liberty is not static it involves over time it's really about managing how to break the cage of north while keeping the elites in check so when you look at that you see the evolution of Liberty so for instance when you take the cage of norms as I mentioned one of the groups that typically suffers in all pre-modern societies under under the cage of norms are women and in most societies in the West including the US and and all European ones even as democratic institutions were introduced discrimination against women did not stop so how did that get reversed well first women organized for example as the suffragettes and a similar movement in the US and they started demanding votes and as they got the votes and became politically powerful they started pushing for other changes that were to stop the discrimination against them and loosen the cage of Norris but even that wasn't enough because just like the social norms against the Dalits even if you have equal representation that doesn't mean that opportunities and social hierarchies are going to stop preventing you from exercising your Liberty so then over the last sixty years there was a variety of movements leading to women expressing more and more their unwillingness to be bound by the social norm so you see one of those here in the context of the sexual revolution for example this is very different from you know women's right being imposed from above so the key thing in the corridor is that the cage of norms is being dismantled as society becomes more powerful so this is gender balance Awards in the United Arab Emirates and of course it's a top-down process as opposed to this one and the interesting thing is that all of the gender balance Awards go to men so this is the ruler of Dubai giving the gender balance Awards so the technology and the cage of norms actually is one of the important aspects of technology it's not only that you're going to have you know AI monitoring people but you're going to have that technology is going to create a variety of different ways in which we can find to generate more opportunities and different social equilibria so social credit system that's one possibility online height speech an example of new ways of imposing restrictive norms that's another possibility but the me2 movement in the that started in the u.s and spread actually it's it's really started in the UK but it really spread in the u.s. you know that's another way of using new technology to start dismantling certain types of social hierarchies that were detrimental to a large number of women so it's really about this same thing as here where do we fall into this figure and how the changes are going to take us from one area to the other and then the final thing that I want I'm gonna say when I end is that all of the issues that we are living right now were actually we're mirrored in earlier periods of new technology's new social equilibrium so for example when the beverage report in 1942 came Hayek was very worried because he thought that this was gonna bring in new totalitarianism not so different from the fears of new totalitarianism today but actually it turns out that Hayek at the end turned out to be mistaken and he was mistaken because of the Red Queen effect when Hayek thought that the welfare state would bring new totalitarianism he wasn't counting on society being organized in order to support monitor and use the social welfare state which we've seen in many countries but perhaps most clearly in Sweden where the beginnings of the social welfare state were developed during the in the aftermath of the Great Depression by the Workers Party the Social Democratic Party but also in England in the political changes that happen starting in 1942 and especially after World War two on the tails of the beverage report that called for this very large emblematic rise of the social welfare state so therefore really the balance of power is key and the balance of power really is key not just to maintain us in the corridor but also in shaping how we use the new technologies there is no necessity that AI is going to bring dictatorship it depends on what we allow what powers we give to companies like Facebook and Google and what other supporting institutions and norms we have that restrict the bad uses of these technologies and of course these technologies are not going to transform China into a liberal democracy but the question is whether they mean that it's the end of Western democracy as we know it and I think the answer is no of course they will create strains but if we find ways of adapting our institutions as for example the social democratic institutions of Europe did despite high excavation welfare state then I think there is a lot of room for Liberty to become even stronger not crumble in the face of new technologies thank you Thank You professor Schwab group allora Shamu M Antonio in bonus Estanza con una razón ami - Vinny moto Don tano e molto accurately Sean Moody foody Vista Te'o 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just about to graduate when I arrived at MIT and I just got inducted into the quarter century club at MIT for having finished my 25 years here so so and and I've always benefited from Antonio's questions comments and it's no exception this time but in the interest of tie time you know since I can respond for one hour for each one of Antonio's questions I'm going to bunch them into two so his first third and fourth questions are really all overlapping Brazil populism and you know what's going on with the right to turn authoritarian turn in many countries around the world so let me then answer his second question first and I'll give it a brief answer yes Italy is a enigma No I mean seriously you know part of the reason why you know the current framework the current book builds but extends the the framework of why nations fail is because what we are trying to emphasize is the political dynamics that then create opportunities but then those opportunities are going to be used in different ways depending on the details of the the power of the state and how that power is used so in other words being the corridor is no guarantee for economic growth being in the corridor provides certain social economic and political preconditions that prevent certain type of economic activities but those economic activities are neither automatic nor do they immediately translate into economic growth and and and and when that is added to the possibility that you know many countries have hugely heterogeneous structures in different parts of the country that really complicates the picture so in many countries the power of the state is very high in some parts but it's actually quite limited in other parts so if you look at the south of Italy you know I think the the big problem of the south of Italy is that the capacity of the state to be able to do the things that you know we sort of depend on are very limited because of most political and social reasons and that then creates both a lack of growth opportunities economic opportunities in the south but then also corrupts the nature of the state for the whole country because the state has to enter into political coalition's that sort of recreate that dysfunctional equilibrium in the south so it's a little bit like in the US where you know US state for for 100 years you know after the civil war had to continuously enter into a bad coalition with the u.s. South and in that process that really undercut its ability to bring better economic opportunities better social insurance better Liberty to many of its citizens everywhere and and so so I think that is not unrelated to the problems in Italy and and and and that you know if that's the right sort of analysis it says the solution has to be to increase the capacity of the state in in everywhere so that the preconditions of economic growth are met better and that requires again to remain in the corridor a simultaneous increase in the power of the states and let me use that as a segue for your other questions and and let me answer your questions by talking about one part of the book which I didn't have time to talk about today which is what we call the Red Queen out of control which is you start in the corridor but the conflicts in the corridor and polarization in the corridor and the inability of institutions to keep up with the conflicts in the corridor makes the Red Queen effect that race between elites and regular citizens turn zero-sum so grievances and efforts to undercut each other start dominating it and that then prevents the benefits from those Red Queen dynamics from being realized and ultimately pushes a society out of the corridor and you're there many examples of that Jim yesterday talked about you know the Italian communes in that light but you know the most iconic example perhaps would be you know the collapse of Weimar Republic and it's making way to the Nazi dictatorship you know that's a very unique historical juncture but it's nevertheless informative about some of the dynamics that you see so and what is the what were the key aspects of those of those dynamics one german society was very polarized and over time became even more polarized second german institutions why mars police force judiciary were very elite dominated and did not attempt to and were not capable of resolving disputes and resolving conflicts in society and third the great depression really created a huge amount of hardship making it very difficult for people to say well we're benefiting from the from being in the corridor so i think all of these have parallels with what's going on today so the right authoritarian turn in many countries that you're witnessing is a consequence of the twin forces the financial crisis that brought a fairly large decline in trust in institutions everywhere especially in the in the west especially in the US the UK france plus economic and social changes brought by automation and globalization that have created many many many losers who are feeling that they're not benefiting from this system so if you look at the grievances in philippines in turkey in brazil they are all related to these two axes the trust in institutions has collapsed and and and people who are not benefiting wants something different but the problem is that those grievances are being translated not into a renewed effort to say psyche a social democratic party that says we want to strengthen the social welfare state but keep the pluralist nature as Antonio called it but by authoritarian leaders saying just give us more power dismantle the institutions that make up the corridor and then perhaps you get some breadcrumbs so in that sense yes we were wrong about Brazil but what we were wrong about Brazil is actually in my opinion a little bit subtle we weren't wrong that the Workers Party was corrupt so I think the worker party being corrupt is you know many parties are corrupt in the workers party that went perhaps way beyond what people expect it certainly what way beyond what we knew when in 2010 when we were writing but in many cases that corruption gets resolved by the normal democratic channels you kick out the party you kick out a leader you bring in somebody else and and that's what's happened with many other examples of corruption there was a huge amount of corruption in in the UK in the 19th century in the u.s. in the 19th and early 20th centuries but but in Brazil what happened is that because the twin powers of corruption and the collapse in trust in institutions created a fertile ground for an anti corridor leader like paulsen ro to rise in the same way that would turn an arrow on have risen so I think this is a very very important set of issues and one that you know we try to grapple with with our framework and I don't think it contradicts anything in the framework but it certainly means that many predictions that people would have made 15 years ago are going to turn out to be wrong including ours because we did not forecast the wholesale collapse in institutions then the final thing is but then are these guys really good for economic growth so there I disagree with you antonio i think sure there are countries that grow under dictatorial regimes and we discussed this at length but oftentimes these despotic Leviathan institutions are not really the cause of the growth and if you look at Turkey and Russia and Brazil I think they all sort of paint a picture that's not inconsistent with this you know Russia is growing because of natural resources actually when you look at the mismanagement in the economy which is a direct consequence is this despotic politics it's creating a huge inefficiencies and it actually created a big big recession in Turkey actually the situation and Antonio would know this because he was an expert chief of mission chief in in Turkey you know the between 2002 and 2007 which is the period where Turkey grew most was when there were a huge number of political and economic reforms that was the most unusual period for turkey because minority rights were recognized civil society was strengthened the army was weakened and economic institutions were also reformed and that's the deal that's the period where you have productivity growth investment growth you know after 2009 you have a very different picture that's much more of the despotic growth all of these rights have been rescinded the dictatorship has increased journalists are in jail but at the same time the government started spending more and more money and and you have a very different growth and if you look at the data and this is where I am drawing from IMF because they did the best study on this the TFP growth total factor productivity growth is very fast for Turkey between 2002 and 2007 and if you look at it since 2010 so get rid of the recession period it's actually negative so it's a very different type of growth and it's slower but it's also its nature is very different and in fact this is something that in some other research my co-authors James Robinson Pasquale Restrepo and Suresh in I do and I have done you know when you look at the cross country data despite what the popular press often rights democracies grow faster and they grow faster by creating reforms by investing in education investing in health and providing more public services and creating greater efficiencies so so I think there are many problems with democracies the biggest one of them it's very hard work to make democracies work but I think they're actually pretty good for economic growth so don't abandon democracy in Italy a BMOC soon remarkable tropopause EC minuti Pella precision a tre allora Sakuma Nansha tiempo para para el público fashion on demand Amal to brave a yo liberal on Oscar so Yoon : sOooo coleg Pujo animal to Brella ter shaman Caskey - libro oppose lollipop policeman and bail bail analysis super cool is being zero pretty mondo a exponent is Segundo Rockwall a el shamah OG additional do a model easy democracy a democrat riya sen Sally Berta a Lily Berta Sansa Democrat chmod a liberally in queer a Democrat SIA a polka spot a second do we who know the quest mode led Institute any bieber ali asghar cemented democratic head she sorry BAE doona no repair lay in the core dog was affirmed Athena no I don't and I think you know democracies are very sort of a complex term you can define it as a minimal democracy where there are elections but you know the problem is that fascism in general and and I think in this it has a lot to do with it has a lot of parallel with right-wing populism is a democratic movement you could not have had fascism like of the Italian sort of the German sort of the Hungarian sort in 19th century when the franchise was restricted to a small number of people it's it's a movement of mass politics and it claims to speak for the majority and come to power via the majority but as soon as it comes to power it starts undermining the same institutions so you know the Hitler and Mussolini were both very clear on this they wanted to come to power and they wanted to appeal to the majority will but they had no intent and interest in having free and fair elections and if you look at that to around the world that's exactly true in all of these authoritarian regimes you know arrow on in Turkey for example claims to be a Democrat and his claim is that he's been elected by the majority but that but then he continuously undermines democratic institutions free media prevents you know other parties competing for power in on an equal footing to sort of read the majoritarian legitimacy so so in that sense I think there isn't a model of durable democracy that sacrifices Liberty because Liberty is the scenic one known of political participation so if you go back to the corridor the corridor isn't defined by people go and vote for a candidate every four years it's defined by society having power so if you take Liberty from society that power is going to evaporate Grantham processional glue salut salut tow grazie Dharam spero de la barrera thank you espero Travon disagree on need each a library each aguante need a magician compute Elena to Nadeem apotheca grazie buona sera wanna go - not Fiona thank you thank you bluegrass there
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