A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous “wisdom of crowds” are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that “institutions matter”: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from.

Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.

But the simple availability of information about corruption tends not to produce genuine accountability because the politically active part of the population are members of clientelistic networks.

The shift in agendas of both left and right toward the protection of ever narrower group identities ultimately threatens the possibility of communication and collective action.

In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years. A.

Political liberty – that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves – does not depend only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when action is required.

On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are somehow intrinsic to the country’s DNA.

The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which had earlier been defeated at great cost.

Human beings cooperate to compete, and they compete to cooperate. The birth of the Leviathan did not permanently solve the problem of violence; it simply moved it to a higher level.

The obligation to respect universal human rights has been voluntarily undertaken by most countries around the world, and rightly so. But all liberal democracies are built on top of states, whose jurisdiction is limited by their territorial reach. No state can undertake an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and whether the world would be better off if they all tried to do so is not clear.