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2024諾貝爾經濟學獎由三位學者以對「國家富庶」根本原因的研究獲獎(該欄2024/10/15、10/16)。三位得主分別是：阿齊模格教授、羅賓生教授、和江森教授；其中羅賓生教授也是一位政治學家。
由於三位強調「制度健全為國家富庶之本」，我把他們的理論(戲)稱為「制度決定論」。阿齊模格教授和羅賓生教授的代表著之一是《國家為什麼失敗：權力、財富、和貧窮的本源》。我手頭剛好收集了三篇這本書的書評；每篇討論的重點不同。把它們轉載於此，大家或許能從中一窺該書全貌。排序先後依篇幅短長而定。
本城市此區和此區已經陸續刊登多篇三位的專題論文，請參考。
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把手按在聖經上說謊
個人認為清教徒文化讓美國强大，但是
近年來大多數美國人放棄清教徒文化(就是不信神了)，尤其是
川普墮落到極點，竟然擺出黑道老大嘴臉面對世界，
難怪美國日漸走下坡！
陳之藩當年在美國見識到清教徒文化讓美國人以繼承遺產為恥，
以繳稅為光榮，現在的美國人則以不繳稅為光榮，
美國人墮落雖不是今日始，但是川普是集其大成者，
川普把手按在聖經上說謊的嘴臉，讓美國人失去典範的價值。
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《國家為什麼失敗》書評 3 – Francis Fukuyama
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在三位評論者中，福山博士顯然比福里德門和貝斯兩位多了幾把刷子。
Acemoglu and Robinson on Why Nations Fail
Francis Fukuyama, 03/26/12
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have just published Why Nations Fail, a big book on development that will attract a lot of attention. The latest fad in development studies has been to conduct controlled randomized experiments on a host of micro-questions, such as whether co-payments for mosquito bed nets improves their uptake. Whether such studies will ever aggregate upwards into an understanding of development is highly questionable. By contrast, Acemoglu and Robinson have resolutely focused on only the largest of macro questions: how contemporary institutions were shaped by colonial ones, why it was that regions of the world that were the richest in the year 1500 were among the world’s poorest today, or how rich elites were ever persuaded to redistribute their wealth. In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson restate and enlarge upon earlier articles like “The Colonial Origin of Institutions” and “Reversal of Fortune,” but in contrast to their academic work, the new book has no regressions or game theory and is written in accessible English for general readers.
Acemoglu and Robinson (henceforth AR; Simon Johnson of the old AJR team dropped out of this volume) have two related insights: that institutions matter for economic growth, and that institutions are what they are because the political actors in any given society have an interest in keeping them that way. These may seem like obvious statements, but many people in the development business haven’t gotten the message. Among development specialists there is what AR term the “ignorance” hypothesis: failure to develop is the result of not knowing either what good policies are (this was the old Washington Consensus) or, now that the focus has shifted to institutions, what good institutions are or how to create them. Many development agencies act as if leaders in developing countries want to do the right thing, if only they knew how, and that development assistance should therefore consist of sending smart people from places like Washington out to teach them, perhaps accompanied by some structural adjustment arm-twisting.
By contrast AR argue that bad institutions are the product of political systems that create private gains for elites in developing countries, even if by doing so they impoverish the broader society. (Think Nigeria, which has many multimillionaires while 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.) Doing the “right thing” would take away the rents they receive, which is why no amount of hectoring or threats to withhold the next loan tranche has much effect on their behavior. They are making almost the identical point to the one made in the 2009 book Violence and Social Orders by Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW), who argue that most underdeveloped societies are what they term “limited access orders” in which a rent-seeking coalition limits access to both the political and economic system. Indeed, I see no real difference between the “extractive/inclusive” distinction in AR and the “limited/open” access distinction in NWW.
This conclusion about the primacy of institutions and politics for development has important implications for policy as AR point out. If growth is a byproduct not just of good policies like trade liberalization, which can in theory be turned on like a light switch, but rather of basic institutions, then the prospects of foreign aid look dim. Bad governments can waste huge amounts of well-intentioned outside resources; indeed, the flow of aid dollars into poor countries can undermine governance by undercutting accountability, thereby leaving societies worse off than they would otherwise be. As the American nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have indicated, moreover, foreign efforts to help construct basic institutions are an uphill struggle. Bad institutions exist because it is in the interests of powerful political forces within the poor country itself to keep things this way. Hamid Karzai understands perfectly well how clean government is supposed to work; it’s just that he has no interest in seeing that happen in Afghanistan. Unless the outsiders can figure out a way to change this political calculus, aid is largely useless.
So far, so good. AR have done a great deal over the years to focus the attention of both theorists and policymakers on institutions, and to shape the emerging consensus on the importance of politics to growth within the economics profession. It is, then, very disappointing that their more fully fleshed out book fails to go very much further than these broad conclusions, skirting critical issues of exactly what sort of institutions are necessary to promote growth, and failing to come to grips with some critical historical facts.
The first problem with their analysis is conceptual. They present a sharply bifurcated distinction between what they call good “inclusive” economic and political institutions, which are sometimes also labeled “pluralistic,” in contrast to what they call bad “extractive” or “absolutist” ones. Unfortunately, these terms are way too broad, so broad indeed that AR never provide a clear definition of everything they encompass, or how they map onto concepts already in use. “Inclusive” economic institutions, for example, seem to include formal property rights and court systems, but also have to do with social conditions that allow individuals access to the market such as education and local custom. “Inclusive” political institutions would seem to imply modern electoral democracy, but they also include an impersonal centralized state as well as access to legal institutions, and forms of political participation that fall well short of modern democracy. We find, for example, that England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 was incipiently inclusive, despite the fact that well under ten percent of the population had a right to vote. When AR first used the term “extractive” in their early articles, it referred to truly extractive practices like the mines of Potosí or the sugar plantations of the Caribbean which extracted commodities out of the labor of slaves. In the current book extractive seems to mean any institution that denies any degree of participation to citizens, from tribal communities to ranchers in 19th century Argentina to the contemporary Chinese Communist Party.
Since each of these broad terms (inclusive/extractive, absolutist/pluralistic) encompasses so many possible meanings, it is very hard to come up with a clear metric of either. It also makes it hard to falsify any of their historical claims. Since more real-world societies are some combination of extractive and inclusive institutions, any given degree of growth (or its absence) can then be attributed either to inclusive or extractive qualities ex post.
The use of such broad categories and the failure to distinguish between the different components of political “inclusion” greatly diminish the book’s usefulness, because one wants to know how these components individually affect growth, and how they interact with one another. There is for example a large literature comparing the separate impacts of a modern state, rule of law, and democracy on growth, which tends to show that the first two of these factors have a far greater influence on outcomes than democracy. There is in fact a lot of reason to think that expansion of the franchise in a very poor country may actually hurt state performance because it opens the way to clientelism and various forms of corruption. The Indian political system is so inclusive that it can’t begin major infrastructure projects because of all the lawsuits and democratic protest, especially when compared to the extractive Chinese one.
Furthermore, as Samuel Huntington pointed out many years ago, expanded political participation may destabilize societies (and thereby hurt growth) if there is a failure of political institutions to develop in tandem. All of the good things in the “inclusive” basket, in other words, don’t necessarily go together, and in some cases may be at odds. You never get much hint of this in Why Nations Fail, however, since the authors seem to argue the more inclusion the better, along any of its axes.
Like many other works making use of history but written by economists, the AR volume contains some pretty problematic facts and interpretations. It makes the case, for example, that Rome shifted away from an inclusive Republic towards absolutist Empire, and that this was then responsible for Rome’s subsequent economic decline. Leave aside the fact that Rome’s power and wealth continued to increase in the two centuries after Augustus, and that its eastern wing managed to hold on remarkably until the fifteenth century. It can be argued that the shift from the narrow oligarchy of the Republic to a monarchy with highly developed legal institutions actually increased access to the political system on the part of ordinary Roman citizens, while solving the acute problem of political instability that bedeviled the late Republic.
Similarly, following on a tradition begun by Douglass North and Barry Weingast, AR point to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 as a critical juncture marking both the establishment of secure property rights and an “inclusive” political system. The latter point is fair enough, but English property rights were rooted in a much older tradition of common law dating from the Norman invasion, and had created a strong commercial civilization well before 1689. The Glorious Revolution was much less important in establishing the credibility of property rights per se, than of the Crown as a borrower, which explains why English public debt exploded in the century following that event.
Given their overall framework, the hardest thing for AR to explain is contemporary China. China today according to them is more inclusive than Maoist China, but still far from the standard of inclusion set by the US and Europe, and yet has been the fastest growing large country over the past three decades. The Chinese restrict access to the market, engage in financial repression, fail to secure property rights, have no Western-style rule of law, and are ruled by a non-transparent oligarchy called the Communist Party. How to explain their economic success? Rather than see this as a threat to their model (i.e., more inclusion, more growth) AR pull a slight of hand by arguing that Chinese growth won’t last and that their system will eventually come crashing down (like Rome did, after about 200 years?). I actually agree that China will eventually crash. But even if that happens, a theory of development that can’t really explain the most remarkable growth story of our time is not, it seems to me, much of a theory.
The broad conclusions of Why Nations Fail are, thus, incontrovertible and of great importance to policy (which is why, incidentally, I gave it a positive blurb). One only wishes then that the authors had made better use of basic categories long in play in other parts of the social sciences (state, rule of law, patrimonialism, clientelism, democracy, and the like) instead of inventing neologisms that obscure more than they reveal.
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《國家為什麼失敗》書評 2 -- Warren Bass
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索引：
Botswana：波札那共和國
brio：生動，有趣；此處：生花妙筆
cajole：哄騙，勾引
exploitative：剝削的，榨取的
extractive：采掘的，|抽取的，榨取的；此處：橫征暴斂的
garrulous：此處：娓娓道來
privation：(生活必需品的)匱乏，缺乏，貧困
rapacious：貪婪的，狼心狗肺的，巧取豪奪的
stupefying：使人昏昏沉沉的，(困倦、無聊、或吸毒)使人迷糊的 ，令人震驚的
wheeze：喘息，氣喘所發出的聲音，(因呼吸困難而)發出粗重的呼吸聲
Book review: ‘Why Nations Fail,’ by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Warren Bass, 04/20/12
“Why Nations Fail” is a sweeping attempt to explain the gut-wrenching poverty that leaves 1.29 billion people in the developing world struggling to live on less than $1.25 a day. You might expect it to be a bleak, numbing read. It’s not. It’s bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece.
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, two energetic, widely respected development scholars, start with a bit of perspective: Even in today’s glum economic climate, the average American is seven times as prosperous as the average Mexican, 10 times as prosperous as the average Peruvian, about 20 times as prosperous as the average inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa and about 40 times as prosperous as the average citizen of such particularly desperate African countries as Mali, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone. What explains such stupefying disparities?
The authors’ answer is simple: “institutions, institutions, institutions.” They are impatient with traditional social-science arguments for the persistence of poverty, which variously chalk it up to bad geographic luck, hobbling cultural patterns, or ignorant leaders and technocrats. Instead, “Why Nations Fail” focuses on the historical currents and critical junctures that mold modern polities: the processes of institutional drift that produce political and economic institutions that can be either inclusive — focused on power-sharing, productivity, education, technological advances and the well-being of the nation as a whole; or extractive — bent on grabbing wealth and resources away from one part of society to benefit another.
To understand what extractive institutions look like, consider les Grosses Legumes (the Big Vegetables), the sardonic Congolese nickname for the obscenely pampered clique around Mobutu Sese Seko, the strongman who ruled what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. When Mobutu decreed that he wanted a palace built for himself at his birthplace, the authors note, he made sure that the airport had a landing strip big enough to accommodate the Concordes he liked to rent from Air France. Mobutu and the Big Vegetables weren’t interested in developing Congo. They were interested in strip-mining it, sucking out its vast mineral wealth for themselves. They were, at best, vampire capitalists.
But the roots of Congo’s nightmarish poverty and strife go back centuries. Before the arrival of European imperialists, what was then known as the Kingdom of Kongo was ruled by the oligarchic forerunners of the Big Vegetables, who drew their staggering wealth from arbitrary taxation and a busy slave trade. And when the European colonists showed up, they made a dreadful situation even worse — especially under the rapacious rule of King Leopold II of Belgium.
When Congo finally won its independence in 1960, it was a feeble, decentralized state burdened with a predatory political class and exploitative economic institutions — too weak to deliver basic services but just strong enough to keep Mobutu and his cronies on top; too poor to provide for its citizenry but just wealthy enough to give elites something to fight over.
Acemoglu and Robinson argue that when you combine rotten regimes, exploitative elites and self-serving institutions with frail, decentralized states, you have something close to a prescription for poverty, conflict and even outright failure. “Nations fail,” the authors write, “when they have extractive economic institutions, supported by extractive political institutions that impede and even block economic growth.”
But even as vicious cycles such as Congo’s can churn out poverty, virtuous cycles can help bend the long arc of history toward growth and prosperity. Contrast the conflict and misery in Congo with Botswana — which, when it won its independence in 1966, had just 22 university graduates, seven miles of paved roads and glowering white-supremacist regimes on most of its borders. But Botswana today has “the highest per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa” — around the level of such success stories as Hungary and Costa Rica.
How did Botswana pull it off? “By quickly developing inclusive economic and political institutions after independence,” the authors write. Botswana holds regular elections, has never had a civil war and enforces property rights. It benefited, the authors argue, from modest centralization of the state and a tradition of limiting the power of tribal chiefs that had survived colonial rule. When diamonds were discovered, a far-sighted law ensured that the newfound riches were shared for the national good, not elite gain. At the critical juncture of independence, wise Botswanan leaders such as its first president, Seretse Khama, and his Botswana Democratic Party chose democracy over dictatorship and the public interest over private greed.
In other words: It’s the politics, stupid. Khama’s Botswana succeeded at building institutions that could produce prosperity. Mobutu’s Congo and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe didn’t even try. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the protesters in Egypt’s Tahrir Square had it right: They were being held back by a feckless, corrupt state and a society that wouldn’t let them fully use their talents. Egypt was poor “precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that has organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people.”
Such unhappy nations as North Korea, Sierra Leone, Haiti and Somalia have all left authority concentrated in a few grasping hands, which use whatever resources they can grab to tighten their hold on power. The formula is stark: Inclusive governments and institutions mean prosperity, growth and sustained development; extractive governments and institutions mean poverty, privation and stagnation — even over the centuries. The depressing cycle in which one oligarchy often replaces another has meant that “the lands where the Industrial Revolution originally did not spread remain relatively poor.” Nothing succeeds like success, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, and nothing fails like failure.
So what about China, which is increasingly cited as a new model of “authoritarian growth”? The authors are respectful but ultimately unimpressed. They readily admit that extractive regimes can produce temporary economic growth so long as they’re politically centralized — just consider the pre-Brezhnev Soviet Union, whose economic system once had its own Western admirers. But while “Chinese economic institutions are incomparably more inclusive today than three decades ago,”China is still fundamentally saddled with an extractive regime.
In fairly short order, such authoritarian economies start to wheeze: By throttling the incentives for technological progress, creativity and innovation, they choke off sustained, long-term growth and prosperity. (“You cannot force people to think and have good ideas by threatening to shoot them,” the authors note dryly.) Chinese growth, they argue, “is based on the adoption of existing technologies and rapid investment,” not the anxiety-inducing process of creative destruction that produces lasting innovation and growth. By importing foreign technologies and exporting low-end products, China is playing a spirited game of catch-up — but that’s not how races are won.
So how can the United States help the developing world? Certainly not by cutting foreign aid or conditioning it; as the authors note, you’d hardly expect someone like Mobutu to suddenly chuck out the exploitative institutions that underpin his power “just for a little more foreign aid,” and even a bit of relief for the truly desperate, even if inefficiently administered, is a lot better than nothing. But ultimately, instead of trying to cajole leaders opposed to their people’s interests, the authors suggest we’d be better off structuring foreign aid so that it seeks to bring in marginalized and excluded groups and leaders, and empowers broader sections of the population. For Acemoglu and Robinson, it is not enough to simply swap one set of oligarchs for another.
"Why Nations Fail" isn't perfect. The basic taxonomy of inclusive vs. extractive starts to get repetitive. After chapters of brio, the authors seem almost sheepish about the vagueness of their concluding policy advice. And their scope and enthusiasm engender both chuckles of admiration — one fairly representative chapter whizzes from Soviet five-year plans to the Neolithic Revolution and the ancient Mayan city states — and the occasional cluck of caution.
It would take several battalions of regional specialists to double-check their history and analysis, and while the overall picture is detailed and convincing, the authors would have to have a truly superhuman batting average to get every nuance right. Their treatment of the Middle East, for instance, is largely persuasive, but they are a little harsh on the Ottoman Empire, which they basically write off as “highly absolutist” without noting its striking diversity and relatively inclusive sociopolitical arrangements, which often gave minority communities considerably more running room (and space for entrepreneurship) than their European co-religionists.
Acemoglu and Robinson have run the risks of ambition, and cheerfully so. For a book about the dismal science and some dismal plights, “Why Nations Fail” is a surprisingly captivating read. This is, in every sense, a big book. Readers will hope that it makes a big difference.
Warren Bass is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and a former adviser to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice.
WHY NATIONS FAIL：The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson；Crown. 529 pp. $30
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「美國優越論」參考文章
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謝謝亓官先生網友光臨和惠賜高見。
的確，「文化」具有相當大的「形塑力」、「影響力」，自然也就「決定」著人類方方面面的決策和行動(請參見此文，該欄2024/11/02)。本城市刊登過很多和這個議題相關的文章，不在此一一列舉。
「美國優越論」是討論美國所以強大的思潮之一。此欄(第3頁：《缺乏自信的超強》，2023/12/16、《美國優越論在2024》，2023/12/16、第2頁：《《美國優越論在2024》評論》，2023/12/17)；《現代性的左傾盲動化》，該欄2024/05/14；以及拙作《走出歐洲中心主義的心路歷程 -- 命運共同體 VS 文明衝突論》聽後 (第1節)等，對它都或多或少有所著墨，歡迎參考和賜教。
等「制度決定論」這個議題告一段落後，我再就美國和清教徒這些議題略抒淺見。
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個人認為清教徒文化讓美國强大，但是
近年來大多數美國人放棄清教徒文化，尤其是川普墮落到極點，竟然擺出黑道老大嘴臉面對世界，難怪美國日漸走下坡！
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《國家為什麼失敗》書評 1 – T. L. Friedman
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Why Nations Fail
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 03/31/12
I’M reading a fascinating new book called “Why Nations Fail.” The more you read it, the more you appreciate what a fool’s errand we’re on in Afghanistan and how much we need to totally revamp our whole foreign aid strategy. But most intriguing are the warning flares the authors put up about both America and China.
Co-authored by the M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson, “Why Nations Fail” argues that the key differentiator between countries is “institutions.” Nations thrive when they develop “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and they fail when those institutions become “extractive” and concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of only a few.
“Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few,” they write.
“Inclusive economic institutions, are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions,” which “distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to achieve some amount of political centralization so as to establish law and order, the foundations of secure property rights, and an inclusive market economy.” Conversely, extractive political institutions that concentrate power in the hands of a few reinforce extractive economic institutions to hold power.
Acemoglu explained in an interview that their core point is that countries thrive when they build political and economic institutions that “unleash,” empower and protect the full potential of each citizen to innovate, invest and develop. Compare how well Eastern Europe has done since the fall of communism with post-Soviet states like Georgia or Uzbekistan, or Israel versus the Arab states, or Kurdistan versus the rest of Iraq. It’s all in the institutions.
The lesson of history, the authors argue, is that you can’t get your economics right if you don’t get your politics right, which is why they don’t buy the notion that China has found the magic formula for combining political control and economic growth.
“Our analysis,” says Acemoglu, “is that China is experiencing growth under extractive institutions — under the authoritarian grip of the Communist Party, which has been able to monopolize power and mobilize resources at a scale that has allowed for a burst of economic growth starting from a very low base,” but it’s not sustainable because it doesn’t foster the degree of “creative destruction” that is so vital for innovation and higher incomes.
“Sustained economic growth requires innovation,” the authors write, “and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics.”
“Unless China makes the transition to an economy based on creative destruction, its growth will not last,” argues Acemoglu. But can you imagine a 20-year-old college dropout in China being allowed to start a company that challenges a whole sector of state-owned Chinese companies funded by state-owned banks? he asks.
The post-9/11 view that what ailed the Arab world and Afghanistan was a lack of democracy was not wrong, said Acemoglu. What was wrong was thinking that we could easily export it. Democratic change, to be sustainable, has to emerge from grassroots movements, “but that does not mean there is nothing we can do,” he adds.
For instance, we should be transitioning away from military aid to regimes like Egypt and focusing instead on enabling more sectors of that society to have a say in politics. Right now, I’d argue, our foreign aid to Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan is really a ransom we pay their elites not to engage in bad behavior. We need to turn it into bait.
Acemoglu suggests that instead of giving Cairo another $1.3 billion in military aid that only reinforces part of the elite, we should insist that Egypt establish a committee representing all sectors of its society that would tell us which institutions — schools, hospitals — they want foreign aid to go to, and have to develop appropriate proposals.
If we’re going to give money, “let’s use it to force them to open up the table and to strengthen the grass-roots,” says Acemoglu.
We can only be a force multiplier. Where you have grass-roots movements that want to build inclusive institutions, we can enhance them. But we can’t create or substitute for them. Worse, in Afghanistan and many Arab states, our policies have often discouraged grass-roots from emerging by our siding with convenient strongmen. So there’s nothing to multiply. If you multiply zero by 100, you still get zero.
And America? Acemoglu worries that our huge growth in economic inequality is undermining the inclusiveness of America’s institutions, too. “The real problem is that economic inequality, when it becomes this large, translates into political inequality.” When one person can write a check to finance your whole campaign, how inclusive will you be as an elected official to listen to competing voices?
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