By Dani Rodrik
CAMBRIDGE – In Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Birds, an American bomber pilot crashes his plane in the Arabian desert and is stranded among the locals in a nearby refugee camp. He finds himself talking about thieves with a local shopkeeper. “Our government is the biggest thief,” he explains. “It steals from the living, it steals from the dead.” The shopkeeper replies, “Thank God we don’t have that problem. We just steal from each other.”
This little vignette just about summarizes the key message of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s new book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. Acemoglu and Robinson’s thesis is that prospects for freedom and prosperity balance on a knife-edge between state oppression and the lawlessness and violence that society so often inflicts on itself. Give the state too much of an upper hand over society, and you have despotism. Render the state weak vis-à-vis society, and you get anarchy.