The Narrow Corridor

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty,” Penguin Press, 2019, 496 pp.

The Power Of Society figure reproduced below contains the theme of this book.  Liberty in society and ultimately state capacity depend on the balance of power between state and society.  If the state becomes too powerful relative to society, we wind up with the Despotic Leviathan.  If the state falls significantly below society's power, we get the Absent Leviathan.  

As the figure below illustrates, we need both state and society attaining relative equal power, neither getting the upper hand: this balanced state is the narrow corridor.  Falling out of this narrow corridor creates a despotism like China, or, absent sufficient state power, a society with castes like India or tribalism as that in Afghanistan.  (Using a teeter-totter as a metaphor works for me but misses the wider corridor that is created over time because of an entrenched tradition and inertia that the author's metaphor captures).

THE POWER OF SOCIETY FIGURE:  The general principle is:  to move into the corridor a nation needs a balance between a powerful centralizing state institution and an assertive, mobilized society able to hold its own against the state’s power and shackle its political elites.  CLICK ON FIGURE TO ENLARGE

My Notes: 

Pg. xii: Locke maintained that liberty must start with people being free from violence, intimidation, and other demeaning acts.  People must be able to make free choices about their lives and have the means to carry them out without the menace of unreasonable punishment or draconian social sanctions.

Pg. 8:  In 1978, the anthropologist Carol Ember documented very high rates of warfare in hunter-gatherer societies, with a war at least every other year in two-thirds of the studied societies. Steven Pinker compiled evidence from twenty-seven stateless societies and estimated a rate of death caused by violence of over 500 per 100,000 people—100 times the current homicide rate in the US, which is presently at 5 per 100,000, or over 1,000 times that in Norway, which is about 0.5 per 100,000.  Note: With a death rate of over 500 per 100,000, a typical inhabitant of this hunter-gatherer society had about a 25 percent likelihood of being killed within a period of fifty years.  Also, it’s not just murder that makes the lives of stateless societies precarious.  Life expectancy at birth in stateless societies was very low, varying between twenty-one and thirty-seven years (because of the high mortality of infants). 

Pg. 17:  In 2012 there were around 350 reeducation camps with 160,000 detainees in China.  A person can be committed to such a camp for up to four years without any legal process.  The reeducation camps are just one part of an extensive gulag of detention.  In May 2014 the system was ‘re-educating’ 709,000 people.

Pg. 40:  The Red Queen Effect:  The leviathan can build greater capacity and become much stronger when society is willing to cooperate with it, but this cooperation requires people to trust that they can control the Leviathan.  But it’s not just trust and cooperation.  Liberty and ultimately state capacity depend on the balance of power between state and society.  If the state and the elites become too powerful, we wind up with the Despotic Leviathan.  If they fall behind, we get the Absent Leviathan.  So we need both state and society running together with neither getting the upper hand.  This is not unlike the Red Queen effect described by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.  In the book, Alice meets and runs a race with the Red Queen.  Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began, ‘but she noticed that even though they both appeared to be running hard, ‘the trees and the other things around them never seem to change their places at all: however fast they went they never seemed to pass anything.’  The Red Queen effect refers to a situation where you have to keep on running just to maintain your position, like the state and society running fast to maintain the balance between them.   

Pg. 63:  This book is about liberty.  Liberty depends on the different types of Leviathans and their evolution—whether a society will live without an effective state, put up with a despotic state, or manage to forge a balance of power that opens the way for the emergence of a Shackled Leviathan (a corridor) and the gradual flourishing of liberty.

Pg. 68f:  The US Constitution reflects the contest and compromises needed to steer a middle course (corridor) during the founding of the nation.  The Bill of Rights wasn’t the only concession that was necessary for ratification.  The issue of states’ rights was a litmus test for Southern elites hell-bent on protecting slavery and their assets.  To this end, the founders agreed that the Bill of Rights would apply only to federal legislation, not to state legislation.  (The 14th amendment changed this).  Discrimination was not just woven into the very fabric of the Constitution where a larger proportion of the population only counted as three-fifths of a free person when determining a state’s representation in Congress, it was also forged by the deep-rooted norms in many parts of the country.  So intense discrimination and dominance against black Americans lived on well after the Civil War.

Pg. 69:  Sundown towns were wide-spread throughout the nation, especially in the South.  In 1936 Victor Green, and African American, published “The Negro Motorist Green-Book" providing detailed instructions to black motorists about where they were allowed after dark or where they could go to the toilet (the last edition is dated 1966).  [Manitowoc WI was allegedly one of these towns—here is a link for details about that community; also, 44 of the 89 counties that Route 66 wound through contained ‘sundown towns.’].

Pg. 69:  Communist China when examined deeply reveals that despotic though it is, it possesses less capacity than a Shackled Leviathan like the US because it doesn’t have a robust society to push it, cooperate with it, or contest its power to push it into the corridor.  For example, in the Chinese education system everything is up for sale including front-row seats near the blackboard.  Teachers expect gift cards, etc.  Of course, government jobs are sold as well.

Pg. 152f:  There was nothing preordained about the rise of Europe.  Agriculture originated in the Middle East and then in China.  It did not reach Britain until 4000 BCE, over 5,000 years after it had become established in the Levant.  Similarly, the first towns and cities emerged in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.  But by the eleventh-century parts of Europe had developed republican governments and were in the middle of a massive economic boom.  How they got there is the result of two historical events that, first, created a fortuitous balance between the powers of central authority and those of common men.  It is this balance that put Europe into the corridor, setting in motion the Red Queen effect in a relentless process of state-society competition.  The balance was a consequence of the takeover of Europe at the end of the fifth century by democratically organized tribal societies centered on assemblies and norms of consensual decision making and second, the legacy of critical elements of state institutions and political hierarchy absorbed from the Roman Empire and the Christian church.  Think of these two elements as the blades of a pair of scissors.  If only one of the two blades was present you got the Byzantium Despotic Leviathan or, as in Iceland where there was little political development and no state-building, you got the Absent Leviathan.

Pg. 178:  The destruction of the feudal institutions in Europe happened in the wake of the Black Death that wiped out at least one-third of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1352.  The cage of norms of the feudal system disintegrated bit by bit. 

Pg. 191:  William Blackstone summarized the common law situation regarding women in 1765:  “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”  This is in line with the 1632 compilation, The Laws Resolution of Women Rights: “That which the husband hath is his own.  That which the wife hath is the husband’s.”  It wasn’t until 1928 that all adult women in Britain got the right to vote.  Predictably, norms and economic relations changed more slowly.

Pg. 194:  The emergence of the Shackled Leviathan in Europe starting in the fifth and sixth centuries was a political and social revolution, even if it took place with gradual, sometimes tentative, steps.  The Industrial Revolution which got underway in the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain, was its economic offshoot because it was produced by the liberty, opportunities, and incentives that the Shackled Leviathan made possible.  No cage of norms blocked the experimentation or the abilities of men to succeed (p. 198).

Pg. 198f:  The history of Europe contains many theories that see something distinctive in Europe long before the Middle Ages—its Judeo-Christian culture, its unique geography, its European values whatever they were—making its subsequent political developments and economic ascendancy inevitable.  This book disagrees with these theories.  There wasn’t anything unique or inevitable in early European history that preordained the rise of the Shackled Leviathan, other than the fortuitous balance of power created by the two blades of the European scissors—state institutions from the Roman Empire and participatory norms and institutions from Germanic tribes.  Both scissor blades were needed.

Pg. 200:  The Romans centralized institutions and the norms and popular assemblies of Germanic tribes were, of course, unique to Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries.  But the general principle here—that to move into the corridor a nation needs a balance between powerful centralizing state institutions and an assertive mobilized society able to hold its own against the state’s power and shackle its political elites—is more broadly applicable here.

Pg. 218:  The defining feature of despotism is its ability to deny society the means of participating in political decision making.  This happened in China with the rise of the Qing state in 1636 and has remained to this day.

Pg. 220ff:  Since the seventeenth century, free media in Europe has played a critical role in the organization of an active, assertive society (this had no parallel in China).  Currently, China is piloting its ‘social credit system.’  Each Chinese citizen will be monitored and given a social credit score.  Monitoring is done of all online activities as well as erection of face recognition cameras (200 million so far).  Points will be subtracted from your social credit score even if a relative or friend does something the authorities don’t like.  A person with top social credit scores will get special treatment at hotels and airports, easier credit from banks, and preferential access to elite universities and top jobs.

Pg. 240ff: While the Red Queen got to work in Europe and simultaneously expanded state capacity, institutionalized and strengthened society’s mobilization, and in the process dissolved the cage of norms, no such thing happened in India.  Even though India has been a democracy since 1950 and liberalized its economy in the 1990s, the dominance of caste and the gamut of restrictive, divisive, and hierarchical norms have persisted and bred a state devoid of real capacity or much interest in helping its poorest citizens.  The nature and the legacy of the caste system manufactured ingrained hierarchies and inequities in society as well as distorted the nature of politics.  Society, fragmented and at war with itself, failed to monitor state institutions and singularly lacked the ability to push the state to build further capacity.

Pg. 280:  Potentially divergent influences on a nation’s political development come not only from military threats or demographic shocks but also from major economic opportunities. 

Pg. 287:  When Putin took over and exiled or jailed the oligarchs—unless they were his special friends—any modicum of liberty that had emerged since 1989 was finished.  Russia was too far outside the corridor, even though the collapse of the despotic state sent the state in the right direction, it wasn’t enough to tame the Russian state, which just picked up where the Soviet state had left off and reconstructed its despotic control over society.

Pg. 333:  The story of the FBI and its Director J. Edgar Hoover illustrate how the Executive (Teddy Roosevelt) circumvented the Constitution.  The Justice Department was founded in 1870 and charged with upholding laws and fighting crimes, including those against the US.  But it had no police force, so as usual the public-private partnership model was followed and private agencies like the Pinkerton’s were employed.  However, Roosevelt wanted to build a federal police force.  His attorney general, Charles J. Bonaparte, went to Congress in 1908 to get permission and was turned down by the House for funding.  Congress didn’t want a ‘central secret-service bureau as there is in Russia.’  Bonaparte ignored Congress and established a new investigative division using the expense funds of the Justice Department while Congress was in recess.  Later he assured Congress that this would not be a secret police force.    

Hoover became the chief of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, charged with monitoring ‘enemies of the state.’  Allied with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover started drawing up a list of Communists, anarchists, socialists, and others he viewed as subversives, especially among immigrants.  In 1924 Hoover was promoted to head the Bureau and remained in that position until he died in 1972.  Hoover turned the FBI into a mass surveillance force unaccountable to Congress, courts, or the president.  COINTELPRO, his program between 1966 and 1971, aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and otherwise neutralizing various domestic political groups and organizations, including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists, and leaders in the civil rights movement, the vast majority of which were nonviolent.  The 1975 Church committee investigation finally brought this all to light.  The CIA was founded in 1947 has a similar history of abuse, including many assassinations carried out in other countries.

Pg. 344:  Failing the Duck Test:  Even though some states look like a state, swim like a state, and may be states, they may not be.  States like Argentina, Colombia, and several other Latin American and African countries that fail the duck test and, despite appearances, lack anything beyond the most rudimentary state capacity: the author calls such states Paper Leviathans.  Their power is hollow; it is incoherent and disorganized in most domains, and it is almost completely absent when you go to outlying areas of the country they are supposed to be ruling over.  (A study by Dalton found that to understand Liberian politics, knowledge of kinship connections are more useful than knowledge of the Liberian constitution. P. 361)

Pg. 381:  A key enforcer of the cage of norms in Saudi Arabia is the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, typically translated as The Religious Police which was created in 1926.  As the Saudi state consolidated its power, the cage of norms tightened.  This was partly because of concessions to the Wahhabi ulama.  But it was also because it was quite useful in shoring up despotism.  This same strategy of marrying unchecked despotism with an intense cage of norms has been used throughout much of the Middle East.

Pg. 389:  The fact that the strategy of manipulating the ulama for the goals of the Saudi Despotic Leviathan helps explain how Osama bin Laden was forged in the Saudi crucible and why fifteen of the nineteen 9_11 hijackers were Saudi citizens.  The concoction of Despotic Leviathan and the institutional structure of Islam doesn’t just intensify the cage of norms, it creates terrorism, violence, and instability.

Pg. 391:  In the last free election Germany held in November 1932, the Nazis received about 33 percent of the vote.  As late as 1928 they had polled less than 3 percent.  The 1929 Wall Street crash changed all that. 

Pg. 419:  The US populist movement has some common hallmarks to past movements.  These hallmarks include rhetoric that pits the ‘people’ against the scheming elite (deep state), an emphasis on the need to overhaul the system and its institutions (because they are not working for the people), trust in a leader who (supposedly) represents the people’s true wishes and interests, and a repudiation of all sorts of constraints and attempts to compromise because they will stand in the way of the movement and its leader.  Contemporary populist movements including that in France, the Netherlands, Venezuela (started by Chavez), and by Donald Trump in the US, all have these features as did the earlier fascist movements (though fascists augmented them with a stronger militarism and fanatical anticommunism).

Pg. 420:  Populist movements can polarize society and create distrust of democratic institutions such as media, DOJ, FBI, State Department, etc.  This is part of what transpired during the Weimar Republic: democratic institutions became grid-locked, the judiciary and security forces could not adjudicate the conflicts in society, and the economy collapsed—with dire consequences for the Germans.  There are certain parallels today.

Pg. 425:  A population failing to benefit from economic changes, feeling that the elites are getting the upper hand, and losing its trust in institutions.  Political parties becoming increasingly polarized and unwilling to compromise.  A strongman claiming to stand for the people against the elites, and asking for the institutional checks to be relaxed so that he can serve the people better.  Sound familiar?  Turkey? Philippines? Marie Le Pen, who came close to an upset victory in the French presidential elections of 2017? Or it could be Donald J. Trump.

Pg. 439fff: Short History Of Modern Turkey:

 In the early 2000s, Turkey was out of the corridor dominated by the military and the bureaucracy.  The Turkish Republic was founded in 1923 after the victory of the forces led by Mustafa Kemal who was later named Ataturk, “Father of Turks.”  Many of the reforms, including the Latin alphabet, the Western dress code, and the restructuring of religious institutions were imposed forcefully on society without any consultation, and those resisting the reforms, for example insisting on wearing the fez rather than Western-style hats, were prosecuted and in some cases executed.

In the decades that followed, the CHP’s (party that Ataturk founded) monopoly of power institutionalized in the one-party system, collapsed, the military and the bureaucracy remained disproportionately powerful.  The military took to coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, whenever it perceived its grip loosening or society mobilizing.  The military and civilian governments, though often secular, were quite willing to use religion for societal control when needed.  The AKP (Justice and Development Party) led by Recep Tayyip Erodogan was a religious, conservative party that came to power in the elections of 2002 with a plurality (though far from a majority) of the vote.  Unlike Japan when in a similar position, several things that needed to go right for a move into the corridor all went wrong.  The military and bureaucratic establishment were hostile, so much so that in April 2007 the military threatened a coup against the AKP.  Though the AKP survived, this event was a watershed in the increasingly polarized, zero-sum relations between the party and the military-bureaucratic establishment.

 Initially, the prodding of the EU was greatly welcomed by the AKP leadership because it was pushing for reduced military tutelage in politics and was arguably one of the reasons why the 2007 military coup attempt failed.  After 2007 the AKP hardened its stance and began to take complete control of different levers of power in the country.  Critical in this process was the alliance between the AKP and the clandestine organization of the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen*, which had taken root in Turkey’s security forces, bureaucracy, judiciary, and educational system.  The AKP had, years before, turned to the Gulen movement, which, thanks to its organization in many high schools and universities, had loyal candidates to place in state institutions.  

*Fethullah Gülen, is a Turkish Islamic preacher who has lived in the United States since 1999.

Erodogan wants Gulen extradited to Turkey. US General Flynn, it appears, was investigating for a way to accommodate Erodogan.  By 2011, Turkey topped the list of countries locking up journalists.  In May 2013, protests erupted in Istanbul.  Soon the protests came to focus on issues of freedom of belief, expression, and the media, the erosion of secularism in Turkish society, and corruption.  In the meantime, Erodogan and Gulen, erstwhile allies when sidelining secularists and leftists, turned against each other, culminating in an unsuccessful coup attempt in July 2016.  The coup appears to have been masterminded by officers aligned with Gulen.  The purging of Gulenists from the security forces, judiciary, and bureaucracy followed.  More than 130,000 people have been fired and more than 50,000 have been arrested.  Erodogan proceeded to introduce an executive presidency with few checks that narrowly became law through a 2017 referendum under martial law. 

So, Turkey missed its opportunity to move into the corridor.  This missed opportunity is telling about what we should expect from China, another celebrated example of despotic state control led by a bureaucratic elite in the form of its Communist Party.

Pg. 450:  The different doorways into the corridor depend on the initial balance of power between state and society.  Starting with a Despotic Leviathan, we need an increase in society’s power (and loosening of the grip of the economic elite or the military-bureaucratic complex).  Starting with a Despotic Leviathan, we need an increase in society's power (and loosening of the grip of the economic elite or the military-bureaucratic complex).  Starting with a Paper Leviathan or a situation where the corridor is absent, we need the state and society to simultaneously increase their powers. 

Pg. 454:  The last four decades have witnessed some notable changes in political institutions around the world.  Take one reasonably well-measured aspect of institutions, whether a country has an electoral democracy where candidates are free to compete and campaign and citizens are free to vote.  By one measure, the number of countries that are electoral democracies has increased from a handful at the end of the nineteenth century, to 40 in the 1970s, to 120 in 2010 (even if the 2010s have not been a good decade for democracy).  Although electoral democracies are not necessarily in the corridor (as for instance India and Latin America) and many nations that historically entered the corridor, such as many in Europe during the Middle Ages, were far from being democratic, there is an elective affinity between democratic regimes and Shackled Leviathans. 

From the massive slave economies of ancient Egypt to serfdom in Europe, to modern slavery in the New World and various types of forced labor in other colonies, including those in Africa, labor coercion has played a fundamental role in most civilizations.  The decline of labor coercion is not the only factor transforming the corridor.  Globalization is another.

Pg. 464:  In the middle of WWII William Beveridge, the director of the London School of Economics (LSE), produced the Beveridge Report that became the foundation of the expansion of the welfare state in the UK.  Its key recommendations included a significant expansion of National Insurance, the program that provides unemployment benefits, sick pay, and pensions, creating universal free healthcare in the guise of the National Health Service and implementing a minimum wage.  Some of the report’s recommendations were implemented during the war, with an expansion of infant, child, and maternity services, a program providing fuel and subsidized milk to mothers and families with children under the age of five, and free school meals for children.  In 1945, the Labour Party swept to power based on its promise to implement the Beveridge Report.  This report and Labor’s implementation of it alarmed Friedrich von Hayek, a noted economist.  He was particularly concerned about ‘socialist’ state planning and administrative regulation of the economy morphing into a type of totalitarianism.  His book The Road to Serfdom, spells out his reasoning, a book that has since become one of the most influential works of social science of the twentieth century.  (A book I reported on some time ago.).  Hayek was worried about the state playing a defining role in influencing wages and the allocation of resources.  Yet, England’s socialist government has not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state that Hayek feared.

Pg. 476:  Two of the most powerful engines of economic prosperity over the last several decades have been economic globalization and the rapid introduction of automation technologies.  Economic globalization has increased the volume of trade, and outsourcing and offshoring have enabled the production process to be distributed around the world to take advantage of lower cost of production for certain tasks and goods.  The economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China, would not have been possible without globalization. 

Pg. 477:  The combined effects of globalization and automation have led to divergent fortunes.  In the US, the pattern of broad-based wage increases ceased after the late 1970s and was replaced by a widening gap between the workers at the bottom of the earnings distribution and those at the top.  Inflation-adjusted earnings of those with a high school education or less declined by more than 20 percent.  US manufacturing employment fell by about 25 percent from the mid-1990s, while the overall employment-to-population ratio has declined significantly since 2000.  Estimates suggest that imports from China alone may have reduced employment in the US by over two million jobs, and the adoption of industrial robots may have led to the loss of as many as 400,000 jobs.  In both cases the majority of the effects were felt by workers at the lower end of the skill distribution.  Similar trends are visible in other advanced economies.

Pg. 478:  Rapid deregulation of several industries in the US, accompanied by more modest changes in other developed economies, has been a major contributor to inequality as well.  Particularly important was financial deregulation.  The bedrock of the postwar financial system in the US was Regulation Q,” which restricted interest rates on savings accounts, limiting competition between different financial institutions, as well as interstate branching restrictions that prevented banks from competing for deposits in multiple states.  The Glass-Steagall Act augmented this by separating retail banking (mainly deposit-taking and lending) from the riskier business of investment banking.  Between 1980 and 2006, the financial sector grew from 4.9 percent of GDP in the US to 8.3 percent, and its profits rose 800 percent in real terms—three times the growth of profits in the non-financial sector.

Pg. 483:  Inequality, unemployment, low productivity, and income growth, and loss of trust in institutions were among the factors that made the Great Depression period such a fertile ground for political instability.  Though the crisis engulfing advanced economies today is not as extreme as the Great Depression given the parallels we cannot afford complacency.

Pg. 487:  The excessive influence in the US of private interests via campaign contributions and lobbying have reached astronomical proportions over the past two decades.  Hence, the concern that a larger state will do the bidding of economic elites is not a distant threat; it is already here.  We have to regain control of campaign finance, end the cozy relationship between lobbyists and the state and reduce the ability of new administrations to make political appointments for all high positions in government agencies.  Redistricting is badly needed since the early 2000s the current system has created scores of electoral districts that are safe for one of the two major parties.  We also need to increase the mobilization of society (go where the jobs are and be prepared to perform them). 

Addenda:

Countries organized like China and Russia are outside the corridor and are run by government elites, much like in the past; countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan are outside the corridor and are organized like tribal entities.  When a graph is pictured with the horizontal axis representing society control and the vertical axis representing state control—China and Russia are dominated by the vertical axis and Afghanistan and Pakistan by the horizontal.  A diagonal line on the graph represents the Shackled Leviathan like the US where the powers of society and the state are in balance..   

Acemoglu and Robinson also wrote Why Nations Fail, a book I reported on in 2012. 

Does democracy have a future? Once, the tendency was to assume that the only future following “the end of history” would be one of free markets and liberal democracies. But in the 1990s and 2000s, vicious conflicts around the edges of the developed world led to the question of whether such a future was attainable by everyone. Moreover, the rise of nihilistic, religiously inspired terrorism signaled that some people desired an altogether different end to history.