James A. Robinson

In “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty,” authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson assemble an astounding collection of political histories to persuade us that to survive in our age political liberty requires a strong state and a citizenry engaged in politics.

And they almost have me convinced.

They not only employ the histories of states who have significant liberties built into their systems, but many states who do not, and a few who seem to be on the way.

They show how China is a tyranny today and why it got that way. They show how Argentina’s and Columbia’s bureaucracies and Lebanon’s Parliament do their best at sitting on their hands.

And they develop a convincing argument that societies with roots in community discussion and debate lay the groundwork for freedom-loving democracies in Europe, America, and Africa.

I can hear the howls of the American Right complaining that government is just too big for its own good, and the Brexiters saying that Bruxelles was just one government too many.

Acemoglu and Robinson lost me a little bit when they claimed that what societies need is more higher education and an acknowledgement from the people that mass surveillance is really in their own best interests.

Excuse me if I lean on Yuval Harari a little bit, but machines are telling us over and over today that there really is a finite limit to the productivity of humans, no matter how much education you pile on them.

That political compromise is anathema to the new politics and that there is so much inertia built into government today that we are piling laws on top of laws that nobody really care a damn about.

As I sit here today waiting out a global pandemic just to begin thinking about climate change once again, I am wondering where is the political will to save us from ourselves.

The authors write a peon to bills of rights, but nowhere do they acknowledge that rights have no benefit without equal and opposite obligations to the body politic. That political discourse on its own doesn’t make people put up or shut up.

That political mobilization makes little sense in a place like America where more believe in fairy tales than science. Present administrations NOT EXCEPTED!

Do we believe in a fair wage economy? Not unless you believe that the care of children, and the sick, and elderly at home account for no economic value to society. Not in our liberal states and not in our illiberal states.

Our liberal states continue to be extractive in the literal as well as metaphorical sense. And we haven’t figured a way out of the extractive logic.… (meer)

¿Qué determina que un país sea rico o pobre? ¿Cómo se explica que, en condiciones similares, en algunos países haya hambrunas y en otros no? ¿Qué papel tiene la política en estas cuestiones? Que algunas naciones sean más prósperas que otras, ¿se debe a cuestiones culturales?, ¿a los efectos de la climatología?, ¿a su ubicación geográfica? No, en absoluto. Ninguna cuestión relativa a la prosperidad de un país está relacionada con estos factores, sino que proviene de otro mucho más tangible: la política económica que dictaminan sus dirigentes. Son los líderes de cada país, afirman los reconocidos profesores Daron Acemoglu y James A. Robinson en este libro, quienes determinan con sus políticas la prosperidad de su territorio, y así ha ocurrido en todos los períodos de la historia, como demuestran en este apasionante estudio.… (meer)