The Origins of Political Order

Human societies are not trapped by their pasts.

The story of the rise of accountable governments in Part IV is also largely a European one. But Europe was hardly uniform in this respect.

Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.

During the forty-year period from 1970 to 2010, there was an enormous upsurge in the number of democracies around the world.

The cumulative effect of these economic crises has not necessarily been to undermine confidence in market-based economics and globalization as engines of economic growth.

Political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances.

Many authoritarian elites had no interest in implementing democratic institutions that would dilute their power.

Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously.

The story of political development and political decay is told in later pages of this volume.

Religion solves this collective action problem by presenting rewards and punishments that greatly reinforce the gains from cooperation in the here and now.