Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships Book

"Just as the great fighter is looking for the jugular, so the great scientist is looking for areas where there can be a breakthrough-for areas where strong claims are in order. Thus I think it is a good research strategy to search for stark and simplifying propositions. In my career I like to think that I have always done that. That is certainly the only thing that I want to do."-Mancur Olson World-renowned economist Mancur Olson was famous for providing simple but convincing answers to broad economic questions, and equally famous for the gusto with which he defended his theories and debated his critics. His landmark work The Logic of Collective Action famously explained what now seems almost intuitive-how interest groups are created and how they are able to subvert the interests of the larger society through their detrimental impact on overall economic efficiency. In Power and Prosperity, which he completed just before his death last year, Olson takes on the broadest questions of his career: Why do some economies perform spectacularly, providing incredible wealth and prosperity, while others fail miserably? How do different forms of government either hinder or promote economic growth? And, more specifically: With the collapse of the Soviet system, why have markets not flourished? Olson contends that governments can play an essential role in the development of markets. Reliable enforcement of private contracts and protection of individual rights to property depend on governments strong enough to guarantee these rights yet constrained enough not to undermine them. His exploration of "market-augmenting government" will stand as a cutting-edge work on economic growth and provide a useful framework in which to consider he evolution of governance and economic policy in the post-communist world, in post-crisis Asia, and indeed in the rest of the developing world. In his writings and teaching since The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson has, by extending economics into the field of politics and the evolution of institutions, made economics more relevant to many of the world's problems, bringing rigor and insight to issues often dismissed as insoluble on account of "culture" or "lack of political will." Olson looked behind these issues to understand why some countries or groups managed to combine successful economic policy and institutional arrangements and others have not yet done so. Power and Prosperity brings his life's work on these questions to bear on the challenge that dominates the end of the 20th Century-the transition to market democracy in countries now exposed to competition with economically advanced democratic nations.Read More