Nobel prize winners Acemoglu and Robinson followed up their Why Nations Fail (2012) with The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (2019).  I was not impressed with this book. The core argument of this book is not new. It may be more philosophically grounded, but in 2012 Duncan Green wrote From Poverty to Power, with the subtitle “how active citizens and effective states can change the world”, which make the same exact argument. Acemoglu and Robinson do not cite Duncan Green. While there are many examples and cases, I struggled to find any new ideas in this book. Read Duncan Green’s book, it is Open Access as well. A few notes:

“Our argument in this book is that for liberty to emerge and flourish, both state and society must be strong. A strong state is needed to control violence, enforce laws, and provide public services that are critical for a life in which people are empowered to make and pursue their choices. A strong, mobilized society is needed to control and shackle the strong state.” (p. xvii)

“What makes this a corridor, not a door, is that achieving liberty is a process; you have to travel a long way in the corridor before violence is brought under control, laws are written and enforced, and the state starts providing services to its citizens. It is a process because the state and its elites must learn to live with the shackles society puts on them and different segments of society have to learn to work together despite their differences. What makes this corridor narrow is that this is no easy feat. How can you contain a state that has a huge bureaucracy, a powerful military, and the freedom to decide what the law is? How can you insure that as the state is called on to take on more responsibility in a complex world, it will remain tame and under control? How can you keep society working together rather than turning against itself, riven with divisions? How can you prevent all of this from flipping into a zero-sum contest? Not easy at all and that’s why the corridor is narrow, and societies enter and depart from it with far reaching consequences.” (p. xviii)

“A very different type of Leviathan, a shackled one, emerges when there is a balance between its power and society’s capacity to control it. This is the Leviathan that can resolve conflicts fairly, provide public services and economic opportunities, and prevent dominance, laying down the basic foundations of liberty. This is the Leviathan that people, believing that they can control it, trust and cooperate with and allow to increase its capacity. This is the Leviathan that also promotes liberty by breaking down the various cages of norms tightly regulating behavior in society. But in a fundamental sense this is not a Hobbesian Leviathan. Its defining feature is its shackles: it does not have Hobbes’s sea monster’s dominance over society; it does not have the capability to ignore or silence people when they try to influence political decision making. It stands not above but a long side society.” (p. 64)

“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 and plentiful. Our account disagrees sharply with these theories. There wasn’t anything unique 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. Neither was sufficient by itself to bring forth the Shackled Leviathan. When only the former blade was present, as in Byzantium, a typical Despotic Leviathan emerged. When only the latter blade was present, as in Iceland, there was little political development and no state building.” (p. 198-199)

“Another lesson from the Swedish experience (confirmed by the Danish, Norwegian, and British cases) is to move welfare programs in a more universal direction, encouraging society at large to embrace them and be involved in their monitoring. Subsidies to specific industries or specific types of workers do not typically achieve this objective. Times of major economic and social change offer an especially fertile ground for the introduction of universal benefits, because they require broad based programs, which can then forge a popular coalition in their support. Possible reforms to deal with the adverse effects of economic globalization, automation, and other economic changes, as well as investments in education to enable more effective and equitable use of these opportunities, must be similarly broad-based and could be designed to furnish their own powerful coalitions. Once again building on the Swedish experience, we can argue that it would be a mistake to rely just on the tax policy and direct redistribution to pursue these objectives. Rather, it would be preferable to design labor market institutions that directly move the economy toward a more equally shared distribution of the gains from economic growth, such as better opportunities for workers to agent collective agreements, minimum-wage legislation, and other policies to increase pay. Such policies would both reduce the burden on the state (and thus make it easier to control it) and also contribute to a broader coalition in favor of maintaining these programs.” (p. 486)