Political order and inequality

This is one of those rare books which elicit a ‘Wow!’ at the sight of the table of contents, a ‘Wow!’ when one reaches the end several days later, and many more in between. I imagine that Adam Smith's Wealth of nations provoked a similar response from its early readers, if in different language. Boix presents nothing less than a theory explaining why we humans have constructed the state (an organization with the capacity and incentives to monopolize violence and enforce order); why virtually no one in human history experienced economic growth and sustained welfare improvements until two centuries ago; and why the ‘modern breakthrough’ occurred as the small fraction of the world's population first in north-west Europe and extending to the zone we call the West experienced economic growth and (for the most part) welfare improvements over the past one to two centuries. The time scale is the very longue durée. It starts with ‘forager’ or hunter-gather societies before the dissemination of intensive agriculture around 4000 BC (and still today on the capitalist fringes). The initiating questions are: what explains the emergence of spontaneous (non-institutionalized) cooperation among forager societies and what explains the lack of economic growth? The time scale ends with the emergence of western capitalism and liberal democracy after the Industrial Revolution and their spread in mutating forms around much of the world by the late twentieth century

Democracy · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Human welfare · Incentive · Inequality · Market economy · Nothing · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Welfare · Welfare state · Demography · Law · Political Economy and Marxism