The Rise and Decline of Nations

In an interview on How Libertarians Can Govern

That leads us squarely to Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, who I’m thrilled to see on your list because to me he’s one of the great and underrated thinkers of the centre-right of the past century. 

This is a really extraordinary book. Olson has got a little bit of a pessimistic view. He makes it sound almost inevitable that free societies will become encrusted with these interest groups that form. It’s not sufficiently in anybody’s interest to oppose them, and because the cost they impose or diffuse over everybody, you need some sort of calamity to wipe them away if you really want growth to happen, if you really want the upward mobility of less fortunate individuals, which I think should be our highest priority. 

Olson’s thesis is that the gradual accumulation of perks carved out for special interests gradually saps the dynamism of economies and societies, leading to their decline if you don’t work very, very hard and constantly to try and counter those effects… 

Yes, and when I went to the shelf and pulled the book down – it had been years since I had – it reminded me how dense the thing is. It’s a very scholarly work but it leads one to ask – since we’d rather not have a war or an earthquake or an epidemic that wipes out these structures – what allows the green shoots of economic growth and mobility to happen again, what can be done to if not eliminate, at least minimise, the stultifying effects? 

This I know had a big effect on me because I had never run for public office before. I surprised myself by choosing to do so and then began thinking and speaking of why and what we were going to do if successful. My entire theme for years has been about making major change in our state. It was some of the books on this list that helped me to see that the real reactionary movements in a country like ours are what we call the left. These really are the forces of status quo: they may travel under different banners or masquerade as something else but these are the folks who are more often than not trying to freeze in place arrangements that worked well for the ‘ins’. So Olson shows you how that happens, Postrel shows you how this happens, Hayek shows you how this happens.