Daron Acemoglu - 24 Sept

Why Nations Fail

Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

This book is about liberty, and how and why human societies have achieved or failed to achieve it. It is also about the consequences of this, especially for prosperity. Our definition follows the English philosopher John Locke, who argued that people have liberty when they have

perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit... without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

Liberty in this sense is a basic aspiration of all human beings. Locke emphasized that

no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Yet it is clear that liberty has been rare in history and is rare today. Every year millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central America flee their homes and risk life and limb in the process, not because they are seeking higher incomes or greater material comfort, but because they are trying to protect themselves and their families from violence and fear.

Philosophers have proposed many definitions of liberty. But at the most fundamental level, as Locke recognized, liberty must start with people being free from violence, intimidation, and other demeaning acts. People must be able to make free choices about their lives and have the means to carry them out without the menace of unreasonable punishment or draconian social sanctions.

In January 2011 in the Hareeqa market in the old city of Damascus, Syria, a spontaneous protest took place against the despotic regime of Bashar al-Assad. Soon afterward in the southern city of Daraa some children wrote The people want the fall of the government on a wall. They were arrested and tortured. A crowd gathered to demand their release, and two people were killed by the police. A mass demonstration erupted that soon spread throughout the country. A lot of the people, it turned out, did want the government to fall. A civil war soon broke out. The state, its military, and its security forces duly disappeared from much of the country. But instead of liberty, Syrians ended up with civil war and uncontrolled violence.

Adam, a media organizer in Latakia, reflected on what happened next:

We thought wed get a present, and what we got was all the evil in the world.

Husayn, a playwright from Aleppo, summed it up:

We never expected that these dark groups would come into Syriathe ones that have taken over the game now.

Foremost among these dark groups was the so-called Islamic State, or what was then known as ISIS, which aimed to create a new Islamic caliphate. In 2014, ISIS took control of the major Syrian city of Raqqa. On the other side of the border in Iraq, they captured the cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, and the historic city of Mosul with its 1.5 million inhabitants. ISIS and many other armed groups filled the stateless void left by the collapse of the Syrian and Iraqi governments with unimaginable cruelty. Beatings, beheadings, and mutilations became commonplace. Abu Firas, a fighter with the Free Syrian Army, described the new normal in Syria:

Its been so long since I heard that someone died from natural causes. In the beginning, one or two people would get killed. Then twenty. Then fifty. Then it became normal. If we lost fifty people, we thought, Thank God, its only fifty! I cant sleep without the sound of bombs or bullets. Its like something is missing.

Amin, a physical therapist from Aleppo, remembered:

One of the other guys called his girlfriend and said Sweetheart, Im out of minutes on my phone. Ill call you back on Amins phone. After a while she called asking about him, and I told her hed been killed. She cried and my friends said, Why did you tell her that? I said, Because thats what happened. Its normal. He died.... Id open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive. They told us, If someone dies, dont delete his number. Just change his name to Martyr.... So Id open my contact list and it was all Martyr, Martyr, Martyr.

The collapse of the Syrian state created a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions. Out of a population of about 18 million before the war, as many as 500,000 Syrians are estimated to have lost their lives. Over 6 million have been internally displaced and 5 million have fled the country and are currently living as refugees.

The calamity unleashed by the collapse of the Syrian state is not surprising. Philosophers and social scientists have long maintained that you need a state to resolve conflicts, enforce laws, and contain violence. As Locke puts it:

Where there is no law there is no freedom.

Yet Syrians had started protesting to gain some freedoms from Assads autocratic regime. As Adam ruefully recalled:

Ironically, we went out in demonstrations to eradicate corruption and criminal behavior and evil and hurting people. And weve ended up with results that hurt many more people.