Power, prosperity and social choice: A review
نویسنده
چکیده
Mancur Olson’s book, The Rise and Decline of Nations [45], used ideas from his earlier Logic of Collective Action [44] to argue that entrenched interest groups in a polity could induce economic sclerosis, or slow growth. These ideas seemed relevant to the perceived relative decline of the U.S. and Britain during the 1970’s. Five years later, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers [27] proposed a more general ‘‘declinist’’ argument, that a great power such as the USA would engage in fiscal irrationality through increasing military expenditure, thus hastening its own decline. Neither of these two declinist arguments seem applicable to the situation of the new millennium. Olson’s last book, Power and Prosperity [46], published posthumously in 2000, attempted a more general theoretical analysis of the necessary and su‰cient causes of prosperity and growth. For Olson only ‘‘securely democratic societies’’ could be conducive to long-lived individual rights to property and contract, but democracy itself need not be su‰cient for the protection of rights. This review attempts to further develop Olson’s logic on the connection between prosperity and liberty, by exploring insights derived from William Riker’s interpretation of U.S. federalism [51], from the contribution of Douglass North and Barry Weingast [43] to neo-institutional economic theory, and from recent work on war and fiscal responsibility by Ferguson [20, 21] and Stasavage [70, 71]. This review is one of a series of papers on constitutional choice based on research supported by NSF grants SBR 97 30275 and 98 18582. I appreciate the assistance of Diana Ivanova, Annette Milford, Andrew Rutten and Tsvetan Tsvetkov. Unpublished work by David Stasavage was very helpful.
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Social Choice and Welfare
دوره 20 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2003