The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. By Mancur Olson. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982. Pp. xi + 273. $14.95.

In-Group Anger or Out-Group Ambivalence? How Voters Perceive Rule-Based Direct Transfers in India

“…They compare rewards from winners of the distributive policy and the punishment from losers, and pursue reform when benefits outweigh the costs. Conventionally, reforms are stalled by the fury of well mobilized losers (Olson 1982;Becker 1983;Geddes 1991;Hellman 1998;Meckling et al 2015). Contrary to this expectation, I find that it is the ambivalence or tepid response of winners, not the fury of losers, that constrains politicians.…”

“…As with any reform or policy adoption, officeseeking politicians will compare the reward from winners and punishment from losers, and pursue reform only when rewards exceed the punishment. Typically, distributive reforms are stalled by entrenched, well mobilized, and influential losers (Olson 1982;Becker 1983;Geddes 1991;Hellman 1998;Meckling et al 2015). However, this insight has not been applied to the transition from targeted to rule-based distribution.…”

Epistocracy vs constitutional democracy: A Hayekian response to Jason Brannan

“…By focusing on the government's impartiality, it is feasible to avert the self-destruction of representative democracies. Because in representative democracies, adopting a political stance against powerful interest groups (oligarchic groups) or obtaining information on daily political developments is fraught with several collective action problems (Olson 1982).…”

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson: The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

“…For example, instead of the despotic Leviathan and the cage of norms, one could easily use the terms dictatorship or autocracy, and traditional society, respectively. The imbalance between formal and informal institutions, which throws societies outside the narrow corridor, may very well be explained by the concept of institutional sclerosis of Olson (1982). Institutional sclerosis is used to explain the case of formal institutions persisting too long and over-living their usefulness as politically powerful groups resist necessary reforms (this would have been particularly useful to explain the lack of sufficient financial regulation in the United States that led to the Great Recession).…”

“… See Olson (1965, 1982.3 Apolte (2012), for example, also criticizes the Acemoglu-Robinson earlier work, on the grounds that they overlook the collective action and focus instead on inequality that, he argues, is not even a necessary condition for revolution .4 InAcemoglu (2006), the elite and the working classes' relative potential for collective action does not evolve via interaction. InNeyapti (2013) andNeyapti and Arasil (2016), however, formal institutional reform results from a social planner that minimizes the cost of creative destruction facing differently evolving norms of different groups.5 See, for example, Gallup, Sachs, and Mellinger (1999) andRodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi (2004).…”