DUE TUE, 4-28-15 4PM "Institutions" Please respond to the following in 2 to2 ½ paragraphs 2 if possibleBased on 2 articles below, address the following: Every country in the world is constructed around the same set of institution that differs only in how governments manage them. 1. Identify the specific components of an institution 2. Explain why the institutions in failed states are in such disarray.Article1 Elections Don't Matter, Institutions Do June 2014 Many years ago, I visited Four Corners in the American Southwest. This is a small stone monument on a polished metal platform where four states meet. You can walk around the monument in the space of a few seconds and stand in four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, so people lined up to do this and have their pictures taken by excited relatives. To walk around the monument is indeed a thrill, because each of these four states has a richly developed tradition and identity that gives these borders real meaning, and yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other. Well, of course that's true, they're only states, not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is a dull commonplace doesn't make it any less amazing. To be sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders — that nevertheless does not conflict with each other — is unique in political history. And this is not to mention the thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing world would be envious of such an original institutional arrangement for governing an entire continent. In fact, Huntington's observation can be expanded further: the genius of Western civilization in general is that of institutions. Sure, democracy is a basis for this; but democracy is, nevertheless, a separate factor. For enlightened dictatorships in Asia have built robust, meritocratic institutions whereas weak democracies in Africa have not. Institutions are such a mundane element of Western civilization that we tend to take them for granted. But as I've indicated, in many places I have worked and lived, that is not the case. Getting a permit or a simple document is not a matter of waiting in line for a few minutes, but of paying bribes and employing fixers. We take our running water and dependable electric current for granted, but those are amenities missing from many countries and regions because of the lack of competent institutions to manage such infrastructure. Having a friend or a relative working in the IRS is not going to save you from paying taxes, but such a situation is a rar ...

1. DUE TUE, 4-28-15 4PM "Institutions" Please respond to the
following in 2 to2 ½ paragraphs 2 if possibleBased on 2 articles
below, address the following:
Every country in the world is constructed around the same set of
institution that differs only in how governments manage them.
1. Identify the specific components of an institution 2.
Explain why the institutions in failed states are in such
disarray.Article1
Elections Don't Matter, Institutions Do
June 2014
Many years ago, I visited Four Corners in the American
Southwest. This is a small stone monument on a polished metal
platform where four states meet. You can walk around the
monument in the space of a few seconds and stand in four
states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, so people
lined up to do this and have their pictures taken by excited
relatives. To walk around the monument is indeed a thrill,
because each of these four states has a richly developed
tradition and identity that gives these borders real meaning, and
yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one
state to the other. Well, of course that's true, they're only states,
not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is
a dull commonplace doesn't make it any less amazing. To be
sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard
Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of
the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its
institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate
identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders
— that nevertheless does not conflict with each other — is
unique in political history. And this is not to mention the
thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their
own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have
covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing

2. world would be envious of such an original institutional
arrangement for governing an entire continent. In fact,
Huntington's observation can be expanded further: the genius of
Western civilization in general is that of institutions. Sure,
democracy is a basis for this; but democracy is,
nevertheless, a separate factor. For enlightened dictatorships in
Asia have built robust, meritocratic institutions whereas weak
democracies in Africa have not.
Institutions are such a mundane element of Western civilization
that we tend to take them for granted. But as I've indicated, in
many places I have worked and lived, that is not the case.
Getting a permit or a simple document is not a matter of waiting
in line for a few minutes, but of paying bribes and employing
fixers. We take our running water and dependable electric
current for granted, but those are amenities missing from many
countries and regions because of the lack of competent
institutions to manage such infrastructure. Having a friend or a
relative working in the IRS is not going to save you from
paying taxes, but such a situation is a rarity elsewhere.
Successful institutions treat everyone equally and impersonally.
This is not the case in Russia or Pakistan or Nigeria. Of course,
Americans may complain about poor rail service and
deteriorating infrastructure and bureaucracies, especially in
inner cities, but it is important to realize that we are,
nevertheless, complaining on the basis of a very high standard
relative to much of the developing world. Institutions, or the
lack of them, explain much that has happened in the world in
recent decades. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in
1989, Central Europe went on to build functioning democracies
and economies. With all of their problems and challenges, the
Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and
Hungary have not fared badly and in some cases have been
rousing success stories. This is because these societies boast
high literacy rates among both men and women and have a
tradition of modern bourgeois culture prior to World War II and
communism. And it is literacy and middle class culture that are

3. the building blocks of successful institutions. Institutions after
all require bureaucrats, who must, in turn, be literate and
familiar with the impersonal workings of modern organizations.
The Balkans have been less fortunate, with bad government
and unimpressive growth the fare in Romania since 1989, semi-
chaos rearing its head in Albania and Bulgaria, and inter-ethnic
war destroying the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s. Here, too,
a history of lower literacy rates, weak or in some cases non-
existent middle classes, and an Eastern Orthodox faith that,
because it is more contemplative it does not encourage
impersonal standards, at least to the degree of Protestantism or
even Catholicism, have all been factors in a weaker institutional
basis for economic growth and political stability. Russia, too,
fits into this category. Its system of oligarchs is a telltale sign
of weak institutions, since corruption merely indicates an
alternative pathway to getting things done when laws and the
state bureaucracies are inadequately developed. Then there is
the greater Middle East. The Arab Spring failed because the
Arab world was not like Central and Eastern Europe. It had low
literacy, especially among women. It had little or no tradition of
a modern bourgeois, despite commercial classes in some cities,
and so no usable institutions to fall back upon once
dictatorships crumbled. Thus, what was left in North Africa and
the Levant after authoritarianism was tribes and sects; unlike
the post-communist civil society that encouraged stability in
Central Europe. Turkey and Iran, as real states with more
successful urbanization and higher literacy rates, are in an
intermediate category between southern Europe and the Arab
world. Obviously, even within the Arab world there are
distinctions. Egyptian state institutions are a reality to a degree
that those in Syria and Iraq are not. Egypt is governable,
therefore, if momentarily by autocratic means, whereas Syria
and Iraq seem not to be. Finally, there is Africa. In many
African countries, when taking a road out of the capital, very
soon the state itself vanishes. The road becomes a vague dirt
track, and the domains of tribes and warlords take over. This is

4. a world where, because literacy and middle classes are minimal
(albeit growing), institutions still barely exist. The way to
gauge development in Africa is not to interview civil society
types in the capitals, but to go to the ministries and other
bureaucracies and wait in line and see how things work — and
if they do.
Indeed, people lie to themselves and then lie to journalists and
ambassadors. So don't listen to what people (especially elites)
say; watch how they behave. Do they pay taxes? Where do they
stash their money? Do they wait in line to get drivers' permits,
and so forth? It is behavior, not rhetoric, which indicates the
presence or absence of institutions. Elections are easy to hold
and indicate less than journalists and political scientists think.
An election is a 24- or 48-hour affair, organized often with the
help of foreign observers. But a well- oiled ministry must
function 365 days a year. Lee Kuan Yew is one of the great men
of the 20th century because he built institutions and, therefore,
a state in Singapore. For without basic order there can be no
meaningful freedom. And institutions are the foremost tools of
order. Because institutions develop slowly and organically, even
under the best of circumstances, their growth eludes journalists
who are interested in dramatic events. Thus, media stories often
provide a poor indication of the prospects of a particular
country. The lesson for businesspeople and intelligence
forecasters is: track institutions, not personalities.Article 2
Review of Why Nations Fail
By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
By Warren Bass, Published: April 20, 2012
Why Nations Fail” is a sweeping attempt to explain
the gut-wrenching poverty that leaves 1.29 billion people in the
developing world struggling to live on less than $1.25 a day.
You might expect it to be a bleak, numbing read. It’s not. It’s
bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It
may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece. Daron Acemoglu and

5. James A. Robinson, two energetic, widely respected
development scholars, start with a bit of perspective: Even in
today’s glum economic climate, the average American is seven
times as prosperous as the average Mexican, 10 times as
prosperous as the average Peruvian, about 20 times as
prosperous as the average inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa and
about 40 times as prosperous as the average citizen of such
particularly desperate African countries as Mali, Ethiopia and
Sierra Leone. What explains such stupefying disparities? The
authors’ answer is simple: “institutions, institutions,
institutions.” They are impatient with traditional social-science
arguments for the persistence of poverty, which variously chalk
it up to bad geographic luck, hobbling cultural patterns, or
ignorant leaders and technocrats. Instead, “Why Nations Fail”
focuses on the historical currents and critical junctures that
mold modern polities: the processes of institutional drift that
produce political and economic institutions that can be either
inclusive — focused on power- sharing, productivity, education,
technological advances and the well-being of the nation as a
whole; or extractive — bent on grabbing wealth and resources
away from one part of society to benefit another. To understand
what extractive institutions look like, consider les Grosses
Legumes (the Big Vegetables), the sardonic Congolese
nickname for the obscenely pampered clique around Mobutu
Sese Seko, the strongman who ruled what is now the
Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. When
Mobutu decreed that he wanted a palace built for himself at his
birthplace, the authors note, he made sure that the airport had a
landing strip big enough to accommodate the Concordes he
liked to rent from Air France. Mobutu and the Big Vegetables
weren’t interested in developing Congo. They were interested in
strip-mining it, sucking out its vast mineral wealth for
themselves. They were, at best, vampire capitalists. But the
roots of Congo’s nightmarish poverty and strife go back
centuries. Before the arrival of European imperialists, what was
then known as the Kingdom of Kongo was ruled by the

6. oligarchic forerunners of the Big Vegetables, who drew their
staggering wealth from arbitrary taxation and a busy slave
trade. And when the European colonists showed up, they made a
dreadful situation even worse — especially under the rapacious
rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. When Congo finally won
its independence in 1960, it was a feeble, decentralized state
burdened with a predatory political class and exploitative
economic institutions — too weak to deliver basic services but
just strong enough to keep Mobutu and his cronies on top; too
poor to provide for its citizenry but just wealthy enough to give
elites something to fight over. Acemoglu and Robinson argue
that when you combine rotten regimes, exploitative elites and
self- serving institutions with frail, decentralized states, you
have something close to a prescription for poverty, conflict and
even outright failure. “Nations fail,” the authors write, “when
they have extractive economic institutions, supported by
extractive political institutions that impede and even block
economic growth.” But even as vicious cycles such as Congo’s
can churn out poverty, virtuous cycles can help bend the long
arc of history toward growth and prosperity. Contrast the
conflict and misery in Congo with Botswana — which, when it
won its independence in 1966, had just 22 university graduates,
seven miles of paved roads and glowering white-supremacist
regimes on most of its borders. But Botswana today has “the
highest per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa” — around the
level of such success stories as Hungary and Costa Rica.
How did Botswana pull it off? “By quickly developing inclusive
economic and political institutions after independence,” the
authors write. Botswana holds regular elections, has never had a
civil war and enforces property rights. It benefited, the authors
argue, from modest centralization of the state and a tradition of
limiting the power of tribal chiefs that had survived colonial
rule. When diamonds were discovered, a far-sighted law ensured
that the newfound riches were shared for the national good, not
elite gain. At the critical juncture of independence, wise
Botswanan leaders such as its first president, Seretse Khama,

7. and his Botswana Democratic Party chose democracy over
dictatorship and the public interest over private greed. In other
words: It’s the politics, stupid. Khama’s Botswana succeeded at
building institutions that could produce prosperity. Mobutu’s
Congo and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe didn’t even try.
Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the protesters in Egypt’s
Tahrir Square had it right: They were being held back by a
feckless, corrupt state and a society that wouldn’t let them fully
use their talents. Egypt was poor “precisely because it has been
ruled by a narrow elite that has organized society for their own
benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. “Such
unhappy nations as North Korea, Sierra Leone, Haiti and
Somalia have all left authority concentrated in a few grasping
hands, which use whatever resources they can grab to tighten
their hold on power. The formula is stark: Inclusive
governments and institutions mean prosperity, growth and
sustained development; extractive governments and institutions
mean poverty, privation and stagnation— even over the
centuries. The depressing cycle in which one oligarchy often
replaces another has meant that “the lands where the Industrial
Revolution originally did not spread remain relatively poor.”
Nothing succeeds like success, Acemoglu and Robinson argue,
and nothing fails like failure. So what about China, which is
increasingly cited as a new model of “authoritarian growth”?
The authors are respectful but ultimately unimpressed. They
readily admit that extractive regimes can produce temporary
economic growth so long as they’re politically centralized —
just consider the pre-Brezhnev Soviet Union, whose economic
system once had its own Western admirers. But while “Chinese
economic institutions are incomparably more inclusive today
than three decades ago,” China is still fundamentally saddled
with an extractive regime.
In fairly short order, such authoritarian economies start to
wheeze: By throttling the incentives for technological progress,
creativity and innovation, they choke off sustained, long-term
growth and prosperity. (“You cannot force people to think and

8. have good ideas by threatening to shoot them,” the authors note
dryly.) Chinese growth, they argue, “is based on the adoption of
existing technologies and rapid investment,” not the anxiety-
inducing process of creative destruction that produces lasting
innovation and growth. By importing foreign technologies and
exporting low-end products, China is playing a spirited game of
catch-up — but that’s not how races are won. So how can the
United States help the developing world? Certainly not by
cutting foreign aid or conditioning it; as the authors note, you’d
hardly expect someone like Mobutu to suddenly chuck out the
exploitative institutions that underpin his power “just for a little
more foreign aid,” and even a bit of relief for the truly
desperate, even if inefficiently administered, is a lot better than
nothing. But ultimately, instead of trying to cajole leaders
opposed to their people’s interests, the authors suggest we’d be
better off structuring foreign aid so that it seeks to bring in
marginalized and excluded groups and leaders, and empowers
broader sections of the population. For Acemoglu and Robinson,
it is not enough to simply swap one set of oligarchs for another.
“Why Nations Fail” isn’t perfect. The basic taxonomy of
inclusive vs. extractive starts to get repetitive. After chapters of
brio, the authors seem almost sheepish about the vagueness of
their concluding policy advice. And their scope and enthusiasm
engender both chuckles of admiration — one fairly
representative chapter whizzes from Soviet five-year plans to
the Neolithic Revolution and the ancient Mayan city states —
and the occasional cluck of caution. It would take several
battalions of regional specialists to double-check their history
and analysis, and while the overall picture is detailed and
convincing, the authors would have to have a truly superhuman
batting average to get every nuance right. Their treatment of the
Middle East, for instance, is largely persuasive, but they are a
little harsh on the Ottoman Empire, which they basically write
off as “highly absolutist” without noting its striking diversity
and relatively inclusive sociopolitical arrangements, which
often gave minority communities considerably more running

9. room (and space for entrepreneurship) than their European co-
religionists. Acemoglu and Robinson have run the risks of
ambition, and cheerfully so. For a book about the dismal
science and some dismal plights, “Why Nations Fail” is a
surprisingly captivating read. This is, in every sense, a big
book. Readers will hope that it makes a big difference. Warren
Bass is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and
a former adviser to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Susan Rice.
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