Barry Weingast on the Violence Trap

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2013

⏱️ 69 minutes

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Summary

Barry Weingast, the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the role of violence and the threat of violence in maintaining destructive economic policies that reduce growth and development. Weingast argues that the threat of violence encourages leaders to create monopolies and other unproductive policies to pay off special interests that would otherwise threaten a coup or revolution. Weingast shows there is a surprising amount of violent regime change in modern times and discusses how this discourages growth-enhancing economic policies. The conversation closes with an analysis of similar ideas in Book III of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:06.3	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:10.8	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast and find links
0:16.1	and other information related to today's conversation.
0:18.9	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done
0:22.9	going back to 2006.
0:25.9	Today is August 2nd, 2013, and my guest is Barry Winegast.
0:36.3	Barry is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford
0:40.9	University and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:45.2	He's written extensively on the political economy of development, legal institutions
0:49.4	and the rule of law and democracy.
0:50.9	On other books, he is the author along with Douglas North and John Joseph Wallace of violence
0:56.2	and social orders, a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history,
1:01.1	which was the subject of an e-con talk episode back in 2007.
1:06.4	Barry, welcome back to e-con talk.
1:09.0	Thanks.
1:09.9	We're going to talk again about violence and growth and political economies we did before.
1:15.0	And you've written a paper with Gary Cox and Doug North called the Violence Trap
1:18.4	and another paper on Adam Smith.
1:21.6	And we're going to use those to get us started and we'll start with the violence trap
1:25.2	and then I hope we'll get to Adam Smith.
1:27.3	Now you start with a very old and interesting puzzle.
	...

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