Barry Weingast on Violence, Power and a Theory of Nearly Everything

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2007

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

Barry Weingast, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, talks about the ideas in his forthcoming book with Doug North and John Wallis, A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Weingast talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how violence shapes political institutions, the role of competition in politics and economics, and why most development advice from successful nations fails to lift poor nations out of poverty.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. My guest today is Barry Winegast, a senior fellow with the Hoover
0:40.2	Institution, as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political
0:45.2	Science at Stanford University. Barry, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks. I'd like to talk to you
0:51.1	about economic development, which is a common theme of a number of recent podcasts. In particular,
0:56.9	I want to talk about your forthcoming book, Co-written with Doug North and John Wallace, a conceptual
1:01.8	framework for interpreting recorded human history. Among other issues, you're interested
1:07.0	in economic growth, the institutions, the societal infrastructure that makes growth possible.
1:12.3	And the central idea of the book is that societies develop different ways to deal with violence.
1:17.7	And those ways that they choose, in turn, affect the opportunity for growth and economic
1:21.7	development. Describe the three types of societies that you mentioned in the book and how they
1:27.1	cope with violence. There are three different types of societies, which we call orders. And
1:32.8	the first is the primitive order. These are small bands of hunter-gatherer societies. They
1:39.3	tend to be small, 25 to 100. They tend not to be larger than that. They're very limited
1:45.5	specialization in these societies, and hence very little accumulation of wealth. The second
1:52.9	type of order is a limited access order, which we also call the natural state. This society
1:58.6	solves the problem of violence through limited access. The violence, one of the key things
2:03.3	about violence is that violence is that there tends not to be in these societies, anyone
2:08.8	who has a monopoly on violence. So there's what we call the distributive access to violence.
	...

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