If we're at three degrees of warming in 2100, that means that all of sub-Saharan Africa will have no economic growth at all.

But I just want to call into question the sort of fundamental premise of what you're asking, which is to say, that economic growth is continuing almost in parallel to these climate impacts.

We know enough about the scale and scope of these impacts to know that they will be, in the very best case,

complicating our trajectories of economic growth and in some cases in some

places probably a lot worse than that. And now the good fight with

Yasha Monk. Today I want to tell you about the argument in chapter 2 of my new book of the

great experiment why diverse democracies fall apart and how they can endure, please order the book and read along.

So when I was figuring out how to write this book, I thought, hey, I know what I'll do. I'll find the diverse democracy that

works really well, and I'll go and spend time there and I'll tell its story and that'll

tell us what we can emulate. It'll be fun and we'll have the solution.

But the more I looked at some of the countries that seem candidates, the less convincing they were.

I don't think that any country in the world has quite figured out how to have these deeply

ethnically and religiously diverse democracies that actually treat their citizens as equals.

So in chapter 2 of the book, I do something different instead.

What I do is to look at the three main historical modes of failure,

at the way in which diverse societies in history have gone badly wrong.

To set up some of the things we should be on

guard again some of the ways we can learn from that historical experience.

Now the first of those historical modes of failure is anarchy.

Thomas Hobbs, a wonderful political theorist, worried that life in the state of nature would be nasty brutish and in short that it would consist of a

war of all against all. That I think is not entirely right. When you look at some of the places in the country where the state is very weak or has failed with nearly non-existent, life actually looks a little bit different.

What you get in Afghanistan and Somalia and other parts of the world is individuals who are caught in what Darren Atsemoglu and James Robinson call a cage of norms.

...