Paul Collier on Democracy and Violence

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2009

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Paul Collier of Oxford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes, a study of democracy and violence. Collier lays out the incentives facing a dictator who is considering the seductive appeal of holding an election. He defends his empirical work that forms the basis for many of the policy ideas in the book. Collier then makes the case for international military intervention to support democracies in poor countries.

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. Today is June 11, 2009, and my guest is Paul Collier of Oxford University.
0:43.2	He is the author of his most recent book is Wars, Guns and Votes, Democracy in Dangerous Places.
0:50.6	Paul, welcome back to Econ Talk. Thanks very much. Your book starts by noting the
0:56.7	spread of democracy as a recent phenomenon and how encouraging we at least thought that was
1:02.2	initially, but ultimately we were a little disappointed. So what happened? What caused that spread and
1:09.4	why is it disappointing? Well, the spread is no surprise and the spread occurred as a result of
1:15.8	the fall of the Soviet Union. First democracy spread in Eastern Europe directly as a result of the
1:25.3	fall of the Soviet Union, and then that gave courage to democracy movements across the world,
1:33.5	and so a lot of the societies of the bottom billion moved to democracy really quite rapidly.
1:41.8	The bottom billion you mean the poorest people in the world? I mean by the bottom billion I mean
1:47.3	sort of about 60 little countries that failed to grow for one reason or another. They were in
1:59.5	various traps that I discussed in my previous book, The Bottom Billion.
2:03.4	And a previous podcast, which is we'll put a link to it. Yeah, and so a lot of these countries
2:12.4	had been autocracies run by narrow elites that had run the economy in their own self-interest.
2:23.4	And so like many people, I was very hopeful that the spread of democracy would quite rapidly lead
2:31.6	to fundamental changes in economic policy that would bring prosperity to these societies.
2:38.8	And like many people, I diagnosed the sort of a core problem as being a
2:46.0	a political problem of the concentration of power in self-serving elites.
	...

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