Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

     In Part One of the book, Fukuyama discusses the development of states across the world, and identifies as the theme of the book that "there is a political deficit around the world, not of states but of modern states that are capable, impersonal, well organized and autonomous." He is certainly a major supporter of the state and believes that a strong state can be the solution to a huge number of social problems humans face. The point, however, is not just to have the biggest state, but the highest quality state, being accountable to the people but not beholden to interest groups based on kinship, ethnicity, tribe, or other fragmented and fragmenting interests.

    Something I hadn't liked about The Origins of Political Order was that I felt like Fukuyama didn't give enough attention to geography and climate. In this one, they get their due attention, although he is sure to make clear that he is no geographical determinist. One interesting observation stood out about how Europe was hard to conquer because it had Britain just off the continent, which was able to gain substantial wealth and power and act to counterbalance Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler, all of whom sought to conquer Europe. This rings true, but it is interesting that the same did not happen with Japan and China. China united very early on and remained united for most of its history, with some large exceptions. Europe on the other hand only ever united ephemerally, never more than a couple of years.

    A very interesting point that came up in this volume is that institutions are not easily gifted. The lesson of colonialism and of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan is that an invader can't just give a country a strong state. They have to create it themselves. This is the difference between two regions colonized for a similar amount of time: Africa and China. China always had a strong state and it could be taken for granted. The real challenge in China has been how to control the state and reign it in to respect rule of law. In Africa, on the other hand, strong states never emerged, and weren't about to form just as a result of a brief European influence. 

    Fukuyama disagrees with Pomeranz that the European advantage over China came primarily from the use of coal. Rather, writes Fukuyama, the Industrial Revolution was not just the result of resource inputs, but also of the integration of a scientific system that could induce general theories from facts, a technological system that applied this knowledge to practical tasks, a property rights system that created incentives for technological innovation, cultural curiosity about the outside world, an education system focused on science and technology, and a political system that allowed and encouraged all of these things to happen at the same time.

    The best chapter of this book by far is Chapter 34: America the Vetocracy. In it, Fukuyama diagnoses specific problems, mostly in the legislative branch. The House of Lords works more decisively than Congress because party leaders can force MPs to vote their way to stay on their party rolls. To bring a vote, they only need a majority, not 60 votes or unanimous consent like the Senate. There is no filibustering in the UK. The UK uses its bureaucracy to make the budget, but the US uses a committee system that takes months to get the budget done. In the meantime, there are countless opportunities for lobbying groups to get their wants into the bill. Fukuyama blames openness and never-ending process for the massive influence of interest groups. There is no point in lobbying MPs in the British system because they have no power. But there is endless incentive to buy US Representatives, who may serve on powerful committees.

    But this complicated and incoherent system doesn't end up limiting government. In fact, it makes it even more unwieldy. Legislative incoherence results in the worst of both worlds: a large and sprawling government that can't get anything done, creating duplicative and overlapping programs or using multiple committees to address the same problem. For example, the Pentagon is mandated to produce over 500 reports for Congress every year, which are often duplicative and consume huge amounts of energy. A more centralized legislature would have a better chance of getting this under control. So that's the irony: a decentralized legislature allows the government to balloon in pork barrel spending and red tape, difficult to cut, but also makes its own state ineffective through redundancy and overly strict prescriptions on what bureaucrats may do.

Miscellaneous Facts and Observations:

• New York State authorized a new courthouse in 1858 that was budgeted for $250,000, but ended up costing $13 million by 1871, at which point it was running years over schedule. It was used by Boss Tweed to funnel huge amounts of money into Tammany Hall, and he even awarded his own printers the costs of printing the special commission's investigation.
• Fukuyama says that the reason Amtrak isn't good is because it is mandated to serve uneconomical areas due to the largesse of the congressmen that approve its budget that are from those areas.
• Argentina had a higher GDP than the United States in 1800.
• Between 1878 and 1914, Europe added 8,653,000 square miles to its possessions, and controlled 84.4% of the land surface of the globe at the start of World War One.
• Africa's population density reached Europe's 1500 population density in 1975. In 1900, Japan had 118.2 people per square km, China had 45.6, and sub-Saharan Africa had 4.4.
• I couldn't help but laugh at a passage where Fukuyama said "The United States is scheduled to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016..."
• Indonesian language is a standardized version of classical Malay, originally spoken by only a small number of inhabitants. But it emerged as a lingua franca. 
• Interesting: Fukuyama describes a theory by Robert Carneiro that says circumscription is key to state formation. To transition from a tribal society to a state-society, you need to eliminate the option to walk away. In unconstrained geographies, people could just leave the tribe if they didn't like the chief.
• Another interesting contradiction: Fukuyama writes that countries will not grow if they are racked by bloody conflicts, and cites Paul Collier as saying that conflict is driven by weak institutions. I would like to know how Fukuyama squares this with Tilly's view, which Fukuyama seemingly accepts, that war drives state formation.
• The actual size of the US government hasn't exceeded 2.25 million since the end of WWII. But it has expanded, just mostly through contractors.