Overview
"Just as the great fighter is looking for the jugular, so the great scientist is looking for areas where there can be a breakthrough-for areas where strong claims are in order. Thus I think it is a good research strategy to search for stark and simplifying propositions. In my career I like to think that I have always done that. That is certainly the only thing that I want to do."
—Mancur Olson
World-renowned economist Mancur Olson was famous for providing simple but convincing answers to broad economic questions, and equally famous for the gusto with which he defended his theories and debated his critics. His landmark work The Logic of Collective Action famously explained what now seems almost intuitive-how interest groups are created and how they are able to subvert the interests of the larger society through their detrimental impact on overall economic efficiency. In Power and Prosperity, which he completed just before his death last year, Olson takes on the broadest questions of his career: Why do some economies perform spectacularly, providing incredible wealth and prosperity, while others fail miserably? How do different forms of government either hinder or promote economic growth? And, more specifically: With the collapse of the Soviet system, why have markets not flourished?
Olson contends that governments can play an essential role in the development of markets. Reliable enforcement of private contracts and protection of individual rights to property depend on governments strong enough to guarantee these rights yet constrained enough not to undermine them. His exploration of "market-augmenting government" will stand as a cutting-edge work on economic growth and provide a useful framework in which to consider he evolution of governance and economic policy in the post-communist world, in post-crisis Asia, and indeed in the rest of the developing world.
In his writings and teaching since The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson has, by extending economics into the field of politics and the evolution of institutions, made economics more relevant to many of the world's problems, bringing rigor and insight to issues often dismissed as insoluble on account of "culture" or "lack of political will." Olson looked behind these issues to understand why some countries or groups managed to combine successful economic policy and institutional arrangements and others have not yet done so. Power and Prosperity brings his life's work on these questions to bear on the challenge that dominates the end of the 20th Century-the transition to market democracy in countries now exposed to competition with economically advanced democratic nations.
Mancur Olson (1932-1998) was Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the chair and principal investigator of the Center on Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector (IRIS). His books, The Logic of Collective Action and The Rise and Decline of Nations, have been translated into more than nine languages.
Editorials
Marc F. Plattner
Mancur Olson's book Power and Prosperity is an important book, written with clarity and verve.— Wall Street Journal
Publishers Weekly -
Olson, whose Logic of Collective Action stands as a landmark work of political economy, died in 1998 before putting the finishing touches on this book. As it stands, it serves as an appropriate coda to Olson's long and productive career, summarizing his major achievements while still contributing new insights to the post-communist debates. As he grapples with the forces that undermine economic vitality, Olson worries over a central question: Why has economic performance been so much better after the defeat of fascism in Germany and Japan than after the collapse of communism in Soviet-style states? In probing this question, Olson examines the complex relationships between the role of the state and economic performance, arguing that "there is no way of explaining the extreme poverty of many nations without taking account of the extent to which they are misgoverned." The lay reader will easily grasp Olson's broad and practical--if not especially vivid--discussions, and specialists will value his excellent analyses of the economic machinations of Soviet-type autocracies, including a fine reading of Stalin's diabolical manipulation of Russia's tax structures. As the world attempts to salvage what's left of the post-communist economies, it must contend with disablingly high rates of inflation and inefficient, state-owned businesses. The challenge ahead is not merely to hasten privatization, Olson says. Instead, economists must work to ensure that a "market-augmenting government" first secures individual rights to private property and guarantees the impartial enforcement of contracts--in his view the two essential ingredients for prosperity. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Arrow
The quality of this posthumous volume only makes those of us who respect and are indebted to the late Mancur Olson regret his untimely death even more.—The Washington Monthly
William Easterly
The late Mancur Olson summed up his life's work in this short but remarkably insightful book. He applies insights drawn from his past work to the vanishing communism to capitalism, and to the poverty of developing countries.—Finance & Development