Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

He would be proved wrong. The rulings of the Supreme Court meant that southern educational facilities had to be desegregated, including the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1962, after a long legal battle, federal courts ruled that James Meredith, a young black air force veteran, had to be admitted to “Ole Miss.” Opposition to the implementation of this ruling was orchestrated by the so-called Citizens’ Councils, the first of which had been formed in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1954 to fight desegregation of the South. State governor Ross Barnett publicly rejected the court-ordered desegregation on television on September 13, announcing that state universities would close before they agreed to be desegregated. Finally, after much negotiation between Barnett and President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington, the federal government intervened forcibly to implement this ruling. A day was set when U.S. marshals would bring Meredith to Oxford. In anticipation, white supremacists began to organize. On September 30, the day before Meredith was due to appear, U.S. marshals entered the university campus and surrounded the main administration building. A crowd of about 2,500 came to protest, and soon a riot broke out. The marshals used tear gas to disperse the rioters, but soon came under fire. By 10:00 p.m. that night, federal troops were moved into the city to restore order. Soon there were 20,000 troops and 11,000 National Guardsmen in Oxford. In total, 300 people would be arrested. Meredith decided to stay on campus, where, protected from death threats by U.S. marshals and 300 soldiers, he eventually graduated.

Federal legislation was pivotal in the process of institutional reform in the South. During the passage of the first Civil Rights Act in 1957, Strom Thurmond, then a senator, spoke nonstop for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes to prevent, or at least delay, passage of the act. During his speech he read everything from the Declaration of Independence to various phone books. But to no avail. The 1957 act culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing a whole gamut of segregationist state legislation and practices. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 declared the literacy tests, poll taxes, and other methods used for disenfranchising southern blacks to be illegal. It also extended a great deal of federal oversight into state elections.

The impact of all these events was a significant change in economic and legal institutions in the South. In Mississippi, for example, only about 5 percent of eligible black people were voting in 1960. By 1970 this figure had increased to 50 percent. In Alabama and South Carolina, it went from around 10 percent in 1960 to 50 percent in 1970. These patterns changed the nature of elections, both for local and national offices. More important, the political support from the dominant Democratic Party for the extractive institutions discriminating against blacks eroded. The way was then open for a range of changes in economic institutions. Prior to the institutional reforms of the 1960s, blacks had been almost entirely excluded from jobs in textile mills. In 1960 only about 5 percent of employees in southern textile mills were black. Civil rights legislation stopped this discrimination. By 1970 this proportion had increased to 15 percent; by 1990 it was at 25 percent. Economic discrimination against blacks began to decline, the educational opportunities for blacks improved significantly, and the southern labor market became more competitive. Together with inclusive institutions came more rapid economic improvements in the South. In 1940 southern states had only about 50 percent of the level of per capita income of the United States. This started to change in the late 1940s and ’50s. By 1990 the gap had basically vanished.

As in Botswana, the key in the U.S. South was the development of inclusive political and economic institutions. This came at the juxtaposition of the increasing discontent among blacks suffering under southern extractive institutions and the crumbling of the one-party rule of the Democratic Party in the South. Once again, existing institutions shaped the path of change. In this case, it was pivotal that southern institutions were situated within the inclusive federal institutions of the United States, and this allowed southern blacks finally to mobilize the federal government and institutions for their cause. The whole process was also facilitated by the fact that, with the massive outmigration of blacks from the South and the mechanization of cotton production, economic conditions had changed so that southern elites were less willing to put up more of a fight.

REBIRTH IN CHINA

The Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong finally overthrew the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in 1949. The People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1. The political and economic institutions created after 1949 were highly extractive. Politically, they featured the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. No other political organization has been allowed in China since then. Until his death in 1976, Mao entirely dominated the Communist Party and the government. Accompanying these authoritarian, extractive political institutions were highly extractive economic institutions. Mao immediately nationalized land and abolished all kinds of property rights in one fell swoop. He had landlords, as well as other segments he deemed to be against the regime, executed. The market economy was essentially abolished. People in rural areas were gradually organized onto communal farms. Money and wages were replaced by “work points,” which could be traded for goods. Internal passports were introduced in 1956 forbidding travel without appropriate authorization, in order to increase political and economic control. All industry was similarly nationalized, and Mao launched an ambitious attempt to promote the rapid development of industry through the use of “five-year plans,” modeled on those in the Soviet Union.

As with all extractive institutions, Mao’s regime was attempting to extract resources from the vast country he was now controlling. As in the case of the government of Sierra Leone with its marketing board, the Chinese Communist Party had a monopoly over the sale of produce, such as rice and grain, which was used to heavily tax farmers. The attempts at industrialization turned into the infamous Great Leap Forward after 1958 with the roll-out of the second five-year plan. Mao announced that steel output would double in a year based on small-scale “backyard” blast furnaces. He claimed that in fifteen years, China would catch up with British steel production. The only problem was that there was no feasible way of meeting these targets. To meet the plan’s goals, scrap metal had to be found, and people would have to melt down their pots and pans and even their agricultural implements such as hoes and plows. Workers who ought to have been tending the fields were making steel by destroying their plows, and thus their future ability to feed themselves and the country. The result was a calamitous famine in the Chinese countryside. Though scholars debate the role of Mao’s policy compared with the impact of droughts at the same time, nobody doubts the central role of the Great Leap Forward in contributing to the death of between twenty and forty million people. We don’t know precisely how many, because China under Mao did not collect the numbers that would have documented the atrocities. Per capita income fell by around one-quarter.

One consequence of the Great Leap Forward was that a senior member of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, a very successful general during the revolution, who led an “anti-rightist” campaign resulting in the execution of many “enemies of the revolution,” had a change of heart. At a conference in Guangzhou in the south of China in 1961, Deng argued, “No matter whether the cat is black or white, if it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” It did not matter whether policies appeared communist or not; China needed policies that would encourage production so that it could feed its people.