Collective Action and Economic Growth

Mancur Olson has applied his theory of collective action to the problem of national advance: The Rise and Decline of Nations is an ambitious attempt to synthesise the topics of growth and development, efficiency and flexibility, free trade and involuntary unemployment, and to correlate them with the size and power of the special-interest groups which comprise the corporate society. Olson’s empirical evidence is taken from a wide range of countries — Germany and Japan in the aftermath of the Second World War, the newly-industrialised countries of Eastern Asia in the 1970s, France reeling from the double shock of the Revolution in 1789 and the Treaty of Rome less than two centuries later, the old cultures and rigid social structures of the north-eastern United States and what would appear to be the whole of the United Kingdom. His interest being comparative, it is no surprise that he harbours doubts about the value of any methodological orientation save the interdisciplinary: ‘Why, then, have so many economists failed to anticipate the emergence of new economic realities in the 1970s and the 1980s? Perhaps it is because, wearing professional blinkers, they have looked only straight ahead at phenomena economists have habitually examined. This book attempts to show that if we take the trouble to look to the side, at the domains of other disciplines, we shall gain a different conception of the entire landscape.’1