Quotes from Paul Collier

The rise of individualism has weakened the capacity of society to work together for common purposes. And the two have interacted: leaders thought they knew what to do, but distrusted people as being too selfish to cooperate, so they relied on incentives linked to scrutiny. The combination of individual selfishness and overconfident top-down management has damaged our societies. But you can change it: we have written this book to help you do so. 1 What is Going On Here?

Public Choice Theory. This recognized that decisions on public policies are not usually taken by detached saints, but by balancing pressures from different interest groups, including the bureaucrats themselves. The selflessness of the planner could only be relied upon while the people involved in the decision were imbued with a passion for the national interest, as instilled into the wartime generation.

La otra opción es quedarnos de brazos cruzados mientras nuestras petroleras compiten con los chinos a ver quién soborna mejor.

But in truth, those of us fortunate enough to have lived all our lives in a mature democracy only think of elections because we take so much else for granted. Democracy is not just elections; it is a whole set of rules that limit what government can do.

Trade does usually benefit each country sufficiently that whoever gets the gains could fully compensate those who lose out. But while economists were vociferous advocates of trade, they kept very quiet about compensation. Without it, there is no analytic basis for claims that society is better off.

it is an insulting delusion of many people who, like me, have cushy jobs in the public sector to imagine that workers in the private sector are driven by greed and fear. The evidence suggests that job satisfaction is actually considerably higher in the private sector; for example, people are far less likely to use illness as a reason for not going to work.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do political opportunists.