“You have democracy in terms of framework, but it’s clan politics,” with elections serving as a method for “preventing potential conflict between clans” and “delivering stability.” Even Faysal Ali Warabe, chairman of the Justice and Welfare Party, conceded, “We campaign on issues, but we’re elected on a tribal basis.”
The description of Somaliland sounds like a limited-access order, as described by North, Weingast, and Wallis. The attempt to go beyond this to an open-access order often fails.
I had to look up NWW. Professor Kling, you do have the habit of speaking in a private code.
Presumably this is some background reading.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2015/Klingtwoforms.html
also I’m so distractible that I didn’t notice you mention “North, Weingast, and Wallis” in your post. Nevermind
Thank you for the link to the review by ASK. Quite interesting.
The US purports to be an “open access” order, but has in fact become a “closed access order.” You don’t have to go to Somaliland to see established interests freezing out competition.
Michael van Notten’s “The Law of the Somalis” is well worth reading. Van Notten was a Dutch classical liberal legal scholar who married a Somali woman and lived in Somalia for the last years of his life. He provides an account of traditional Somali law as kritarchy, rule by judges within the context of the clan structure. It is broadly similar to David Friedman’s account of medieval Icelandic law as “law without the state,”
https://www.amazon.com/Law-Somalis-Foundation-Economic-Development/dp/156902250X
David Friedman provides a summary here,
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Legal_Systems_Draft/Systems/SomaliLawChapter.html
Van Notten and Spencer MacCallum, who finished the book after Van Notten’s death, both saw the forcible imposition of a majoritarian central government in Mogadishu by the international community as contributing to the ongoing violence there. They believe that if the international community had allowed the clans to rule using indigenous clan law, Somalia today would be less violent and more prosperous.
Instead, the international community insisted on a central “state” to which they then send large amounts of foreign aid, incentivizing violence to capture the goodies. Here is an AEI account of one case of $18 million going missing,
“The Horn of Africa country received more than $50 billion in aid between 1991 and 2011 and hundreds of millions of dollars annually in U.S. aid ever since. U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Donald Yamamoto has promised to increase that amount.
Reports have now emerged that $18 million in aid from the European Union, Saudi Arabia, and the United Nations have disappeared. The government received the funding, but it did not pass through the Treasury’s account at the Central Bank. $18 million might be a pittance compared to the total aid Somalia receives, nor is it the only money that has disappeared. Transparency International has listed Somalia as the world’s most corrupt country for 16 years running.”
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/somalia-must-explain-missing-cash-before-receiving-more-foreign-aid/
In a nation with a GDP per capita of $225, control of “central government” in Mogadishu is the ultimate cash cow.
Meanwhile, Somaliland and Puntland are functioning relatively well, with much less violence, without all of the corrupting cash. Although morally we should definitely recognize them as independent entities, if we did so we’d probably begin sending large amounts of “foreign aid” to the alleged “governments” thus incentivizing a significant increase in violence.
When is the last time you read an account of the violence in Somalia that emphasizes the role of foreign aid directed towards an externally imposed central government, not rooted in indigenous Somali institutions, as incentivizing the violence?
Several of Boettke’s former students have written on Somalia as a stateless society, including Peter Leeson’s “Better Off Stateless,”
https://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
Coyne and Leeson, “Understanding the Feasible Institutions,”
https://www.ccoyne.com/Somalia.pdf
Ben Powell, Ryan Ford, and Alex Nowrasteh, “Somalia after State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement?”
http://www.benjaminwpowell.com/scholarly-publications/journal-articles/somalia-after-state-collapse.pdf
I lived in Philadelphia for 12 years.
Not that different from Somaliland.
The Republicans all moved to the suburbs. The Democrats have a monopoly on Philadelphia. There is a black Democrat Party, which wins all the primaries for the Democrat nomination for Mayor. There is a white Democrat Party, which either fails to win a nomination or runs as a Republican to oppose the black Democrat Party candidate. Each candidate gets tribal votes. The blacks vote for the black candidate, the ethnic whites vote for the white candidate, and the Gentry Left votes for the black candidate because of “racism.” The issues are a sideshow, just noise.
Tom Wolfe’s last novel was called “Back to Blood.” He says politics and religion have failed us, so people go back to blood, that is, to ethnic identity.
Back To Blood. There Will Be Blood. Welcome to Somaliland, where all politics is all tribal, all the time.
I can’t agree with this formulation. Politics and religion are not people and can neither be faithful nor betray anybody. In the words of one imaginary character, “the law does not defend people: it is the people who defend the law.”
“Not that different from Somaliland.”
This part is right. I think people are fooling themselves if they don’t realize that certain communities in the US vote in elections and on juries by prioritizing ethnic solidarity and venal class interest over other considerations.
Indeed, the fact that this was at the expense of liberal ideals of individualism, neutrality, and fairness was once upon a time something of an embarrassment rationalized by temporarily compelling excuses which were thought likely to eventually fade away.
Instead, the solidarity – because politically useful – proved to be made of stronger stuff than the ideals, and so the ideology was reformulated to not just excuse these unfortunate deviations but promote them as positive goals in and of themselves. But not for everyone: only for the groups providing Democratic Party vote banks.
This is just like how Affirmative Action was recognized as a violation of Equal Protection but deemed temporarily ok anyway because of historical contingencies (plausible) and compelling interests in pedagogy and team performance (implausible phony baloney). But since AA is more important than Equal Protection, that “wrong but necessary and only temporary” framing has gone out the window, and it’s *not* putting thumbs on the identity scales that constitute the new transgressions.
A major goal of development economics/international aid orgs should involve convincing the clannish peoples of the world to outbreed.
1. We have lots of strong evidence that inbreeding (cousin-marriage) mildly reduces IQ. Garett Jones has argued convincingly that even small gains in average IQ can have big growth effects.
2. Heinrich’s WEIRD book shows that this program will also have very beneficial effects in the very long run. Clans ain’t good; outbreeding eventually weakens and destroys them.