Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order" (2011) is already standard reading, and should be read by all students of development studies. For those unfamiliar with the work, it focuses on the development of government institutions. This post picks up on a few points that resonated on a recent reading:

The background: "Political institutions develop, often slowly and painfully, over time as human societies strive to organize themselves to master their environments. But political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances. There is something like a law of the conservation of institutions. Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs." (p. 7)

In agreement with a recent work on China, Fukuyama argues that a "parsimonious theory of political change, comparable to the theories of economic growth posited by economists, is in my view simply not possible. The factors driving the development of any given political institution are multiple, complex, and often dependent on accidental or contingent events." (p. 23) Again: "Social order was not, according to Hayek, the result of top-down rational planning: rather, it occurred spontaneously through the interactions of hundreds or thousands of dispersed individuals who experimented with rules, kept the ones that worked, and rejected those that didn't. The process by which social order was generated was incremental, evolutionary, and decentralized; only by making use of the local knowledge of myriads of individuals could a working "Great Society" ever appear" (p. 252). But, Fukuyama also cites examples of alternative pathways, such as conversion to Christianity or Islam, as a means to introduce rapid, sometimes top-down social order (see p. 256).

The author contrasts cultural relativism with evolutionary theory, arguing that human societies also evolve like biological evolution. ("…why one level gets superseded by another…"). While the author avoids labeling better/higher or lower/worse, the values he does chose to assess societies – complexity, richness and power – are themselves value judgements. If one society is able to wipe out another, is this a valuable metric equating with biological advancement? Similarly, if one society is able to deplete the resources of humanity rapidly and usurp the wealth of others, thereby becoming richer than others, is this a valuable metric equating with biological advancement? I am not convinced by Fukuyama's narrative on these points. I also strongly oppose the ease with which Fukuyama switches between comparisons of chimp societies and certain human societies he views as being less complex, powerful and rich, such as "Like chimp bands, hunter-gatherers inhabit a territorial range…" (p. 53).

On wealth and inequality: "There is something like an iron law of latifundia in agrarian societies that says that the rich will grow richer until they are stopped – either by the state, by peasant rebellions, or by states acting out of fear of peasant rebellions." (p. 141).

On unity: "A second perhaps more important reason by China reunified has implications for contemporary developing countries… there was a strong feeling that China was defined by a shared written language, a classical literary canon, a bureaucratic tradition, a shared history, empirewide educational institutions, and a value system that dictated elite behavior at both the political and social levels. That sense of cultural unity remained even when the state disappeared." (p. 149)

On methods: "Putting the theory after the history constitutes what I regard as the correct approach to analysis: theories ought to be inferred from facts, and not the other way around. Of course, there is no such thing as pure confrontation with facts, devoid of prior theoretical constructs. Those who think they are empirical in that fashion are deluding themselves. But all too often social science begins with an elegant theory and then searches for facts that will confirm it." (p. 24)

We frequently read and use claims based on claims of causation. Yet, infrequently do we explore if the claims are well founded, or if the methods are well suited to the claims being made. Nancy Cartwright's "Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics" (2007) is a valuable resource to better engage with causation. The book, a collection of essays, "is for philosophers, economists and social scientists or for anyone who wants to understand what causality is, how to find out about it and what it is good for" (p. 1). Cartwright argues: "Our philosophical treatment of causation must make clear why the methods we use for testing causal claims provide good warrant for the uses to which we put those claims" (p. 2). 

The chapters cover a range of different topics and approaches to causation, however in general the book provides arguments for caution:

• "What causes should be expected to do and how they do it - really, what causes are - can vary from one kind of system of causal relations to another and from case to case. Correlatively, so too will the methods for finding them... The important thing is that there is no single interesting characterizing feature of causation; hence no off-the-shelf or one-size-fits-all method for finding out about it, no 'gold standard' for judging causal relations" (p. 2). 

• "Just as there is an untold variety of quantities that can be involved in laws, so too there is an untold variety of causal relations. Nature is rife with very specific causal relations involving these causal relations, laws that we represent most immediately using content-rich causal verbs: the pistons compress the air in the carbine chamber, the sun attracts the planets, the loss of skills among long-term unemployed workers discourages firms from opening new jobs... These are genuine facts, but more concrete than those reported in claims that use only the abstract vocabulary of 'cause' and 'prevent'. If we overlook this, we will lose a vast amount of information that we otherwise possess, important, useful information that can help us with crucial questions of design and control" (p. 19-20).

• "There may be good evidence for the effectiveness of a policy conceived, as it usually is, in the abstract, but the actual outcomes may depend crucially on the find tuning of the method of implementation... Or consider poverty measures. Policy may set whether a poverty line should be relative or absolute and if relative, in what way (for instance, two-thirds of the median income). But the results - for instance, the poverty ranking among European countries - depend crucially on dozens and dozens of details of implementation (how to deal with individuals versus families, wealth or welfare benefits versus earned income, etc.), details where it seems that very different decisions can be equally motivated by the ranking will come out very differently depending on how these decisions are taken. The more the details matter, the more the problems of evidence multiply." (p. 41).

• "I can summarize my view by comparing an economic model to a certain kind of ideal experiment in physics: criticizing economic models for using unrealistic assumptions is like criticizing Galileo's rolling ball experiments for using a plane honed to be as frictionless as possible. The defence of economic modelling has a bite, however. On the one hand, it makes clear why some kinds of unrealistic assumptions will do; but on the other, it highlights how totally misleading other kinds can be - and these other kinds of assumptions are ones that may be hard to avoid given the nature of contemporary economic theory." (p. 217)
  

Even if parts may be challenging for social scientists who are unfamiliar with economics and equations, the book is well worth reading.