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rayiner · 2022-02-27 · Original thread
Reminds me of how the ousted Afghan President literally "wrote the book" on Fixing Failed States: https://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Failed-States-Framework-Rebuil...

This would be an accurate summary of this book:

> 1. Overthrow dictatorship

> 2. ...

> 3. Profit!

I love how the section on "Building a Durable Democracy" is six pages. That's the hard part! From Egypt to India to Pakistan to Bangladesh to Iraq to Afghanistan, we have learned that an eloquent constitution isn't what produces democracy. But what else would you expect from a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth? He's so acclimated to democracy from birth that he can't even recognize all the culture and socialization built up over hundreds of years that enables democracy. He can't help but be like a fish that can't understand the complex cycles that make aquatic life possible.

It's remarkable to me that so much academic and intellectual horsepower focused on this area has produced so little. I suspect these professors are all looking in the wrong place. They see their own western history in terms of oppression, and thus don't analyze it to understand what makes it tick. Which is sad, because this is an incredibly important problem to be solved.

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