The Boston Bombings and Why Nations Fail: A Tale of Two Tales

I was as usual drinking coffee while watching the CNN news coverage this morning. Like yesterday and the days before, CNN was exclusively covering the tragic Boston Bombings that claimed three lives and wounded hundreds during the ill-fated marathon contest. There was breaking news announcement that the manhunt for the perpetrators of the dreadful bombing incidents have come to a successful conclusion. The TV-screen was flooded by the pictures of the two Tsarnev brothers from Chechenia, the 26 year old Tamerlan, who had been killed in the hunt, and the 19 year old Dzhokhar, who had been wounded and captured alive. A reporter had immediately flown to Dagestan, the birthplace of the brothers, and presented interviews with their father and shots of their former primary school. Several correspondents took turns reporting the reaction of Bostonians and the officialdom on the conclusion of a week-long nightmare.

While CNN spent hours and hours of expensive airtime on the Boston bombings, much has been going on in the world. In the week since April 15, several bomb blasts have killed more than 40 people, including a single one that claimed 32 lives, in the unending violence in Iraq. The grueling war in Syria that has so far claimed 70,000 lives is still raging. Just today, 157 were reportedly killed in an earthquake in Sichuan province of China.

Why is that, ignoring all these tragedies, CNN focused exclusively on the Boston bombings, directing all its resources and reporters on this comparatively smaller incident? Which brings me to the seemingly unrelated question: Why Do Nations Fail?

This is the title of a bestselling book I finished reading just a week ago. One of the co-authors of the book, Professor James Robinson, visited our department, and gave a public lecture on the same theme. There was also a question and answer session in which he received questions about his book. I actually got the chance to ask why nations, particularly African nations, fail. Is it because of war, diseases, revolutions, crime, culture, climate, corruption, starvation, lack of resources, inequality, organizational failure, isolation, political infighting, what else?

Professor Robinson has a simpler answer: institutions. Forget everything else; it is for lack of proper institutions that nations fail. More specifically, we need inclusive political institutions to avert the collapse of states. His story envisions three layers of institutional arrangements. A necessary condition for the emergence of inclusive political institutions is the existence of a strong and centralized state. Without a strong central organ that exclusively exercises power and the “monopoly for violence”, law and order would be lacking, thus inhibiting any sort of social organization. But this centralized authority should be of an inclusive type if it is going to promote sustainable economic growth. In other words, it should have a reasonably fair representation of the broad masses. Only an inclusive (or democratic) type of political government can promote economic policies that encourage entrepreneurship, investment, creativity, education and hard work. To sum up, a nation can rise only when it has a sufficiently centralized government that is representative so that it can promote economic policies that are conducive for growth.

Though at different levels, both CNN and Professor Robinson tell us stories about what the world looks like. But what is it that they have in common? If you have not got me yet, the similarity between the two is that they tell stories in their own ways.  Both are extremely selective in their presentation, and offer simple explanations for complex problems. For CNN the only major world event this week was the Boston bombing and for Professor Robinson nations fail just because of bad institutions.

Of course, both CNN and Professor Robinson know that much more is going on in the world. Their positions can be described as  at best simplistic and at worst biased and partial. Why is that a top ranked news channel as well as a professor in the world’s best university offer such simplistic answers while knowing the reality is much more complex?

The answer is what psychologists call the “bounded rationality” problem. This means that human analytical (thinking) power is by nature limited and thus cannot grasp a complex problem in its entirety. In other words, to be understood, a solution for a complex problem should be abstracted and robbed of its complexity, so that it is presented only in its bare basic form. According to Professor Robison, “a framework that [has] 17 factors… is no framework at all.” And thus the best story should have only one variable; one simple, clear story is the answer.

The first striking thing about this approach is that it sacrifices content merely for the sake of presentation. Surely nations fail for more than one reason. The mere fact that we can properly understand only one variable does not guarantee that in reality there is a single solution for the problem. The fact that CNN’s mainly Americanized viewers can best identify with the story of the Boston marathon bombings does not qualify the event as the single most important incident of the week.

The tragedy of the bounded rationality problem is that it works two-ways, that is it affects both the storyteller and the listener. It is not just readers of Professor Robinson’s book that would fail to understand a more complex model of state failure. If Professor Robinson had built a much more realistic model by sacrificing its simplicity, he himself would probably have hard time grasping how the model works. Similarly, for a given amount of resources CNN cannot efficiently report ten different stories at the same time without compromising the quality of its reporting. The logic of efficiency is thus against a more inclusive story, both for the professor and the news channel.

Where does this leave us, as readers of books and followers of TV channels? My opinion is that we should be conscious of not only what we read and watch, but also what we do not read and do not watch. The storyteller will make all appearances of certainty, and the story itself might be appealing in its elegance and simplicity. Nonetheless, however well told, a single story is in the end only half-true, until the other half is told. It is thus presumptuous to assume to watch ‘world news’ by following one TV-channel, as it is disastrous to formulate policy in the image of one school of thought.