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BAD GUYS MATTERAuthor(s): PAUL COLLIERSource: Foreign Policy, No. 180 (July/August 2010), pp. 88-89Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20753969 .

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BAD GUYS

MATTER

THEY PUT THE FAILED IN FAILED STATES. BY PAUL COLLIER

There are bad leaders, good leaders, and great leaders. Let's

start with one very bad one.

When I met Sani Abacha in 1997, the Nigerian dictator struck me as uninterested in matters economic, his eyes glaz

ing over as I sketched Nigeria's untapped opportunities. But I

later realized how badly I had misjudged him: In his short five years in office, he reportedly succeeded in amassing some

$4 billion in private bank accounts overseas. It was only his

country's economy that bored him. Good thing for Nigeria that he passed

away when he did, in 1998. During the subsequent oil boom, more scru

pulous leaders enabled Nigeria to accumulate $70 billion in reserves. Just

think how much of that Abacha would have squirreled away. Leaders matter, for better or, more likely, for worse. Sure, some of

Asia's "benign" autocrats have turned their ambitions to building strong national economies. But not in Africa and many of the other countries

that I call the bottom billion?quite a number of which crowd the upper

reaches of the Failed States Index. There, the most common form of

autocracy is anything but benign. These leaders not only neglect to build

the economy, they actively avoid doing so. The best-known instance

is President Mobutu Sese Seko's order to "build no roads" in the vast

country then known as Zaire. Why? Because without roads, it was harder

for opponents to organize a rebellion against him.

The world, unfortunately, has many Mobutus. When I asked Kenya's autocratic president, Daniel arap Moi, why he had banned food imports from neighboring Uganda, his answer so tortured common sense that

one of his aides had to take me aside and tell me the real story: Some of

the president's businessman friends had stocks of food warehoused and

wanted prices to rise. In Angola, I once asked a finance minister why, in

defiance of economic logic, his country operated multiple exchange rates.

The president used the dual system to siphon off money, he whispered. Until last year, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe did the same.

Bad guys matter, and when they rule, they make weak states weaker.

And the countless anecdotes are backed up by numbers: In a celebrated

study, economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken looked at

whether the death of a country's leader altered economic growth. It did,

sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Recently, an Oxford

colleague, Anke Hoeffler, and I sifted through their results again, distin

guishing this time between democrats and autocrats. We found that in

democracies, changing the leader does not change growth?all leaders

are disciplined to perform tolerably. But in autocracies, the growth rates

are as unpredictably varied as the leaders' personalities. Here lies the

difference between good leaders and great ones: Good leaders put right the policy catastrophes of bad leaders; great leaders, like the men who

shaped the U.S. Constitution, build the democratic checks and balances

that make good leaders redundant.

So much for the good and the great?now back to the bad. Like Tolstoy's

unhappy families, leaders can be bad in many different ways, and the

extremes of their badness matter out of all proportion to their frequency in the population. At the extreme of greed are kleptocrats. At the extreme

of insensitivity to the pain of others are psychopaths. At the extreme of

preference for getting their own way are tyrants. Although people with

such characteristics are rare, they have a knack for getting themselves into

precisely those positions where their traits are most damaging. Kleptocrats do not aspire to become monks; they want to be bankers. Psychopaths do

not dream of being nurses; they strive to be soldiers. Tyrants do not plead to

be social workers; they scheme to become politicians. At the core of all successful societies are procedures for blocking

the advancement of such men. The safety mechanisms are often rather

mundane. Britain, for example, transformed the 19th-century civil service

from corruption to efficiency by replacing promotion by patronage with

competitive examinations.

The weakest states utterly lack such defenses. There, as extremely bad people of all three varieties infiltrate a wide range of key positions, countries are brought to their knees?and not just by politicians. Banks

are routinely run by thieves who bankrupt them by "lending" the deposits to themselves. Rebel armies are led not by liberators, but by people more

suited for a mental hospital. Take Lib?ri?n commander Prince Johnson,

who filmed himself calmly sipping a beer while his captive, President Samuel Doe, was tortured to death.

But among the many varieties of badness, political tyranny is surely the

most destructive. Politically ambitious crooks do not just fritter away the

money they make from corruption; they invest it in future power. And that

should frighten us most of all.

Paul Collier is professor of economics at Oxford University and author of the

recently publishedThe Plundered Planet.

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