Codename Olson

In 1982, Mancur Olson published The Rise and Decline of Nations: the argument that economies don’t just stumble into stagnation — they organise their way into it. Olson is that argument, rendered as charts, country by country.

What it is

Olson’s thesis is that societies accumulate distributional coalitions over time: organised special interests that succeed not by growing the pie but by capturing a bigger slice of it. A cartel here, a protected industry there, a rent-seeking guild everywhere else. Each one is rational on its own terms. Together they add up to what Olson called institutional sclerosis — an economy that grows slower and slower as more and more of its energy goes into defending slices rather than baking bread.

The charts on this site follow that process across countries: how coalitions form, what they capture, and what happens to growth when they do.

The standstill

The end-state is what Olson called reformist gridlock. When zero-sum, veto-cratic special interests dominate the administrative, legislative, and political systems, every reform gets blocked by the coalition that loses from it. Nothing structural can change. The standstill isn’t a crisis — it’s the equilibrium.

Terms of trade can hide it. A country riding a commodity boom can post perfectly respectable numbers while its institutions quietly sclerotise underneath, the good times papering over the gridlock. But it’s there — and when the terms of trade turn, it’s all that’s left.

How it’s built

The data are updated monthly with cron jobs, so the charts stay current without any manual fiddling. Pick a country, watch the decline.