The Capacity Trap

What if the very thing that makes a state powerful is also what makes it fragile? Several of the region's most capable states have never been more able to act and never more exposed to what it costs to concen-trate that capability in too few hands. They can mobilize capital fast, build at scale, and intervene decisively when it matters. This book argues that the usual explanations for what still goes wrong, authori-tarianism, rentierism, weak institutions, elite capture, are not wrong so much as incomplete. They describe conditions. They do not ex-plain the transition into them. The argument offered here is narrower and, I would contend, sharper: a state can increase its capacity to execute while decreasing its capacity to absorb failure, and the mechanism by which this hap-pens is not a design choice or a political pathology but a feedback loop built from individually reasonable decisions. A capable institu-tion solves a problem a weaker one could not. The solution works. Success routes the next similar problem to the same address. Routing changes practice. Reduced practice erodes the capability of the insti-tution that lost the work. That erosion increases the relative ad-vantage of the institution that took it on. The trap does not begin when the center becomes too powerful. It begins when the center becomes too useful.