Mancur Olson

"Small privileged groups often capture the benefits of public goods while dispersing the costs to the unorganized many."

"Rational choice theory predicts both cooperation and defection; institutions determine which occurs."

"Transition costs are real and therefore create genuine resistance to change, not just attachment to the status quo."

"The logic of group size implies that large groups will be less efficient providers of public goods than privileged groups."

"We overestimate the power of ideology and underestimate the power of selective incentives in explaining behavior."

"Decentralized systems are slower but often wiser than centralized ones because they aggregate more information."

"The rise and decline of nations is often explained by collective action capacity, not by culture or geography."

"Coalitions that include diverse interests are inherently unstable because the coalition members have conflicting goals."

"Public choice theory shows us that government failure is not an aberration but a predictable consequence of institutional design."

"The tragedy of the commons occurs when property rights are not clearly defined or enforceable."

"We should judge institutions not by their stated intentions but by their actual incentive structures."

"Scale changes everything—the logic of a family firm does not work for a multinational corporation."

"Those who benefit most from an institution rarely acknowledge it and often deny its importance to their success."

"The success of special interests is not due to their greater resources but to their ability to organize more effectively."

"Institutions are both more powerful and more fragile than we typically recognize."

"The distribution of costs and benefits in a system determines whose voice will be heard in disputes over that system."

"Stability requires more effort and resources than we typically allocate to it."

"The implicit bargain that holds institutions together is often recognized only when it begins to break down."

"Change requires not just good ideas but the ability to coordinate action among those who would benefit from change."

"We construct elaborate moral frameworks to justify what are often simply the results of power imbalances."

"The invisible hand works better at generating wealth than at distributing it fairly."

"Institutions that cannot evolve gradually tend to collapse suddenly when crisis arrives."

"The privileged within any system have every incentive to claim that the system is natural, inevitable, and fair."

"Collective action capacity is as important to national success as natural resources or technological innovation."

"We attribute to character what we should attribute to circumstances and institutional design."

"The smaller the group, the more likely it is that the collective good will be provided."

"Institutional sclerosis—the accumulation of distributional coalitions—explains economic stagnation better than any other single factor."

"The logic that explains why cartels form also explains why they often fail."

"Democratic societies are inherently vulnerable to the organized few, which is why constitutional limits are necessary."

"Incentive structures operate whether we acknowledge them or not, which is why designs that ignore them inevitably fail."