What Links These Stories?
This chapter looks at the common threads that unite the various disaster stories of ancient Byzantium, the Middle East, the French Revolution, and modern-day Somalia. First, cooperation helps; factionalism and infighting hurt. The French aristocracy doomed itself by splintering while arguing over which subset of nobles would have to pay the new taxes, and the interclan divisions prevented the Somalians from developing a unified response to defend themselves against British or Italian colonizers. Second, governments do not survive without adequate tax revenues. Byzantium doomed itself by granting tax subsidies to its nobility, while the Somalian government was always in tenuous straits due to the lack of taxable surplus in the country. Third, the economy matters, and fourth, ecological preservation can be essential to economic growth. Fifth, ethnic tensions inhibit rational state policy: the inability of African or Middle Eastern countries to prevent the loss of the semiarid came from governments paralyzed by ethnic divisions. Finally, state capacity matters: Somalia's government was crippled by widespread corruption and flagrant lack of expertise.