ECONOMY

douglass c. north 1007
implied that acquiescing in the British attempt to impose the stamp tax—no matter
how trivial in itself—gave them the right to impose any policy. To many radicals, this
implied that Britain sought to undo the credible commitment to honoring American
property rights: In short, the British had become a great threat. The radicals read
malevolence into British behavior—Great Britain was out to subjugate the American
colonies.
In the mid-1760s, most Americans did not agree. Although they did not approve of
the British behavior, they did not see it as the beginnings of malevolence and subjugation.
Nothing in their previous experience suggested anything like what the radicals
were suggesting. And yet, nothing in their experience allowed them to understand
what the British were doing and why they were doing it.
In the face of their failure to convince most Americans, the radicals made a prediction:
the British would attack the source of American liberty, the colonial assemblies
that had protected their rights. Indeed, the British did just that. In the face of New
York’s refusal to quarter British troops, Britain suspended the New York Colonial
Assembly. A few years later, when Americans in Boston dumped tea in the harbor to
protest the British, reaction was far more forceful, passing what became known in the
colonies as the Intolerable Acts. These closed the port of Boston, imposed martial
law, and annulled the Massachusetts Colonial Charter. In short order, the British
had acted exactly as the radicals had predicted: they had disbanded the Colonial
Assembly and with it Massachusetts law protecting colonial property rights. Pivotal
moderates became sufficiently convinced of British malevolence that they supported
arevolution.
The point of this example is that Americans faced a problem that was unique
given their experience. Nothing from the past allowed them easily to interpret this
challenge. Initially, most people thought the problem relatively small while a smaller
group argued that it represented the end of the world as they had known it. As the
colonists and the British interacted, more evidence was produced, eventually leading
asufficient coalition to support a revolution. Even so, most Americans could not be
sure a war was necessary.
Second, consider Timur Kuran’s (1992) brilliant point in his essay “Why revolutions
are better understood than predicted.” The idea is that in authoritarian regimes (think
of Poland in the 1970s), most citizens hate the regime and, moreover, this is common
knowledge. And yet each citizen knows that if she acts alone against the regime, she
risks severe punishment. Only if a great many citizens act in concert do they have a
hope of overthrowing the regime. This is a coordination game; specifically, a tipping
game.
Authoritarian regimes understand this strategic environment, so they spend a large
portion of their resources suppressing the ability of citizens to coordinate. These
regimes typically drastically curtail the freedom to speak, to assemble, and to form
organizations. As Kuran observes, the regime acts to defend against all actions that it
can reliably predict will foster citizen coordination.
This point implies that the only events that can spark citizen coordination are those
that the regime fails to recognize for what they are. In other words, revolutions cannot