In his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, economist Mancur Olson argued that over time, stable societies accumulate “distributive coalitions,” narrow special-interest organizations that complexify social life and burden the economy with overregulation and opaque forms of wealth redistribution. The notion that distributive coalitions are more often bad than good for economic performance, at least when they are not sufficiently “encompassing” to internalize the costs of inefficient redistribution, is pretty well accepted, but Olson’s thesis that political stability and the passage of time are the most important determinants of the number and power of distributive coalitions has been more controversial. One of the chapters of his book is an empirical test of the hypothesis on the 50 states. Olson finds that states settled earlier have higher rates of unionization and lower growth rates (in the 1960s and 1970s), except the former Confederate states, which “benefit” from the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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