ASSESSING STATE CAPACITY LIBERTARIANISM

Tyler Cowen (2020), in a controversial and widely discussed blog post, has argued that free economic institutions must be accompanied by state capacity to achieve maximal growth rates. He calls this "State Capacity Libertarianism," which echoes positions he has posed previously (Cowen 2007, 2018). Besley and Persson (2011) can be perhaps seen as a direct predecessor. Criticisms immediately emerged, with Henderson (2020) arguing that Cowen's specific proposals are in direct conflict with libertarianism, and with minor caveats, free economic institutions are already able to achieve the goals Cowen hopes to achieve with state capacity. Geloso and Salter (forthcoming) argue that the lack of examples of wealthy countries with weak states is due to survivorship bias, and they apply their argument to criticize Cowen (Geloso and Salter 2020). Caplan (2018), while not directly addressing State Capacity Libertarianism, argues that there is little reason to believe that the effects of state capacity are the result of strong states themselves, rather than the social and cultural factors that allowed a strong state to emerge in the first place. The purpose of this article is to put data to the question of the individual effects of state capacity and free economic institutions on economic performance, and the potential interaction between the two.