Weingast on Violence, Power and a Theory of Nearly Everything

“Economists assume away the problem of violence.”

Barry Weingast was a guest on EconTalk in August of 2007. He describes a categorization of societies based on the means of dealing with violence.

• Primitive order: hunter-gatherer societies of 20-100 people
• Limited access order: System of privileges in which distribution of rents reflects distribution of power (access to violence). Monarchies and most developing countries fall into this category. Per capita income ranges between $400 and $8000.
• Open access orders: modern free-market democracies. Per capita income above $20k. Open access to organizations of all types - political, economic, social, religious. Equality before the law.

If you wanted to criticize, you might point out that they've taken hunter-gatherer at one extreme and western democracies at the other and lumped everything else into the limited access category. But, I'm not sure the categories are the point. Too often economics ignores the social and political context. All other things are seldom equal.