Economic models tend to treat the state as a benign planner, and Lundahl uses Haiti to show what that assumption costs. He attributes Haitian underdevelopment to population growth working with soil erosion, technological stagnation in peasant farming, and governments that have run the country on the premise that the nation exists for the sake of the polity. The third factor is his subject here. Once the plantation economy collapsed after the wars of independence and land passed to smallholders, the elite lost its landed income, and control of the presidency became the surest route to wealth. What followed was a chain of kleptocracies, altered by the United States occupation, which substituted army arbitration for open competition between cliques, and perfected by François Duvalier's militia. Reviewing the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier and the ruined elections after it, Lundahl doubts the prospects for democracy and describes a self-reinforcing autocratic equilibrium in which the past itself obstructs change.