Somalia was pluralistic because many different groups held power in the country, but it wasn’t centralized because these groups didn’t work together to make and enforce decisions. The Kingdom of Taqali’s resistance to writing again shows why people—including both elites and commoners—often oppose centralization. Specifically, centralization increases the state’s power, and the state can use this for good as well as for evil. This is why both the most prosperous countries (like Britain) and the most repressive ones (like North Korea) have highly centralized institutions. The elite fears it will lose power under centralization, and the people fear that the elite will further disempower them. But Taqali’s refusal to use writing also disproves the assumption that countries simply need to create new technologies to develop. Rather, Acemoglu and Robinson emphasize that the state’s willingness to accept, adopt, and spread technology is at least as important as the creation of that technology in the first place.