The biggest historical event in the data since 1960 is the end of Soviet Socialism, which was a very large detour of the political-economic system from the general transition path in ten countries. It led to 28 successor states. The Socialist system suffered from poor economic performance, but the triggering event in the USSR is a set of unique, complex, and unforeseen events, and hence a practically exogenous event in the USSR. It became an exogenous external political event in the other 27 countries. The return of the countries to the long-run transition path has a very wide J-curve. The Muslim/Mena-exception is analyzed. The collapse of Soviet Socialism produced a strong zeitgeist effect in the rest of the world, where Socialism went out of fashion.

While the Jumps Model explains the changes caused by triggering events, Chapter 6 demonstrates that the events happen randomly. This is done in two ways: One is a statistical analysis trying to explain the binary event index. It appears that the standard development variables explain very little. The second is a study of the relevant articles in the Historical Archive of the Economist. One or more articles in the journal cover all 262 larger events found in the Polity P-index, 1960–2016. The articles all identify one (or more) triggering events. It appears that most are domestic political events. They are very diverse, so most have to be classified as practically exogenous. The second biggest causal factor is the external political event, associated to swings in the zeitgeist. System changes are independent of external economic events.

The book shows that institutional changes have a large endogenous element in the form of strong but fuzzy underlying transitions. This is illustrated by a tale of three countries with a different culture and history that have converged to become much the same. However, the endogeneity means that we are explaining development by development, which gives a very confluent process. It is argued that exogeneity enters through arbitrary triggering events, which creates the large-scale fuzziness we observe, even when the underlying endogeneity leads to much the same transitions in the end.