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Why Nations Fail - Wikipedia

Why Nations Fail

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
AuthorsDaron AcemogluJames Robinson
LanguageEnglish
GenreComparative politicsEconomics
PublisherCrown Business
Publication date
March 20, 2012
Publication placeUnited States
Media typeHardcoverAudiobookAmazon Kindle
Pages546
ISBN0307719219
OCLC729065001

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The book applies insights from institutional economicsdevelopment economics, and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, according to a wide range of historical case studies.

The authors also maintain a website (with a blog inactive since 2014) about the ongoing discussion of the book.

Context

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The book is the result of a synthesis of many years of research by Daron Acemoglu, on the theory of economic growth, and James Robinson, on the economies of Africa and Latin America, as well as research by many other authors. It contains an interpretation of the history of various countries, both extinct and modern, from the standpoint of a new institutional school. The central idea of many of the authors' works is the defining role of institutions in the achievement of a high level of welfare by countries. An earlier book by the authors, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, is devoted to the same, but it did not contain a large number of various historical examples.[1][2][3]

The authors enter into an indirect polemical dispute with the authors of other theories explaining global inequality: the geographical theory of Jeffrey Sachs[4] and Jared Diamond,[5] the theory of ignorance of the elites Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo,[6] Seymour Martin Lipset and his modernization theory,[7] as well as various cultural theories: that of David Landes about the special cultural structure of the inhabitants of Northern Europe,[8] that of David Fischer about the positive influence of British culture,[9] and that of Max Weber about the influence of Protestant ethic on economic development.[10][11] They most harshly criticized geographical theory as "unable to explain not only global inequality, in general,” but also, the fact that many countries have been in stagnation for a long time, and then, at a certain point in time, began a rapid economic growth, although their geographical position did not change.[12]

Simon Johnson co-authored many of Acemoglu and Robinson's works, but he did not contribute to this book.[12] For example, in a 2002 article, they showed, through statistical analysis, that institutional factors dominate culture and geography in determining the GDP per capita of different countries.[13] And in the 2001 article, they showed how mortality among European settlers in the colonies influenced the establishment of institutions and the future development of these territories.[14]

Content

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Conditions for sustainable development

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Beginning with a description of NogalesArizona, and NogalesSonora, the authors question the reasons for the dramatic difference in living standards on either side of the wall separating the two cities.[15] The book focuses on how some countries have managed to achieve high levels of prosperity, while others have consistently failed. Countries that have managed to achieve a high level of well-being have demonstrated stable high rates of economic growth, for a long time: this state of the economy is called sustainable development. It is accompanied by a constant change and improvement of technologies — a process called scientific and technological progress. In search of the reasons why, in some countries , we observe this phenomenon, while others seem to have frozen in time, the authors come to the conclusion that for scientific and technological progress, it is necessary to protect the property rights of a wide strata of society and the ability to receive income from their enterprises and innovations (including from patents for inventions).[16] But as soon as a citizen receives a patent, he immediately becomes interested in that no one else patented a more perfect version of his invention, so he can receive income from his patent, forever. Therefore, for sustainable development, a mechanism is needed that does not allow him to do this, because, together, with the patent, he receives a substantial wealth. The authors come to the conclusion that such a mechanism is pluralistic political institutions that allow wide sections of society to participate in governing the country.[17] In this example, the inventor of the previous patent loses, but everyone else wins. With pluralistic political institutions, a decision is made that is beneficial to the majority, which means that the inventor of the previous one will not be able to prevent a patent for a new invention and, thus, there will be a continuous improvement of technologies.[18][19] The interpretation of economic growth, as a constant change of goods and technologies, was first proposed by Joseph Schumpeter, who called this process creative destruction.[11][20][21] In the form of an economic model, this concept was implemented by Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt in the Aghion–Howitt model, where the incentive for the development of new products is the monopoly profit from their production, which ends after the invention of a better product.[22] Since only pluralistic political institutions can guarantee that the owners of existing monopolies, using their economic power, will not be able to block the introduction of new technologies, they, according to the authors, are a necessary condition for the country's transition to sustainable development. Another prerequisite is a sufficient level of centralization of power in the country, because, in the absence of this, political pluralism can turn into chaos. The theoretical basis of the authors' work is presented in a joint article, with Simon Johnson,[23] and the authors also note the great influence of Douglass North's[24][25][26] work on their views.[11]

The authors support their position by analyzing the economic development of many modern and already disappeared countries and societies: the USA; medieval England and the British EmpireFrance; the Venetian Republic; the Roman Republic, and the Roman EmpireAustria-HungaryRussian EmpireUSSR and modern RussiaSpain and its many former colonies: ArgentinaVenezuelaGuatemalaColombiaMexico and PeruBrazil; colonial period of the Caribbean regionMaya civilizationNatufian culture; the Ottoman Empire and modern TurkeyJapanNorth Korea and South Korea; the Ming and Qing empires, and modern China; the sultanates of TidoreTernate and Bakan, the island state of Ambon and other communities on the territory of modern Indonesia, and the consequences of the impact of the Dutch East India Company on them; AustraliaSomalia and Afghanistan; the kingdoms of Aksum and modern EthiopiaSouth AfricaZimbabwe and Botswana; the kingdoms of the Congo and Cuba, and the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo; the states of OyoDahomey and Ashanti, and modern GhanaSierra Leone; modern Egypt and Uzbekistan. Reviewers unanimously note the wealth of historical examples in the book.[2][27][28][29]

Contrasting two types of institutions

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The decisive role for the development of countries, according to the authors, is played by institutions — a set of formal and informal rules and mechanisms for coercing individuals to comply with these rules that exist in society.[30] Acemoglu and Robinson divide institutions into two large groups: Political and economic. The first regulate the distribution of powers between the various authorities in the country and the procedure for the formation of these bodies, and the second regulate the property relations of citizens. The concept of Acemoglu and Robinson consists in opposing two archetypes: the so-called “extractive” (“extracting”, “squeezing”[31]) and “inclusive” (“including”, “uniting”[32]) economic and political institutions, which, in both cases, reinforce and support each other.[27][33][34][35]

Inclusive economic institutions protect the property rights of wide sections of society (not just the elite), they do not allow unjustified alienation of property, and they allow all citizens to participate in economic relations, in order to make a profit. Under the conditions of such institutions, workers are interested in increasing labour productivity. The first examples of such institutions are the commenda in the Venetian Republic and patents for inventions. The long-term existence of such economic institutions, according to the authors, is impossible, without inclusive political institutions that allow wide sections of society to participate in governing the country and make decisions that are beneficial to the majority.[35] These institutions are the foundation of all modern liberal democracies. In the absence of such institutions, when political power is usurped by a small stratum of society, sooner or later, it will use this power to gain economic power to attack the property rights of others, and, therefore, to destroy inclusive economic institutions.[27][33][34]

Extractive economic institutions exclude large segments of the population from the distribution of income from their own activities. They prevent everyone, except the elite, from benefiting from participation in economic relations, who, on the contrary, are allowed to even alienate the property of those who do not belong to the elite.[36] Examples include slaveryserfdom, and encomienda. In the context of such institutions, workers have no incentive to increase labour productivity, since all or almost all of the additional income will be withdrawn by the elite.[35] Such economic institutions are accompanied by extractive political institutions that exclude large sections of the population from governing the country and concentrate all political power in the hands of a narrow stratum of society (for example, the nobility). Examples are absolute monarchies and various types of dictatorial and totalitarian regimes, as well as authoritarian regimes, with external elements of democracy (constitution and elections), which are so widespread in the modern world, where power is supported by power structures: the army, the police, and dependent courts. The very fact that there are elections in a country does not mean that its institutions cannot be classified as extractive: competition can be dishonest, candidates' opportunities and their access to the media are unequal, and voting is conducted with numerous violations, and in this case the elections are just a spectacle, the ending of which is known, in advance.[8][33][34]

Analysis of the economic development of different countries

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Acemoglu and Robinson analyze the factors that contribute to the success or failure of states in their book. They argue that commonly cited explanations such as geography, climate, culture, religion, race, or the ignorance of political leaders are insufficient.

To support their thesis, the authors compare case studies of different countries. They highlight examples like North and South Korea, where similar factors led to divergent economic outcomes. They also examine border cities to analyze the impact of institutional environments on prosperity.

The main argument of Acemoglu and Robinson is that inclusive economic and political institutions are crucial for economic prosperity. Inclusive institutions allow for broad participation in decision-making and provide incentives for talent and creativity. On the other hand, extractive institutions, which benefit a small elite, hinder economic growth.

The authors use historical examples, such as the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain, to illustrate the importance of democratic pluralism for economic development. They also discuss China's economic boom, attributing it to increasingly inclusive economic policies.

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, economic growth can lead to changes in political institutions. They caution that if China does not improve its political balance, it may face a collapse similar to the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Theories

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The book explores two main theories. The first theory examines the factors that drive democratic and dictatorial regimes. The second theory delves deeper into how democratic regimes foster economic growth, while dictatorial regimes hinder it.

Drivers of democracy

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Acemoglu and Robinson's theory on the driving forces behind democracy is based on their previous work in game theory.[37] Their paper examines the historical democratization of Western Europe and Latin America and highlights the role of revolution threats and elite desires for economic redistribution in the transition to democracy.

The authors make several assumptions in their game theoretic model. They assume that society is divided into a rich class and a poor class, that regimes are either democratic or nondemocratic, and that people's preferences are solely based on monetary redistribution. They also consider people's concerns for future redistribution and the fluctuation of a country's economic output. Additionally, individuals in society aim to maximize their own utility.

In their model, a country starts as a nondemocratic society where a small rich group controls the wealth and rules over the poor majority. The rich determine the taxation rate and the poor can either accept the redistribution offered or choose to revolt, which comes with a cost. The outcome of the game depends on the rich's taxation proposal and the poor's decision to revolt or not.

Democratization occurs when the rich voluntarily increase monetary redistribution and franchise to the poor to avoid revolution.

VariableChange to variableOppressed Payoff

Without Revolution

Oppressed Payoff

With Revolution

Oppressor Payoff

Without Revolution

Oppressor Payoff

With Revolution

More Likely to Democratize?Why
Annual economic outputDecreasesDecreasesUnchangedDecreasesUnchangedYesDuring economic downturn, economic output decreases and thus poor would want to resort more to revolution. To compensate for it, rich would increase redistribution and franchise to prevent the poor from revolting.
Cost to oppressed for attempting a revolutionDecreasesUnchangedIncreasesUnchangedUnchangedYesWith lower cost of revolution (for example, if one is unemployed vs. employed, the cost is much lower when unemployed), the poor tends to resort more to revolution; the rich would thus give more benefits to the poor to prevent that from happening
Cost to oppressors for a successful revolutionIncreasesUnchangedUnchangedUnchangedDecreasesYesWith higher punishment, the rich would be more willing to increase redistribution to the poor to avoid more severe punishment
Benefit to oppressed of successful revolutionIncreasesUnchangedIncreasesUnchangedUnchangedYesIf the benefits for revolution are higher, revolution appeals more to the poor and thus the rich again have more incentive to redistribute to avoid revolution

The analysis suggests that the constant threat of revolution motivates the wealthy to democratize. This theory aligns with a paper by Clark, Golder, and Golder, which discusses how governments decide whether to exploit or protect citizens, based on the benefits, while citizens can choose to leave, to stay loyal, or to voice their concerns through protests.[38][unreliable source?] Similarly, this game also provides insights into how variables like exit payoff, cost of voicing, and value of loyalty change state's behavior as to whether or not to predate.

How democracy affects economic performance

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The second part of the story in Why Nations Fail explores the connection between inclusive political institutions and economic growth. This idea was previously discussed, in a paper, by Acemoglu and Robinson, titled Institutions as the Fundamental Cause for Long-Run Growth.[39] Acemoglu and Robinson's theory explains the varying levels of economic development in countries, using a single framework.

Political institutions, like a constitution, determine the written distribution of political power, while the distribution of economic resources determines the actual distribution of political power. Both the written and actual distribution of political power impact economic institutions and how production is conducted. They also shape future political institutions. Economic institutions also determine the distribution of resources for the future. This framework is time-dependent, as today's institutions determine tomorrow's economic growth and institutions.

For example, before the Glorious Revolution, political power in Europe, particularly in England, was concentrated in the hands of the monarch. However, the increasing profits from international trade led to the emergence of a commercially engaged nobility and a rising merchant class. These groups played a significant role in the economy and contributed a substantial portion of tax income to the monarch. As a result, political and economic institutions began to favor the merchant class, eventually leading to the downfall of the monarchical system in England and the establishment of efficient economic institutions.

In another paper with Simon Johnson at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), called The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,[40] the authors use a natural experiment in history to show that different institutions result in different levels of economic growth. They analyze the institutional choices made during the colonial period of several nations and their impact on present-day economic development. The study reveals that in countries where the disease environment made it difficult for colonizers to survive (high mortality rate), they established extractive regimes, resulting in poor economic growth today. Conversely, in regions with lower mortality rates, colonizers settled down and replicated institutions from their home countries, as seen in the successful colonization of Australia and the United States. Therefore, the mortality rate among colonial settlers, hundreds of years ago, has determined the economic growth of present-day post-colonial nations, by setting them on divergent institutional paths.

The theory of interaction between political and economic institutions is further reinforced by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson in The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,[23] which covers the economic rise of Europe after 1500. The paper shows that the Transatlantic trade after 1500 increased profits from trade and thus, created a merchant class that was in a position to challenge monarchical power. Through regression analysis, the authors also reveal a significant interaction between the Atlantic Trade and political institutions. Specifically, the presence of an absolutist monarch hinders the economic impact of the Atlantic Trade. This explains why Spain, despite having access to the same trade, lagged behind England, in economic development.

Acemoglu and Robinson have explained that their theory is largely inspired by the work of Douglass North, an American economist, and Barry R. Weingast, an American political scientist.[citation needed] In North and Weingast's paper in 1989, Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,[41] they conclude that historical winners shape institutions to protect their own interests. In the case of the Glorious Revolution, the winning merchant class established property rights laws and limited the power of the monarch, which, essentially, promoted economic growth. Later on, North, Wallis, and Weingast call this law and order open access, in their 2009 paper Violence and the Rise of Open-Access Orders.[42] With open access, equality and diversity in thought—societies are more able to flourish and prosper.

Reception

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The reviews, below, are notable responses, either directly or indirectly, addressed towards the book, the authors, or the arguments made by the book. The section, below, is arranged in alphabetical order of the respondent's first name.

Arvind Subramanian

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Indian economist Arvind Subramanian points out the potential problem of reverse causality in Acemoglu and Robinson's theory in his publication in The American Interest.[43] He argues that Why Nations Fail assumes that political institutions cause economic performance, but modernization theory suggests that economic modernization can also lead to improvements in political institutions. The book does not address why this alternative perspective is not valid. However, a 2001 paper by Acemoglu and Johnson attempts to answer this question, using a two-stage regression test, cited in the book.

According to Subramanian, the book also fails to explain the recent economic development in China and India. China, under an authoritarian regime, has achieved rapid economic growth, while democratic India has lagged behind. This challenges the book's theory of inclusive and extractive political institutions. It is unsatisfying that the theory cannot explain the situation of such a large portion of the world's population, and it is unlikely that China or India will change, significantly, in the near future, according to the book's prediction.

Acemoglu and Robinson counter[44] that their theory distinguishes between political and economic institutions and that it is not political institutions that contribute to growth, directly, but rather, it is economic institutions that are shaped by the political institutions. In China, they note, political institutions have played a role in driving economic reform, since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping implemented the opening up policy. This supports the idea that changes in political institutions can shape economic institutions and impact economic performance. It is expected that China's economic growth will also influence its political institutions, in the future. However, if China remains an authoritarian regime, despite becoming as wealthy as the US or Germany, it would be an exception to this theory.

In the case of India, the authors argue that there is a distinction between inclusive political institutions and electoral democracy. India's political system has been dominated by the Congress Party, and there are issues with corruption, criminal charges against lawmakers, and caste-based inequality. The poor quality of democracy and flawed political institutions, in India, contribute to its poor economic institutions and hinder economic growth.

David R. Henderson

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David R. Henderson wrote a generally positive review in Regulation[27] but criticized the authors for inconsistency regarding the role of a central government in promoting development. The authors attribute the failure of states like Afghanistan, Haiti, and Nepal to the lack of a strong central government but also embrace weak government for growth, as seen in the example of Somalia. Henderson also points out two errors made by the authors, regarding the United States. Firstly, they falsely accuse "monopolists," like Rockefeller, of being extractive powers, when in reality, Rockefeller lowered the price of oil to gain market share. Secondly, they overlook mainstream scholarship on American economic history between the Civil War and civil rights movements, failing to recognize that the South was actually converging with the North.[27]

Francis Fukuyama

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In his article in The American Interest,[45] Francis Fukuyama criticized Acemoglu and Robinson's argument for being similar to a book by North, Wallis, and Weingast in 2009.[46] Fukuyama agrees with the book's conclusion that failed economies are often due to institutions benefiting elites. However, he argues that the approach oversimplifies the issue, by grouping different institutions together and making flawed comparisons between societies. Fukuyama also disagrees with the historical evidence used to support the argument. He specifically mentions that the argument does not apply to modern China.

Acemoglu and Robinson responded to Fukuyama's comments, stating that their work builds on and complements North et al.'s work.[47] Second, they defend the oversimplification as a way to analyze complex political institutions. They also attribute China's economic growth to some level of inclusiveness but predict that it will not reach the same level of per-capita income as Spain or Portugal, with its current extractive institutions.

Jared Diamond

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In Jared Diamond's book review on The New York Review of Books,[36] he says the book's theory focuses solely on institutions and overlooks other factors, like geography. One issue with the authors' argument is endogeneity: what explains good political institutions, if they are the cause of economic growth? Diamond proposes a theory of geographical causes for developmental differences, comparing tropical and temperate areas. He suggests that differences in wealth are due to weather conditions, such as higher disease rates and lower agricultural productivity in tropical areas. Diamond also criticizes Acemoglu and Robinson for their narrow focus on small historical events, like the Glorious Revolution, while ignoring prosperity in Western Europe.

In response to Diamond's criticism,[48] the authors reply that the arguments in the book do take geographical factors into account but that geography does not explain the different level of development. Acemoglu and Robinson view geography as an initial factor for a country, but its impact on development is determined by institutions. They introduce the theory of Reversal of Fortune, which explains how previously poor countries, like the U.S., Australia, and Canada, have become wealthy, despite limited natural resources. They also reject the theory of the ”resource curse," emphasizing the importance of institutions in shaping a country's use of its natural resources, throughout history.

Diamond disagreed[48] with Acemoglu and Robinson's response and reiterated his argument about the book's inaccuracies. He emphasized the significance of geographical factors in determining a country's wealth or poverty. For instance, he pointed out that the prevalence of tropical diseases in Zambia leads to prolonged illness among male workers, greatly reducing their productivity. Diamond also highlighted how geography influences the establishment of local plantations and the development of ancient agricultural practices. These practices, in turn, shape sedentary lifestyles and social interactions, which, ultimately, give rise to distinct social institutions and varying economic outcomes among nations.

Diamond's review was excerpted by economist Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution.[49]

Jeffrey Sachs

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According to Jeffrey Sachs,[50] an American economist, the major problem of Why Nations Fail is that it focuses, too narrowly, on domestic political institutions and ignores other factors, such as technological progress and geopolitics. For example, geography plays an important role in shaping institutions and weak governments in West Africa may be seen as a consequence of the unnavigable rivers in the region. Sachs also questions Acemoglu and Robinson's assumption that authoritarian regimes cannot motivate economic growth. Several examples in Asia, including Singapore and South Korea, easily refute Acemoglu and Robinson's arguments that democratic political institutions are prerequisites for economic growth. Moreover, Acemoglu and Robinson overlook macroeconomic factors like technological progress (e.g. industrialization and information technology).

In response to Sachs' critique, Acemoglu and Robinson replied, on their book blog, with twelve specific points. First, on the role of geography, Acemoglu and Robinson agree that geography is crucial in shaping institutions but do not recognize a deterministic role of geography in economic performance. Second, on the positive role authoritarian governments can play in economic growth, especially in the case of China, the fast economic growth could be part of the catch-up effect. However, it does not mean that authoritarian governments are better than democratic governments, in promoting economic growth. It is still way too early, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, to draw a definite conclusion, solely based on the example of China. Last, on industrialization, they argue that industrialization is contingent upon institutions. Based on Acemoglu and Robinson's response, Sachs wrote a rebuttal on his personal website.[51]

Paul Collier

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Development economist Paul Collier from the University of Oxford reviewed the book for The Guardian.[52] Collier's review summarizes two essential elements for growth from the book: first, a centralized state and second, inclusive political and economic institutions. Based on the case of China, a centralized state can draw a country out from poverty, but without inclusive institutions, such growth is not sustainable, as argued by Acemoglu and Robinson. Such a process is not natural but only happens when the elites are willing to cede power to the majority, under certain circumstances.

Peter Forbes

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Peter Forbes reviewed the book for The Independent: "This book, by two U.S. economists, comes garlanded with praise by its obvious forebears – Jared Diamond, Ian MorrisNiall FergusonCharles C. Mann – and succeeds in making great sense of the history of the modern era, from the voyages of discovery to the present day."[53] Besides singing high praises for the book, Forbes links the message of the book and contemporary politics in developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Though the two countries are, by far, some of the most inclusive economies in the world, various parts of them are, by nature, extractive—for instance, the existence of a shadow banking system, of conglomerate manufacturers, and so on. He warns against extractive practices, under the guise of an inclusive economy.

Warren Bass

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Warren Bass reviewed the book for the Washington Post, writing: "It's bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious, and ultimately, hopeful. It may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece."[33] Despite his applause, Bass also points out several imperfections of the book. First of all, the definition of extractive and inclusive institution is vague in a way that cannot be utilized in policymaking. Second, though Acemoglu and Robinson are ambitious in covering cases of all nations across history, this attempt is subjected to the scrutiny of regional experts and historians. For example, their accusation of Ottoman Empire as "highly absolutist" might not be correct, given the level of tolerance and diversity inside the Empire, as compared to its European counterparts.

William Easterly

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In a mixed review of the book in the Wall Street JournalWilliam Easterly was generally supportive of the plausibility of the book's thesis but critiqued the book's failure to cite extant statistics-based evidence to support the validity of the historical case studies.[54] For example, in the book's example about Congo, the stated reason Congo is impoverished is that Congo is close to slave trade shipping points. The approach of this historical case study only offers one data point. Moreover, Easterly also points out the danger of ex-post rationalization that the book only attributes different levels of development to institutions in a way a bit too neat. For example, to explain the fall of Venice, it could be the extractive regime, during the time, or it could also be the shift from Mediterranean trade to Atlantic trade. The historical case studies approach might be biased.

Awards and honors

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ Amable, B.; Palombarini, S. (2007). "Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J. A.: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy"Journal of Economics92 (3): 293–295. doi:10.1007/s00712-007-0277-zS2CID 154627703.
  2. Jump up to:a b Aghion, Philippe; Akcigit, Ufuk; Howitt, Peter (2014-01-01), Aghion, Philippe; Durlauf, Steven N. (eds.), Chapter 1 - What Do We Learn From Schumpeterian Growth Theory?, Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 2, Elsevier, pp. 515–563, doi:10.1016/b978-0-444-53540-5.00001-xISBN 9780444535467, retrieved 2020-11-23
  3. ^ Acemoglu, Daron (2006). Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Robinson, James A. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 434. ISBN 0-511-14081-9OCLC 64130765.
  4. ^ Sachs, Jeffrey (2005). The end of poverty : economic possibilities for our time. Vol. 12. New York: Penguin Press. pp. 17–21. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0579.2007.00476.xISBN 1-59420-045-9OCLC 57243168PMID 18289264S2CID 10071076. {{cite book}}|journal= ignored (help)
  5. ^ Diamond, Jared M (1997). Guns, germs, and steel : The fates of human societies (1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 480. ISBN 0-393-03891-2OCLC 35792200.
  6. ^ Banerjee, Abhijit V.Duflo, Esther (26 April 2011). Poor economics : a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty (First ed.). New York: PublicAffairs. p. 320. ISBN 978-1-58648-798-0OCLC 317925786.
  7. ^ Lipset, Seymour Martin (1959). "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy1"American Political Science Review53 (1): 69–105. doi:10.2307/1951731ISSN 1537-5943JSTOR 1951731S2CID 53686238.
  8. Jump up to:a b Landes, David S (1998). The wealth and poverty of nations : why some are so rich and some so poor (1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 658. ISBN 0-393-04017-8OCLC 37213494.
  9. ^ Fischer, David Hackett (1989). Albion's seed : four British folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 972. ISBN 0-19-503794-4OCLC 20012134.
  10. ^ Weber, Max (1905). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalismUnited States: Merchant Books. p. 132. ISBN 978-1-60386-604-0OCLC 956448584.
  11. Jump up to:a b c Can, Raif (2013). "Book Review - "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson"Central Bank Review13 (1): 83–88.
  12. Jump up to:a b Johnson, Simon (2012-03-08). "The Koch Brothers, the Cato Institute and Why Nations Fail"Economix Blog. Retrieved 2020-11-23.
  13. ^ Acemoglu, Daron; Johnson, Simon; Robinson, James (November 2002). "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution". Quarterly Journal of Economics118. Cambridge, MA: 1231–1294. doi:10.1162/003355302320935025.
  14. ^ Acemoglu, Daron; Johnson, Simon; Robinson, James A. (December 2001). "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation"The American Economic Review91 (5): 1369–1401. doi:10.1257/aer.91.5.1369ISSN 0002-8282.
  15. ^ Collier, Paul (2012-03-11). "Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson – review"The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  16. ^ Michalopoulos, Stelios; Papaioannou, Elias (2013-12-19). "National Institutions and Subnational Development in Africa *"The Quarterly Journal of Economics129 (1): 151–213. doi:10.1093/qje/qjt029ISSN 0033-5533PMC 4354689PMID 25802926.
  17. ^ Rodrik, Dani (2011-09-01). "The Future of Economic Convergence"National Bureau of Economic Research17400. Cambridge. doi:10.3386/w17400S2CID 16930109.
  18. ^ "Finance and Development"Finance and Development | F&D. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  19. ^ Friedman, Thomas L. (2012-03-31). "Opinion | Why Nations Fail (Published 2012)"The New York TimesISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  20. ^ Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1942). Capitalism, socialism, and democracyRadford, VAHarper. p. 431. ISBN 978-1-61720-865-2OCLC 825099394.
  21. ^ Piatkowski, Marcin (9 February 2018). Europe's growth champion : insights from the economic rise of Poland (First ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 8–9. ISBN 978-0-19-250638-2OCLC 1027965598.
  22. ^ Aghion, PhilippeHowitt, Peter (January 1990). "A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction"National Bureau of Economic Research3223. Cambridge, MA. doi:10.3386/w3223.
  23. Jump up to:a b Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James (June 2005). "The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth" (PDF)American Economic Review95 (3): 546–579. doi:10.1257/0002828054201305.
  24. ^ North, Douglass C. (1981). Structure and change in economic history (1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 240. ISBN 0-393-01478-9OCLC 7806655.
  25. ^ North, Douglass C.; Robert Paul, Thomas (1973). The rise of the Western world : a new economic historyCambridge University Press. p. 180. ISBN 0-521-20171-3OCLC 730879.
  26. ^ North, Douglass C.; Wallis, John Joseph.; Weingast, Barry R. (2009). Violence and social orders : a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 480. ISBN 978-0-511-51783-9OCLC 647766531.
  27. Jump up to:a b c d e Henderson, David (Spring 2013). "The Wealth -- and Poverty -- of Nations" (PDF)Regulation (a publication of the Cato Institute). Retrieved 2013-11-21.
  28. ^ Hunter, Janet (2012-08-26). "Book Review: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty"EUROPP. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  29. ^ "The big why"The Economist. 2012-03-10. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  30. ^ Auzan, Alexander (2006). Институциональная экономика: Новая институциональная экономическая теория [Institutional Economics: A New Institutional Economics Theory]. Moscow: Infra-M. p. 23. ISBN 5-16-002020-9OCLC 751740168.
  31. ^ Acemoglu, DaronRobinson, James (2012). Why nations fail : the origins of power, prosperity, and poverty (First ed.). New York: Crown Publishing Group. p. 108. ISBN 978-0-307-71921-8OCLC 729065001.
  32. ^ Acemoglu, DaronRobinson, James (2012). Why nations fail : the origins of power, prosperity, and poverty (First ed.). New York: Crown Publishing Group. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-307-71921-8OCLC 729065001.
  33. Jump up to:a b c d Bass, Warren (2012-04-20). "Book review: 'Why Nations Fail,' by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson"Washington Post. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
  34. Jump up to:a b c Ghosh Dastidar, Ananya; Malhotra, Rajiv; Sujea, Vivek; Nayyar, Deepak; Sudipto, Mundle (2018). "Beyond Catch Up: Some Speculations About the Next Twenty-Five Emerging Economies". Economic theory and policy amidst global discontent : essays in honour of Deepak Nayyar. London: Routledge. p. 482. ISBN 978-1-351-13757-7OCLC 1022560823.
  35. Jump up to:a b c Piatkowski, Marcin (2018). Europe's growth champion : insights from the economic rise of Poland (First ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-19-250638-2OCLC 1027965598.
  36. Jump up to:a b Diamond, Jared (2012-06-07). "What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?"The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
  37. ^ Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James (2001). "A Theory of Political Transitions" (PDF)American Economic Review91 (4): 938–963. doi:10.1257/aer.91.4.938hdl:1721.1/64163.
  38. ^ Clark, William; Golder, Matt; Golder, Sona N. "Power and Politics: Insights from an Exit, Voice and Loyalty Game" (PDF). {{cite journal}}Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  39. ^ Acemoglu, Daron; Johnson, Simon; Robinson, James A. (2005). "Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth". In Aghion, Philippe; Durlauf, Stephen (eds.). Handbook of Economic Growth. Vol. 1, Part A. pp. 385–472. doi:10.1016/S1574-0684(05)01006-3ISBN 9780444520418.
  40. ^ Acemoglu, Daron; Johnson, Simon; Robinson, James (December 2001). "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation". American Economic Review91 (5): 1369–1401. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.313.7172doi:10.1257/aer.91.5.1369.
  41. ^ North, Douglass; Weingast, Barry (December 1989). "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England". Journal of Economic History49 (4): 803–832. doi:10.1017/S0022050700009451JSTOR 2122739S2CID 3198200.
  42. ^ North, Douglass; Wallis, John; Weingast, Barry (January 2009). "Violence and the Rise of Open-Access Orders". Journal of Democracy20 (1): 55–68. doi:10.1353/jod.0.0060S2CID 153774943.
  43. ^ Subramanian, Arvind (October 30, 2012). "Which Nations Failed"The American Interest. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  44. ^ "China, India and All That". November 2, 2012. Archived from the original on February 24, 2020. Retrieved April 13, 2016.
  45. ^ Fukuyama, Francis (2012-03-26). "Acemoglu and Robinson on Why Nations Fail"The American Interest. Retrieved 2020-05-14.
  46. ^ Douglass, North (2009-02-26). Violence and Social Order. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521761734.
  47. ^ Acemoglu, Daron (April 30, 2012). "Response to Fukuyama's Review"Why Nations Fail. Archived from the original on February 16, 2020. Retrieved April 17, 2016.
  48. Jump up to:a b Acemoglu and Robinson, Daron and James (August 16, 2012). "Why Nations Fail"The New York Review of Books. Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  49. ^ Cowen, Tyler (2012-03-18). "Jared Diamond reviews *Why Nations Fail*". Marginal Revolution. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
  50. ^ Sachs, Jeffrey. "Government, Geography, and Growth".
  51. ^ Jeffrey, Sachs (December 3, 2012). "Reply to Acemoglu and Robinson's Response to My Book Review"Jeffrey Sachs. Archived from the original on March 1, 2019. Retrieved April 23, 2016.
  52. ^ Collier, Paul (2012-03-11). "Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson – review"The Guardian. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
  53. ^ Forbes, Peter (2012-05-26). "Why Nations Fail, By Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson: A penetrating analysis of social organisation argues that the West's 'inclusive' states show signs of a relapse"The Independent. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
  54. ^ Easterly, William (2012-03-24). "The Roots of Hardship: Despite massive amounts of aid, poor countries tend to stay poor. Maybe their institutions are the problem"Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2013-09-21.
  55. ^ "Paddy Power & Total Politics Political Book Awards"Total Politics. 7 February 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2014.
  56. ^ Andrew Hill (2012-09-13). "Biographies and economics dominate"Financial Times. Retrieved 15 September 2012.
  57. ^ Mark Medley (February 4, 2013). "Lionel Gelber Prize longlist revealed"National Post. Retrieved August 29, 2014.
  58. ^ "Fredrik Logevall Wins CFR's 2013 Arthur Ross Book Award for "Embers of War"". Council on Foreign Relations. December 16, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2014.




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Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty


Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

4.08
52,201 ratings4,743 reviews

Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Nonfiction (2012)
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?

Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.

Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including:

- China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West?
- Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority?
- What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More
philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions?

Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

GenresNonfictionPoliticsHistoryBusinessSociologyPolitical ScienceSociety
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529 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2012
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Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2005 he won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best economist under 40.




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Randal Samstag
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August 22, 2016
The book Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson comes with book-jacket praise from the usual suspects: Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, Jared Diamond of Collapse fame, Nobel Prize “laureate” George Akerlof, and Niall Ferguson, champion of imperialism. Thomas Freidman dashed off a quick review in his New York Times column for April 1, 2012. Freidman, the giddy fan of globalization, was ecstatic, although he admitted that he was “reading” the book, but not that he had “read” it. Freidman points out one of the authors’ main points: “Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few.” And this is perhaps their main point, albeit one which they share with most neoliberal development economists. Acemoglu and Robinson are professors at MIT and Harvard Universities; Acemoglu is a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal in the Economics department at MIT and Robinson an area specialist in the department of Government (Political Science)at Harvard. The book seems to be aimed at a wider audience than academia, however.

While the authors mine an enormous literature on development to populate their book with dozens of interesting stories of developmental failure and success, at the end of the day, their book devolves into the something similar to most of the neo-liberal thinking of which we see so much from the “science” of economics. Diamond, who is quoted on the book jacket as saying “Like me, you may succumb to reading it in one go, and then you may come back to it again and again” is more critical in a review in the New York Review of Books (7 June 2012). There he points out that after presenting a map of Africa that clearly shows the tropical countries of the interior of the continent at the lowest end of the income scale they insist that geographic factors are “Theories That Don’t Work” compared to their preferred “institutional” explanation. Diamond’s reaction: “While institutions are undoubtedly part of the explanation, they leave much unexplained: some of those richer temperate countries are notorious for their histories of bad institutions (think of Algeria, Argentina, Egypt, and Libya), while some of the tropical countries (e.g., Costa Rica and Tanzania) have had relatively more honest governments. What are the economic disadvantages of a tropical location?” He concludes, “In their narrow focus on inclusive institutions, however, the authors ignore or dismiss other factors. I mentioned earlier the effects of an area’s being landlocked or of environmental damage, factors that they don’t discuss. Even within the focus on institutions, the concentration specifically on inclusive institutions causes the authors to give inadequate accounts of the ways that natural resources can be a curse.” After describing Acemoglu and Robinson’s botched job in their explanation of the rise of agriculture “to assert, in the complete absence of evidence, that . . . hunter/gatherers had become sedentary because, for unknown reasons, they happened to develop innovative institutions through a hypothesized political revolution” he concludes that “Acemoglu and Robinson do themselves a disservice by misstating these findings.”

The book has a few points to recommend it in this reviewer’s mind: 1) Its insistence on uncertainty in the course of human affairs, 2) Its appreciation for the importance of centralized political structure on economic success, 3) Its recognition of the wasted resources that come with gross inequality. But it has glaring blind spots that should cause a critical reader pause.

In the first chapter the authors quote from Fra Bartolome de Las Casas’s book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Las Casas is presented by the authors as a hero, who defended the rights of the indigenous people enslaved in the New World by the conquistadores. They seem positively unaware, however, of the irony that motivated Jorge Luis Borges to mention Las Casas in the very first chapter of HIS book, A Universal History of Infamy. For Las Casas’s answer to the enslavement of the indigenous people of the New World was to import Africans to work in the Antillean gold mines. Thus Borges sees Las Casas not just as the savior of the indigenas of the New World (in which effort he was unsuccessful in any case) but as the father of “W.C. Handy’s blues; . . . the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the word “to lynch” into the thirteenth edition of the Spanish Academy . .” etc. This kind of irony is well over the heads of our authors.

They take the “failure” of the Mayan civilization to be the result of their favorite themes of “creation of extractive political institutions” and lack of “creative destruction.” They recognize that “the coalescence of these institutions created the basis for an impressive economic expansion” but see its collapse in the ninth century AD to be the result of the overthrow of the political system that had produced this expansion. They recognize that “existing archeological evidence does not allow us to reach a definitive conclusion about why the k’ubul ajaw and elites surrounding him were overthrown” but they take this collapse as evidence nonetheless for their theory that “extractive institutions” were the cause of that collapse. And concerning their diagnosis of “collapse”, should a Mayan society that apparently thrived for close to one thousand years be considered a failure? There is no discussion of the possibility that laterite formation in tropical soils had anything to do with this “collapse.” The story of the Mayans just becomes another example of their pet theory.

I have mentioned “creative destruction”. Although there is only one direct mention of the “great economist Joseph Schumpeter” in the book, there are references aplenty to Schumpeter’s most memorable phrase. Creative destruction was explained by Schumpeter as follows: “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating the new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, page 83.) Schumpeter was convinced that the entrepreneur is the driving force for development in a capitalistic society. Keynes was not so sure, remarking “we are damned if we know” why capitalists invest.

Acemoglu and Robinson seem to take as gospel that creative destruction is necessary for societal advance and always works toward the public good. Someone like Polanyi would no doubt not agree. Schumpeter’s young Harvard colleague Paul Sweezy certainly did not agree when he participated with Schumpeter in their famous debate at the Harvard Graduate Student’s Economics Club in the winter of 1946-47 (See “on the laws of capitalism, Insights from the Sweezy-Schumpeter Debate” in Monthly Review, May, 2011.) Sweezy’s notes for the debate say that “There is no reason to deny Schumpeter’s entrepreneurial type, but its significance is quite differently evaluated. For him the entrepreneur occupies the center of the stage; the accumulation process is derivative. For me the accumulation process is primary; the entrepreneur falls in with it and plays a part in it.” Sweezy was, of course, one of the most prominent American Marxist economists of the twentieth century. For him the historical process of evolution of society was crucial, as it was for Marx. And Schumpeter, even as an Austrian economist, had a profound appreciation for this. It is not fair to Acemoglu and Robinson to say that they are oblivious to history; their book is full of historical anecdotes. But this reader gets the sense that for them if a society would just get with the program and encourage capitalists, everything would come out all right.

They rail against the monopolies and resistance to enclosure by the Tudor and Stuart kings in England. This is a typical response of the neo-liberal. The problem is not market economies, they say, but those that interfere with the “free” motion of these economies in society. They attribute the rise of the Industrial Revolution in England to an overcoming of the absolutism of the Tudors and Stuarts by the rise of “inclusive institutions” embodied in the Glorious Revolution by the rise of Parliament. But the destruction part of the rise of the entrepreneurial class gets little appreciation. For that we have to read Polanyi and Marx. And they are oblivious to the fact that without Tudor protectionism, the wool-spinning industry in England may never have gotten of the ground. To learn about this we would have to read the Marxist historians or Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans.

This book contains almost no reference to socialist or even non-free trade capitalist critique of the development policies which the authors prefer. This, of course, is typical of the environment of American academic departments of economics and political science, where our authors reside. In spite of their re-telling of many stories about the corruption and distortion imposed upon the people of the South by European imperialism in the nineteenth century, there is no mention of Lenin’s Imperialism, Highest Form of Capitalism. No mention of Polanyi. The only significant mention of Marx is in a passage where they say “Lenin and his Communist Party were inspired by Marx, but the practice could not have been more different than the theory. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a bloody affair, and there was no humane aspect to it.” In fact, the Russian Revolution was remarkably bloodless, since the army went wholly over to the Revolution very early in the process. There is no question that much blood was spilled during the Civil War and that enormous suffering was caused by the Stalinist purges and forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia, but that the authors would assume uncritically that this meant that the Revolution itself was “a bloody affair” is a telling indicator of biases that shield them from facts that don’t fit their view of reality. In a book that is so filled with facts, this ignorance seems systematic; as if they were searching out only the facts that fit their theory.

The authors make an off-hand reference to current day Iraq (on page 444) with amazing lack of empathy for the impact of the “shock and awe” imposed on that country by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld regime and the UN Sanctions that preceded it. They use Iraq’s recent history to argue against the “theory of modernization” that they say “maintains that all societies, as they grow, are headed toward a more modern, developed, and civilized existence, and in particular toward democracy.” They mention the “disastrous economic performance under Saddam Hussein’s regime” without mentioning the years of pain imposed by continuing NATO-enforced sanctions and bombardment. For a more realistic estimate of that impact the reader is directed to Iraq Under Siege, The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, published in 2000, three years before “shock and awe.” There the reader will find another reason behind that “disastrous economic performance” of the previous decade. Anthony Arnove in the introduction to Iraq under Siege quotes from a Wall Street Journal article in 1999 citing unnamed US officials saying, “After eight years of enforcing a ‘no-fly zone’ in northern [and sourthern] Iraq, few military targets remain. . . . We are down to the last outhouse.” Acemoglu and Robinson say that hopes for “pluralism” were “dashed as chaos and civil war descended upon Iraqi society.” This implies that the “chaos and civil war” were the result of some internal dynamic in Iraq without considering that what had descended onto Iraqi society was not just the “extractive institutions” of Saddam Hussein but also the wrath of the American Empire, imposed over a decade of economic sanctions and bombardment since the end of the first Iraq war, “Desert Storm”. They fail to mention the possibility that 6,000 sorties and 1,800 bombs as part of the “longest sustained US air operation since the Vietnam War” had anything to do with the dissolution of Iraqi society that followed the second US land invasion by Bush, the younger. Iraq had long since been “bombed back to the stone age” to quote an earlier American general talking about that earlier war. Acemoglu and Robinson make no mention of this.

One of the interesting facts that the authors dredge up from the large anthropological and historical literature upon which they report is a story from the history of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. They tell the story of the Banda Islands which had established trading relations with English, Portuguese, Indian, and Chinese merchants for mace and nutmeg, which were indigenous to their islands. In 1621 the Dutch governor of Batavia (now Jakarta in Indonesia) Jan Pieterszoon Coen “sailed to Banda with a fleet and proceeded to massacre almost the entire population of the islands, probably about fifteen thousand people.” He set up a plantation system in place of the thriving economic activity of the local Banda people and “divided the islands into sixty-eight plantations, awarded to sixty-eight Dutchmen, mostly former and current employees of the Dutch East India Company.” They use this to support their major thesis, that “European expansion . . . sowed the seeds of underdevelopment in many diverse corners of the world by imposing, or further strengthening existing, extractive institutions.” But their emphasis is on the “extractive institutions” and not on the fact that European imperialism imposed this reality by genocidal force of arms. This is a very strange emphasis to place on these facts.

Diamond’s critique in his NYRB article provides a good summary of this book. There he points to “the authors’ resort to assertion unsupported or contradicted by facts.” This book presents what is really a banal conclusion: that authoritarian institutions that impose the will of a small group of elites onto a population is the primary cause of “underdevelopment”. This is not a new theory. It is a re-statement of Aristotle’s Politics. The real questions are why these authoritarian institutions succeed in taking over power in so many societies and how societies with apparently “inclusive” institutions like those in current day United States have evolved into such unequal societies. This book leaves us no closer to an answer to these questions.

The real problem that I have with this book is that it uncritically takes for granted the underlying assumptions from the neoclassical economist’s tool box. They point out the obvious: “Europeans themselves stamped out the possibility of economic growth in many parts of the world that they conquered; . . . the lands where Industrial Revolution originally did not spread remain relatively poor; . . . . the Industrial Revolution and other new technologies are unlikely to spread to places around the world today where a minimum degree of centralization of the state hasn’t been achieved.” These conclusions are delivered with a tone of great solemnity, but no one but the most dogmatic libertarians or European chauvinists would seriously disagree. The real question is how to change this. Their prescription of more “inclusion” the like of which we have in the United States may satisfy some, but it does not satisfy this reviewer.
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Yalman Onaran
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January 7, 2013
This could be written in one chapter or a long magazine piece. Has an interesting theory, but it just goes on for too long and not worth spending the time.

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William2
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September 15, 2017
This economic history is, as far as it goes, excellent. The main thesis is ultra simple: nations must develop inclusive economic and political institutions if they are to achieve prosperity. Such political institutions include fair and free elections, an independent judiciary, uncorrupt legislative and executive branches etc etc. Inclusive economic institutions include financial controls such as (in the U.S.) the Fed, the SEC, trust breaking litigation, and so forth. The authors say all of these things are mutually reinforcing. In the U.S., for instance, all three main governmental institutions at the federal level hold each other in check. This is also more or less true in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Botswana. Yes, that Botswana. The stories of Botswana -- and the rest of post-colonial Africa -- are ones I have not come across elsewhere and for which I am especially grateful.

Nations with inclusive economic and political institutions allow something called "creative destruction." This is what happens when new technologies appear and cause a redistribution of wealth. Perhaps the most recent example of creative destruction has been the impact of computers and the internet. So many industries have been upset by these new technologies: publishing, the music industry, retail stores, manufacturing, etc etc. Nations which do not have inclusive economic and political institutions are called "extractive." An extractive nation is one in which an elite prospers from the misfortune of the rest of the population. One example of this is the post-colonial African nation of Sierra Leone. When the British left Sierra Leone, and it was thought that the extractive mechanisms they had put in place would be abolished, just the opposite happened. Local strong men came along and upped the ante. This had the effect of disincentivizing entrepreneurs. After all, why work hard if 90% of one's output will be seized by the junta? Moreover, such extractive nations will not permit creative destruction because it threatens to undermine the power of the governing elite. So the extractive states tend to be backward because they shun new technologies. Though examples from antiquity are adduced -- Rome, Mayan civilization, for instance, both extractive -- the authors are mostly concerned with what happened starting with the Industrial Revolution on. They show how the English Civil War and subsequent Glorious Revolution set the stage for the growth of inclusive political and economic institutions in England and how these became mutually reinforcing over time.

The book is compelling. I hope people living in these extractive nations will get a translation because it is so eye-opening. But that's unlikely, isnt it? Since a major feature of extractive nations is suppression of the media, which is transparency.

This is a view of history, on the other hand, that does not question its foundations. It's a great cheering section for capitalism generally. But there's a huge problem with this economic-growth-at-all-costs mentality. It may have been fine for a century or so but now it's no longer tenable. In fact, it's killing us: climate change, loss of biodiversity, global deforestation; our oceans are covered, by one recent estimate, with 480 billion cubic tons of plastic. GDP is the wrong measure of our "progress" now. We need new sustainable economic models. So the book, while being a captivating history of how capitalism has worked historically, offers no solutions for how it might change. New models are badly needed. If, that is, we haven't already passed the ecological tipping point.
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Heidi (Heidi's Bookish Adventures)
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March 7, 2019
The central idea of the book is that states fail because of their political institutions, namely because of their extractive nature. This thesis is, in my opinion, extremely simplistic.

Economic processes are never this one-dimensional. The authors argue that the three theories of poverty (nations are poor because of their unfortunate geographic location, their culture does not facilitate growth and the West simply does not know how to transform poor countries into rich ones) are completely irrelevant which I disagree with (as in, I think that there are probably multiple causes as to why some nations are rich and some poor). The assumption that only politics and political institutions determine whether a country is 'poor or prosperous' is simply too one-sided. The authors do back their ideas up with countless examples from history but these sometimes tend to be irrelevant and random. For example:

They state that disease is not the reason why Africa is poor, it is rather the consequence of Africa already being poor. A possible solution: African governments should invest in health care just like England did in the 19th century. Firstly, the leader of the Industrial Revolution was by no means a poor country. They had the means and resources to do lots of things that contemporary Africa can only dream of. Therefore, this solution is not really much of a solution. Assuming that the political elite in some of the poorest nations in Africa have the resources to build up a new system of health care (this would also mean that the government should provide education for the public which in turn would mean that the mostly agricultural nature of the society would have to change because the country would need educated professionals) is not feasible. That is not to say that African nations are not capable of achieving success, in fact quite a few of them have already done so in various fields but in general, building a country essentially from scratch is not that simple.

The authors also argue that growth under extractive institutions is possible. However, the Caribbean islands were extremely wealthy in the 17th and 18th centuries despite their extractive institutions. They were not poor and definitely not 'failed'. The authors then argue elsewhere that several countries in the Middle East only thrive because of oil, should oil prices fall, they would quickly lose some of their wealth. This is probably true but we cannot ignore the fact that those states are wealthy even though they operate under extractive institutions, just like those of 17-18th century Caribbean. And calling the Ottoman Empire and the Mayans failed is simply incorrect. If a civilization manages to thrive for hundreds and hundreds of years, it is definitely not failed.

There is obviously merit in the authors' argument and I do agree that political and economic institutions have a lot to do with how prosperous and successful a state becomes. History obviously matters but what really annoyed me was the way the book drones on it. The authors constantly repeat themselves and it made me feel as if someone was hitting me in the head with a hammer, making sure that I understand that "Nations fail because of extractive institutions." Okay, I get it already.

To sum up, colonialism and authoritarian governments do indeed stagnate the economy as a whole and create distrust among people. Evil institutions never do too much to help the general public. But they're not the only reason why some countries are poor and some rich.

Edit 06.03.2019: wording and sentence structure.
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Siew
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July 7, 2012
Such an insightful and shocking book! The examples are very well-explained, and I truly enjoyed thinking and discussing the points raised in this book. Only if more people would read this book and understand that it is not for the lack of aid to poor countries, but the very political and economical structure of the country that makes it poor.

The whole inclusive and extractive political-economical standpoint is very interesting.

The only nitpick I would comment on: the book suffers from excessive repetition. Only if the writers of this book would take some lessons from Jonathan Haidt on how to structure a (non-fiction) book properly.
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David Rubenstein
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June 10, 2012
This is an excellent book about the reasons why some nations are prosperous, while others are steeped in poverty. The authors contend that some nations have "inclusive" economic and political policies. These policies give a political voice to a large segment of the population, rather than only to a small elite. As a result, a set of checks and balances tends toward a positive feedback, sometimes called a "virtuous cycle". This virtuous cycle helps to accelerate the tendencies toward inclusiveness, and to suppress occasional lapses toward power-grabbing.

The other side of the coin are nations with "extractive" economic and political policies. A single person, or a small elite, finds it in their personal interests to grab power and extract as many of the nation's resources for their personal gain. They reject technological innovation, and try their best to maintain the status quo. These nations may temporarily improve their economical conditions, but in the long run their improvements cannot be sustained. Interestingly, the authors claim that China, despite economic improvements in recent decades, is going to be a short-lived phenomenon. At its roots, the political system is still extractive, because it does not allow dissension, does not protect private property, and does not extend the rule of law to everyone.

The authors go into considerable detail, explaining why Western Europe, especially Great Britain, became more economically successful than Eastern Europe. They extend their understanding to North vs. South America. They describe the histories of many other countries as well, to understand why inclusive or extractive policies have helped or hindered progress.

The book tends to be rather repetitive, sometimes too repetitive for my taste. Also, sometimes the sentence constructions are a bit awkward. Nevertheless, the book gives some fascinating insights into political science, and why nations become progressive, or tend toward failure.
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billyskye
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May 2, 2017
I worked for an international affairs journal when this book was first released. I remember the considerable energy the authors seemed to be putting into its marketing – the articles, the interviews, the debates, the blog, the proliferation of review copies. It seemed like there was a concerted effort to get Why Nations Fail added to that canon of suspect, generalist readings of geopolitics – your Clash of Civilizations, your Tragedy of Great Power Politics, your End of History and the Last Man – that worm their way into the lexicons of all first-year IR students alongside the terms “realism,” “constructivism,” and “neoliberal institutionalism.” I must confess that at the time I was put off by the baby blue cover (everyone knows that all serious works of poli-sci keep their color schemes to the austere blacks and whites). But it was about time to give it a go.

The book’s central thesis is very simple. “Extractive institutions” limit “creative destruction” (borrowing Joseph Schumpeter’s famous term) as a society run by a “narrow elite” with entrenched power fear a disruption of the status quo. This “iron law of oligarchy” limits long-term market success. The answer lies in “inclusive” economic and political structures that foster a “virtuous circle” of innovation and sustainable growth. These phrases are repeated ad nauseam. They season the cherry-picked case studies that span the vast breadth of human history and take up the meat of the read.

If all that seems rather obvious, I don’t think you’re alone. Who among those with access to this text remain unconvinced that graft, monopolism, despotism yield limited prosperity for society at large? Vladimir Putin? Viktor Orban? Donald Trump? I’m sure their motivations stem from very different sources of inspiration than those the authors have in mind. As for the Western academic tradition – it seems rather conclusive on this matter. Why Nations Fail doesn’t deal much in nuance. It commits to a definition for neither “nationhood” (surely something a bit different than Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities) nor “failure” (are we talking a runaway Gini coefficient – large-scale income inequality? Scarcity? Barbarians at the gates?). So, what are we left with? Almost a tautology. Nations are sets of state-run institutions. They fail when those state-run institutions break down. Naturally.

I’m going to coin a term here. As a disclaimer: I’ve never studied classics so it’s probably less-than apt, but here goes. Historrhea (from Ancient Greek ἱστορία historía “history” and ῥέω rheo “to flow”) | noun | hist˙or˙rhea. Historrhea is characterized by excessive and sometimes incoherent tellings of societal events. I find there’s a lot of historrhea in these sorts of books that attempt to prescribe some grand narrative to human civilization. That seems to be what’s going on here and I’m not a huge fan for a few reasons: (1) It comes across as tendentious. I’ve witnessed enough anthropology professors dealing body blows to Guns, Germs, and Steel, the misguided goodwill of Jeffrey Sachs, and the latest Tom Friedman mixed-metaphor to know that things are rarely that simple. A lot of people have lived on planet earth. And collectively they have done a lot of stuff. You can bend the past to fit a linear argument in pretty much any way you want if you try hard enough. That doesn’t mean you’ve stumbled upon some harmonious truth to the universe, especially if… (2) There is almost no reliance on data/statistical modeling. This was a huge disappointment. I understand that Why Nations Fail was written as a work of pop-history, but Drs. Acemoglu and Robinson are respected economists. Why not play to your strengths and craft a more compelling, rigorous argument in the process? As it stands… (3) The results are not very educational. I read non-fiction to learn. It is very difficult to internalize information – for me at least – when the text skips haphazardly throughout time and space, dealing in surface-level treatments of complex issues like a disorganized AP World History study guide. The analysis of events never makes it past the Wikipedia page. I know enough to be suspicious of this.

Drs. Acemoglu and Robinson reject the “historical determinism” of other hypotheses for state success and state failure, but to me that’s kind of like a proponent of the Cartesian theater rejecting neurological determinism. Sure, you’ve liberated the mind from its fated ends, but how, then, do you do the same for the homunculus you’ve created? Here too, we manage a claim that nations may determine their own fate through the institutions they establish, but where do these institutions come from? Wherein lies the will to will? Really you’re not getting anywhere at all.

The theories proffered by Why Nations Fail are purely descriptive in nature. Drs. Acemoglu and Robinson acknowledge this lack of predictive power, but I’m not sure that makes it better. I think the most damning indictment of this sort of work comes at the authors’ own hands. As the book concludes, Drs. Acemoglu and Robinson can’t resist making some tame prognostications based on their thesis. The year is 2012. China is bound for a crash, they write; its authoritarian regime can’t hold on. Conversely, Brazil’s future is looking bright as the party of Lula rights the ship. In 2017 we know a bit of how things play out. Xi Jinping consolidates power as the Chinese economy continues its implacable advance. The reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, Brazil remains mired in its worst recession on record while the government is wracked with corruption scandal after corruption scandal. Of course, there is always time for things to turn around. Even those in the Chinese politburo – riding high – must know this. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been. Perhaps a window will open up in which the authors can claim vindication – that they were right in the long run. Of course, another famous quotation comes to mind in response.

Two stars. In the long run we are all dead.

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Keith Swenson
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November 12, 2013
Overall: very very interesting and very important topic. I would give it 5 stars except it is very long, detailed, and not an easy read. However well worth it.

Thesis in brief: some countries are properous, and others are not. What causes the difference? Some are right next to each other and the difference in prosperity can not be explained by geography, climate, or even culture. Instead it is the system, and what is it about the system that explains the difference. They elaborate a theory that there are "inclusive" political and economic systems, and there are "extractive" political and economic system. A precondition to either of these is a minimal level of centralized political control.

To distill this to a very simplified level: a region needs to develop a minimal amount of centralized control. At that point it is possible to create a system that is inclusive, where power is somewhat distributed, and economic gains are shared, which helps make the economy grow in a sustained way. At some point it is possible to switch to an extractive system where the people in power manipulate the system to enrich themselves and to stay in power, and at that point sustained growth becomes impossible. The rest of the world passes it up, or in some cases the country descends into ruin.

The bulk of the book is a scholarly and encyclopedic study of different cultures, testing and demonstrating the theory.

Mexico vs. USA: neighboring countries and the difference in climate does not explain the extensive difference in the properity. Surprisingly, 500 years ago Mexico was far more prosperous than the land north of the border. Mexico had 500 times as many people per sq. mile than Virginia, it had an advanced civilization, and tremendous wealth by any measure. How did it come that today USA is so prosperous compared to Mexico? When the Europeans got to mexico, they immediately set up an extractive system to enrich themselves, while in Virginia the Jamestown settlers came close to extinction, and had to set up an inclusive system in order to survive. Once the pattern is set, it is very hard to change, and echos of these patterns survive today.

Chapter 2 addresses all of the common folk theories of why rich countries and poor countries are different: geography, culture, & ignorance. Evidence against is presented. The conclusion: "poor countries are poor because those that have power make choices that create poverty"

Chapter 3 explains extractive and inclusive using the example of South and North Korea which were identical before the border was drawn at the 38th parallel. "Nations fail when they have extractive economic institutions supported by extractive political institutions that impede and even block economic growth." Economic growth requires that 'creative destruction' that Adam Smith referred to, and in an extractive system, those in power oppose change because they fear it will dilute their power and wealth. They actively oppose change. However, without change you can't have growth. Congo and Soviet Union are given as examples of extractive systems that achieved limited growth because the elite actively directed the resources to this end ... but it does not last.

Chapter 4 talks about systems that change from one form to another at a critical juncture. The black death. The Glorious Revolution. Japan in transition from Edo to Meiji.

Chapter 5 is a wide ranging survey of countries (and periods of their history) with extractive systems.

Chapter 6 covers rise and fall scenarios: Venice, Rome, others.

Chapter 7 stands on its own and presents the answer to the question: "Why did the industrial revolution happen in England?" After all, England was not that different from the rest of Europe, but those small differences, and a critical juncture, pushed it in just the right way to be ready for the technological advances of the industrial revolution.

Chapter 8 gives many example (e.g. Somalia) of how the people in power of some countries avoided any advantage from the industrial revolution .. and were left economically behind because of it.

Chapter 9 gives some example (most notably the Spice Islands) where invaders managed actually to destroy inclusive cultures in order to line their own pockets.

Chapter 10 discusses the diffusion of prosperity and how that enabled key countries to benefit from the industrial revolution.

Chapter 11 explains the virtuous circle and how when a country manages to get inclusive economic and political institutions, it tends to stay that way in a stable configuration.

Chapter 12 explains the vicious circle, the pattern where extractive systems tend to reinforce themselves and become stable, even as the country sinks into ruin.

Chapter 13 brings us back to the present day, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leon, Argentina, Korea, and the US south (slave states).

Chapter 14: some positive stories of countries that made a narrow escape: Botswana started very poor, but has grown more than any of its neighbors into a country with the highest per-capta income in sub-saharan Africa. How the south escaped slavery, how those institutions persisted for a hundred years, but finally made it out.

Chapter 15: with all that groundwork behind you, you are finally prepared to fully understand properity, poverty, and their causes. They reject the idea that natural growth will bring prosperity once the country is educated enough. Foreign aid will never work in a country that has extractive institutions -- what has to happen is a change to inclusive, and there is nothing natural or easy about this change.

The book yeilds a lot of insight on the ways that countries can evolve, and indeed patterns that are sure to cause failure. I can't stop wishing that the authors could offer a sure fire way to solve the problem, to turn a country from extractive to inclusive, but alas this is not included in book. It is clear that no simple solutions exist. It would seem that each country to be "saved" would probably need a solution unique to it.

In poor countries they found extractive institutions; in rich countries inclusive institutions; however the cause and effect is not completely clear. We don't really know what causes the form encountered, nor what might cause a change of form. Thus is might simply be that a particular country just happens to be poor and extractive -- it is hard to say whether change to an inclusive structure is even possible. Maybe you have to growing to have inclusive systems. What is the chicken, and what is the egg?

This does not diminish the book in any way. Their 15 years of research are brought to expose patterns that I expect to enhance my way of viewing world politics, economics, and culture, for many years to come.


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Maziyar Yf
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August 12, 2021
نویسندگان کتاب چرا ملتها شکست می خورند : ریشه های قدرت ، شکوفایی و فقر – جیمز رابینسون و دارون عجم اوغلو کوشیده اند در کتاب بسیار معروف خود به سوال بسیار کلی علت شکوفایی ملت ها و دلایل عقب ماندگی برخی کشورها پاسخ دهند .
بدون تردید یافتن جوابی جامع برای سوالی کلی فوق کار بسیار سختی ایست ، همانند کتاب های مشابه ، نویسندگان این کتاب هم پیش از طرح نظریه و تئوری خود ابتدا تلاش کرده اند تا جوابهای رایج به پرسش را بررسی کنند .
شاید محبوب ترین پاسخ به علت شکوفایی ملت ها جغرافیا و تفاوت های جغرافیایی باشد اما نویسندگان کتاب با مثال آوردن شهری مرزی بین آمریکا و مکزیک این دلیل را رد می کنند . ( شاید مهم ترین مشکل کتاب همین دید کوتاه و رد کردن یک فرضیه با یک مثال نقض باشد ، امروزه می دانیم که یکی از دلایل پیشرفت غرب ، نزدیکی شهرها به همدیگر به علت آب و هوای مطلوب و بارندگی زیاد بوده ، این امر ارتباطات و مراودات تجاری میان شهرها به ویژه در فرانسه ، آلمان فعلی ، سوییس ، اتریش و شمال ایتالیا را افزایش داده ، شهرها به همدیگر وابسته شده و کم کم مازاد تولید جهت تجارت به وجود آمد ، بانکداری جهت رونق دادن بازرگانی در اروپا و به ویژه در ایتالیا ، ونیز و جنوا پا گرفت و پیشرفت کرد ، از طرفی دیگر دسترسی کشورها به رودهای پر آب و قابل کشتیرانی و نزدیکی به اقیانوس و دریاهای مهم مانند مدیترانه باعث پیشرفت قابل توجه کشتیرانی در ایتالیا ، سپس در اسپانیا و پرتغال ، فرانسه و هلند و در پایان در انگلستان شد ، صدها و شاید هزاران دریانورد مانند مارکوپولو ، واسکو دوگاما ، کریستف کلمب و ماژلان از غرب برای تجارت ابریشم ، ادویه از ایتالیا ، اسپانیا و پرتغال راهی دنیاهای جدید شدند .در حالی که در شرق برای مثال ایران به علت خشکی سرزمین ، شهرها عموما با فاصله زیاد از هم بنا می شدند و مجبور به تامین مایحتاج خود از داخل شهر بودند ، بازرگانی زمینی به علت وجود صحرا و کوه های فراوان و ناامنی همواره با مشکل روبرو بوده ، بنابر این مازاد تجاری خاصی هم به وجود نیامده و از همه مهمتر اصولا کشتیرانی و تجارت دریایی هموار به جبر جغرافیا مورد بی اعتنایی مطلق قرار گرفته بود. )
رابینسون و اوغلو به همین ترتیب والبته با تاکید بر مثال های نقض ، دیگر فرضیه های رایج مانند فرضیه فرهنگ و نژاد را هم نفی می کنند ، آنها سپس با تکیه بر واژه هایی مانند نهاد های فراگیر ، نهادهای استثماری و تخریب خلاق نظریه خود را با ذکر مثال شرح و بسط می دهند .
ساده ترین مثال برای اثبات درستی نظریه آنان ، مقایسه بین کره شمالی و کره جنوبی ایست که با وجود موقعیت یکسان جغرافیایی ، فرهنگ و نژاد همسان ، کره شمالی به سرعت مسیر قهقرا ولی کره جنوبی راه پیشرفت و توسعه را می پیماید . به نظر نویسندگان کتاب علت پیشرفت کره جنوبی در انتخاب سیاستها و روشهایی ایست که با خود رشد نهاد های فراگیر اقتصادی به همراه آورده اما در کره شمالی باعث گسترش و تقویت نهادهای استثماری شده است .
شاید بتوان گفت کتاب به غیر از طرح ایده نهادهای فراگیر و نهادهای استثماری ، حرف و سخن دیگری ندارد ، نویسندگان کتاب با آوردن نمونه و مثال های فراوان و ذکر چرایی شکست و یا پیروزی آنها ، به هر قیمتی این دلایل را به نظریه خود ارتباط می دهند ، امری که باعث تکراری بودن مطالب کتاب شده و خواننده را به سرعت و به خاطر نیافتن نکته جدیدی در کتاب خسته می کند .
نکته ای که نویسندگان کتاب برآن اصرار فراوان داشته اند تلاش در جهت یافتن فرمولی ریاضی وار و گنجاندن ریشه مشکلات در آن است ، روشی ساده و البته نسبتا غیر علمی با نادیده گرفتن ریشه های تاریخی ، جغرافیای سیاسی و البته دلایل فرهنگی . تلاش آنان کتاب را تکراری و خسته کننده کرده و خواننده را در چرخه ای بی پایان از علت های یکسان انداخته است .
در پایان کتاب خواننده احتمالا به این نتیجه رسیده است که نمی توان به این پرسش پاسخی کلی داد ، یا آنرا در قالبی گنجاند ، بلکه هر کشور یا ملتی را باید به صورتی جدا و با در نظر گرفتن مجموعه ای کامل از تمامی عوامل بررسی کرد ، مفاهیمی که در این کتاب به صورت کامل نادیده گرفته شده اند .

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This book will show that while economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has.
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Inclusive economic institutions also pave the way for two other engines of prosperity: technology and education.
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Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Should be required reading for politicians and anyone concerned with economic development." —Jared Diamond, New York Review of Books


"...bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece."—Washington Post


“For economics and political-science students, surely, but also for the general reader who will appreciate how gracefully the authors wear their erudition.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Provocative stuff; backed by lots of brain power.”—Library Journal


“This is an intellectually rich book that develops an important thesis with verve. It should be widely read.” —Financial Times


“A probing . . . look at the roots of political and economic success . . . large and ambitious new book.” —The Daily


“Why Nations Fail is a splendid piece of scholarship and a showcase of economic rigor.” —The Wall Street Journal


"Ranging from imperial Rome to modern Botswana, this book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations...as ambitious as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel."
—Bloomberg BusinessWeek


“The main strength of this book is beyond the power of summary: it is packed, from beginning to end, with historical vignettes that are both erudite and fascinating. As Jared Diamond says on the cover: 'It will make you a spellbinder at parties.' But it will also make you think.”—The Observer (UK)


"A brilliant book.” —Bloomberg (Jonathan Alter)


“Why Nations Fail is a wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.” —The New York Times (Chrystia Freeland)


"Why Nations Failis a truly awesome book. Acemoglu and Robinson tackle one of the most important problems in the social sciences—a question that has bedeviled leading thinkers for centuries—and offer an answer that is brilliant in its simplicity and power. A wonderfully readable mix of history, political science, and economics, this book will change the way we think about economic development. Why Nations Fail is a must-read book." —Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics


"You will have three reasons to love this book. It’s about national income differences within the modern world, perhaps the biggest problem facing the world today. It’s peppered with fascinating stories that will make you a spellbinder at cocktail parties—such as why Botswana is prospering and Sierra Leone isn’t. And it’s a great read. Like me, you may succumb to reading it in one go, and then you may come back to it again and again." —Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the bestsellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse


"A compelling and highly readable book. And [the] conclusion is a cheering one: the authoritarian ‘extractive’ institutions like the ones that drive growth in China today are bound to run out of steam. Without the inclusive institutions that first evolved in the West, sustainable growth is impossible, because only a truly free society can foster genuine innovation and the creative destruction that is its corollary." —Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money


"Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail." —George Akerlof, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001


"Why Nations Fail is so good in so many ways that I despair of listing them all. It explains huge swathes of human history. It is equally at home in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It is fair to left and right and every flavor in between. It doesn’t pull punches but doesn’t insult just to gain attention. It illuminates the past as it gives us a new way to think about the present. It is that rare book in economics that convinces the reader that the authors want the best for ordinary people. It will provide scholars with years of argument and ordinary readers with years of did-you-know-that dinner conversation. It has some jokes, which are always welcome. It is an excellent book and should be purchased forthwith, so to encourage the authors to keep working." —Charles C. Mann, author of 1491 and 1493


“Imagine sitting around a table listening to Jared Diamond, Joseph Schumpeter, and James Madison reflect on over two thousand years of political and economic history. Imagine that they weave their ideas into a coherent theoretical framework based on limiting extraction, promoting creative destruction, and creating strong political institutions that share power and you begin to see the contribution of this brilliant and engagingly written book.” —Scott E. Page, University of Michigan and Santa Fre Institute


“This fascinating and readable book centers on the complex joint evolution of political and economic institutions, in good directions and bad. It strikes a delicate balance between the logic of political and economic behavior and the shifts in direction created by contingent historical events, large and small at ‘critical junctures.' Acemoglu and Robinson provide an enormous range of historical examples to show how such shifts can tilt toward favorable institutions, progressive innovation and economic success or toward repressive institutions and eventual decay or stagnation. Somehow they can generate both excitement and reflection.” —Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1987


“It’s the politics, stupid! That is Acemoglu and Robinson’s simple yet compelling explanation for why so many countries fail to develop. From the absolutism of the Stuarts to the antebellum South, from Sierra Leone to Colombia, this magisterial work shows how powerful elites rig the rules to benefit themselves at the expense of the many. Charting a careful course between the pessimists and optimists, the authors demonstrate history and geography need not be destiny. But they also document how sensible economic ideas and policies often achieve little in the absence of fundamental political change.”—Dani Rodrik, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University


“Two of the world’s best and most erudite economists turn to the hardest issue of all: why are some nations poor and others rich? Written with a deep knowledge of economics and political history, this is perhaps the most powerful statement made to date that ‘institutions matter.’ A provocative, instructive, yet thoroughly enthralling book.” —Joel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University


“A brilliant and uplifting book—yet also a deeply disturbing wake-up call. Acemoglu and Robinson lay out a convincing theory of almost everything to do with economic development. Countries rise when they put in place the right pro-growth political institutions and they fail—often spectacularly—when those institutions ossify or fail to adapt. Powerful people always and everywhere seek to grab complete control over government, undermining broader social progress for their own greed. Keep those people in check with effective democracy or watch your nation fail.” —Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers and professor at MIT Sloan


“This important and insightful book, packed with historical examples, makes the case that inclusive political institutions in support of inclusive economic institutions is key to sustained prosperity. The book reviews how some good regimes got launched and then had a virtuous spiral, while bad regimes remain in a vicious spiral. This is important analysis not to be missed.” —Peter Diamond, Nobel Laureate in Economics

“Acemoglu and Robinson have made an important contribution to the debate as to why similar-looking nations differ so greatly in their economic and political development. Through a broad multiplicity of historical examples, they show how institutional developments, sometimes based on very accidental circumstances, have had enormous consequences. The openness of a society, its willingness to permit creative destruction, and the rule of appear to be decisive for economic development.” —Kenneth Arrow, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1972

“Acemoglu and Robinson—two of the world's leading experts on development—reveal why it is not geography, disease, or culture which explains why some nations are rich and some poor, but rather a matter of institutions and politics. This highly accessible book provides welcome insight to specialists and general readers alike.” —Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order


“Some time ago a little known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have re-tackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great-…-great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail.”—George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001

“In this stunningly wide ranging book Acemoglu and Robinson ask a simple but vital question, why do some nations become rich and others remain poor? Their answer is also simple—because some polities develop more inclusive political institutions. What is remarkable about the book is the crispness and clarity of the writing, the elegance of the argument, and the remarkable richness of historical detail. This book is a must read at a moment where governments right across the western world must come up with the political will to deal with a debt crisis of unusual proportions.”—Steve Pincus, Bradford Durfee Professor of History and International and Area Studies, Yale University

“The authors convincingly show that countries escape poverty only when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition. More originally, they argue countries are more likely to develop the right institutions when they have an open pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate, and openness to new political leaders. This intimate connection between political and economic institutions is the heart of their major contribution, and has resulted in a study of great vitality on one of the crucial questions in economics and political economy.”— Gary S. Becker, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1992

“This not only a fascinating and interesting book: it is a really important one. The highly original research that Professors Acemoglu and Robinson have done, and continue to do, on how economic forces, politics and policy choices evolve together and constrain each other, and how institutions affect that evolution, is essential to understanding the successes and failures of societies and nations. And here, in this book, these insights come in a highly accessible, indeed riveting form. Those who pick this book up and start reading will have trouble putting it down.” ¯Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001


"In this delightfully readable romp through 400 years of history, two of the giants of contemporary social science bring us an inspiring and important message: it is freedom that makes the world rich. Let tyrants everywhere tremble!" —Ian Morris, Stanford University, author of Why the West Rules – For Now


“Acemoglu and Robinson pose the fundamental question concerning the development of the bottom billion. Their answers are profound, lucid, and convincing.” ―Paul Collier, Professor of Economics, Oxford University, and author of The Bottom Billion
About the Author
Daron Acemoglu is the Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. In 2005 he received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. He is also the co-author of The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty.


James A. Robinson, a political scientist and an economist, is the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University. A world-renowned expert on Latin America and Africa, he has worked in Botswana, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. He is also the co-author of The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty.
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency; Reprint edition (September 17, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307719227
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307719225
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1300L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 1.17 x 8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #11 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Economic History (Books)
#1 in Development & Growth Economics (Books)
#1 in Economic Conditions (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 8,724 ratings
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James A. Robinson
James A. Robinson, a political scientist and an economist, is one of 8 current University Professors at University of Chicago. Focused on Latin America and Africa, he is currently conducting research in Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Haiti and in Colombia where he has taught for many years during the summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá.


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Freh
5.0 out of 5 stars Noninclusive, extractive institituions cause the failure of national prosperity that is the primary cause of global inequality.
Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2017
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Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. 2012.


The authors begin by comparing life in Nogales, Arizona with life in Nogales, Sonora, which is only a few feet away across the Mexican border. Residents north of the border are healthier, live longer, have three times more household income, and enjoy much better government services, including law and order, with much less corruption than residents south of the border. Due to the proximity and shared background of the two cities, these striking differences cannot be explained by the usual references to geography, culture, ignorance, or the protestant work ethic. Instead, the cause is major differences of political and economic institutions between the US and Mexico. These differences have evolved because of the way the societies were formed in the early colonial period.


Spain’s and Portugal’s conquests of Mexico, Central America, and South America were complete. Hence, they were able to replace the already exploitative institutions of the indigenous peoples with similar noninclusive, extractive institutions of their own. The new European aristocracy established a system of absolutist rule with forced labor to extract the wealth and resources of indigenous peoples for themselves, Spain, and Portugal. Once established, this system persisted for centuries, including within many new countries formed after independence from Spain and Portugal. Infighting of elites over the spoils led to political instability with an endless succession of coups and dysfunctional governments. Dispossession and political exclusion of the general population led to slow economic growth from lack of incentives for innovation and entrepreneurship and from inability to counter the excesses of elites.


English colonization of the New World did not begin until after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and hence was limited to the then less desirable portion that remained in North America. The English intended to establish exactly the same kind of noninclusive, extractive colonies as the Spanish and Portuguese. However, due to differing circumstances, their initial colony at Jamestown failed to subjugate the indigenous peoples, then failed to confiscate sufficient output from their own colonists. Consequently, the English were forced to introduce economic incentives and increased political participation to develop and retain more productive colonists. These changes persisted and evolved into the institutions of the US today that are much more inclusive and much less extractive than those of Latin America. It is the cumulative effects of these extractive institutions designed to take incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset that explain the differences in prosperity between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. The authors then report that similar institutional factors in other countries and eras provide the best explanation for most differences in national prosperity for the rest of the world.


Alternative possible primary sources for differences in prosperity are discussed and dismissed. For geography and culture, this is done by comparing many adjacent regions with differing outcomes, such as Nogales, North and South Korea, West and East Germany, and adjacent sides of the Kasai River in the Congo. For religion, it is noted that recent Asian successes occurred without benefit of the Protestant work ethic and that Middle Eastern dysfunction is much more strongly related to successive extractive colonization by the Ottoman Empire and European powers than to the Islamic religion. For ignorance, it is noted that the leaders of underperforming countries are well aware of the problems of their extractive policies but choose them on purpose since they benefit at the expense of everyone else. Also, it is noted that many economists seem to favor the ignorance hypothesis because it implies more value for the advice they provide.


For much of world history, economic growth has been slow due to mostly noninclusive and extractive political and economic institutions, although with some variability. In ancient Rome, expansion and some economic growth occurred during the years of the Republic (510-28 B.C.) due to somewhat more inclusive (though still restrictive) political and economic institutions. Toward the end of the Republic and during the years of the Empire (28 B.C.-476 A.D), increasingly absolutist political rule, increased economic extraction by elites, markedly increased inequality, and eventually extreme political instability with endless civil wars resulted in complete collapse. In Medieval times, the Venetian Republic flourished from its onset in 810 A.D. due to relatively inclusive institutions and a favorable location for Mediterranean trade. However, the adoption of noninclusive institutions beginning in the 14th Century led to its decline to be the museum it is today. Many more historic examples are discussed.


Although noninclusive societies sometimes manage to achieve limited growth, it is usually unsustainable. The classic Maya civilization of 400-1200 A.D. (after the earlier 500 B.C.-100 A.D. cities) initially expanded due to centralized government and occupational specialization, but then declined due to political instability from elites fighting over the spoils of extraction. From 1928 to 1960, the Soviet Union achieved 6% annual growth of income by reallocating resources from agriculture to industry, but then declined and collapsed when this reallocation was complete. Thus, growth in extractive societies is unsustainable because technologic progress does not occur when most people in the economy lack the necessary incentives and security for innovation and the necessary political participation to limit extraction by elites. Indeed, political and economic elites who benefit
from the status quo often resist conditions that favor growth because they fear the creative destruction of a healthy economy.


World inequality dramatically increased with the British Industrial Revolution because only some parts of the world had the necessary inclusive institutions to adopt the spectacular changes of its innovations and new technology. These changes started in Briton and soon spread to Europe, the British “Settler Colonies” (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and Japan, then to South Korea, Taiwan, and China after World War II. They failed to spread to Sub-Saharan Africa, much of Latin America, the Middle East, and much of Asia due to the absence of favorable institutions. This failure was the legacy of centuries of institutions with absolutist political repression and economic extraction (including the slave trade), mostly from colonization by European countries, then from new countries’ own elites after independence in the 20th Century.


Absolutist rulers who feared economic change leading to political change actually blocked or delayed spread of the Industrial Revolution in the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and China. Absolutism was not the only barrier to developing inclusive institutions. Some parts of the world, particularly in Africa, lacked a centralized state that could even provide the minimal law and order necessary for those institutions. European colonization even reversed some favorable institutional development, such as with the Portuguese and Dutch conquest of the Asian spice economy and with the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade for the sugar plantations and other colonies in the Americas.


The Industrial Revolution started and made its biggest strides in England because of her uniquely inclusive political and economic institutions. The emergence of constitutional rule and political pluralism made possible centralized government that could strengthen property rights, improve markets, undermine state-sanctioned monopolies, remove trade barriers, extend taxation to elites, and limit extraction by elites to increase incentives for innovators and entrepreneurs. Highlights in the evolution of this system included the Magna Carta of 1215, the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, political centralization beginning after 1485 by the Tudors and continuing with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the shift of authority from the monarch to Parliament after 1688, and subsequently numerous acts of Parliament that encouraged the countless innovations in textiles, other manufacturing, transportation, and trade occurring at the time.


Why did these inclusive changes vital to economic development occur first in England rather than somewhere else? According to the authors, the divergence of institutional characteristics between nations is largely the consequence of slow accumulation of small historical differences, the acts of individuals, or just random factors. This institutional drift is then amplified by critical junctures that lead to more rapid divergence, as in the following instances. The Black Death of 1346 led to labor shortages and land surpluses in Europe that ended feudalism in the West, where peasants had more bargaining power, but strengthened it in the East. The expansion of world trade after 1600 weakened the absolute rule of Elizabeth I of England who was unable to establish monopolies but strengthened it for the monarchs in France and Spain who were able to do so. The French Revolution led to inclusive institutions that converged with those of England in Western Europe but not in Eastern Europe.


Once established, these institutional differences are remarkably persistent due to virtuous and vicious cycles. They remain the core cause of inequality between and within nations today, although details vary from nation to nation. North Korea has one-party rule without elections, while Zimbabwe has one-party rule with the façade of elections. Argentina and Columbia have elections, but authority does not reach the periphery in Columbia. In Egypt and Uzbekistan elites took over extractive institutions of socialist governments and transformed them to crony capitalism. Centralized government is lacking in Somalia and Afghanistan because of failure to achieve it and in Haiti and Sierra Leone because of collapse of the state.


The solution to the economic and political failure of nations today is the difficult task of transforming extractive institutions toward inclusive ones. To do so, requires some degree of centralized order, some preexisting political inclusiveness, and transformative media, which are often attacked or captured by extractive regimes. Three examples of success are given. In Botswana, the chiefs seized the critical juncture of postcolonial independence to introduce inclusive institutions that achieved the highest per-capita income in sub-Saharan Africa at a level equal to that of Hungary. In the US South, replacement of the highly extractive institutions of slavery and Jim Crow in the 1960s contributed to the elimination of the 50% per-capita income gap between the South and the North. In China, the replacement by Deng Xiaoping of Mao’s extractive economic institutions in 1980 led to decades of rapid economic growth. However, questions remain about sustainability in China because this was said to be catch-up growth under noninclusive political institutions, rather than growth from innovation and creative destruction.


Multiple alternative solutions to reverse economic failures of nations are examined and rejected. The irresistible charm of authoritarian growth, such as in China, is rejected because China’s institutions are extractive, and its growth is said to be likely to end as soon as it reaches the level of a middle income country. The modernization theory that societies may pass through an authoritarian stage during rapid growth before becoming democratic as they mature is rejected because no authoritarian society has done so in the last one hundred years. The the prospect of engineering prosperity by providing the right advice is rejected because it fails to recognize the primary role of political institutions that undermine meaningful change. A primary role for foreign aid to extractive governments is rejected, since most of it is plundered and fails to reach its target.
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J.K. Turner
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating book, but a little redundant.
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2018
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Level - Moderate, you'll need some basic familiarity with economics, politics, and history; Long (462 pages before acknowledgements, notes, etc.) overly repetitious and a bit tedious.


Summary
As I start to write the review, it dawns on me that perhaps the title is a bit misleading. It isn't so much about why they fail, as to why the never even get off the ground. Some nations seem doomed from the start, however, other become wildly successful. Ultimately, I think, the point of the book is who are the ones that are successful and how does that happen? Acemoglu and Robinson pin it two factors, which taken with their opposites form something like a matrix or quadrant, and you need to overlap with the positive of both. These are whether or not you nation is politically inclusive and, and perhaps more importantly, the whether or not you have extractive institutions.


The politic aspect is fairly straight forward, are you in a dictatorship (or other controlling, top down government) or in a democracy (or other form of responsive government)? If you have no say in politics, and government is controlled by a few or just one person, it is fairly easy to see why that wouldn't work. The more complicated and impactful side is the extractive institutions. These can take many forms, such as contract law or heavy taxation, but a good example is property rights. If you know you have solid and secure property rights, you are more likely to invest and build up your business. If you fear that an institution may step in at any moment and take your land or business from you, why bother?


The book itself is broken into 15 chapters, with an interesting preface about Mubarak and Egypt. The first chapter compares Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora; the two cities have similar culture and geography, so why is one rich and the other poor? The chapter serves as the intro to the book and leads into the second chapter where the debunk the reasons for poverty being related to genetics or weather, among others. Chapters 3 through 12 are basically case studies where the authors look a different political situation throughout history through the lenses of responsiveness and extractiveness. In 13 and 14, the authors discuss nations that fail today those that have become successful. The final chapter looks at our attempts to help impoverished nations and how understanding the causes, as the have proposed, will help us to better understand why those attempts have failed and how we can do better going forward.


My Thoughts
First, about the book itself - the authors are both academics, and the book certainly reads that way to an extent. The book could have been much more concise, dropping at least 100 pages without missing any case studies are points. I think part of the issue may come from the publisher/editor, in that instead of setting up most of the chapters as case studies that then looked at their points each time, it might have been better to make their points, and then touch on case studies as proof. Instead, each chapter could almost be read independently, meaning there is too much repetition of their point.


To the content of the book - it was fascinating, anyone with interest in economics, history, or politics, this book is a must read. One of the the more interesting points of history to me, was the impact of the Plague on serfdom in Europe. Eastern Europe reacted one way, England another, which would then impact America (as it was founded with this change as part of history), which ultimately effects me today. Had the reaction in England been the same as the Austria-Hungary reaction, who knows how different the Western World would look, perhaps I wouldn't be writing this review right now.


Another point the spend some time on that is worth considering is looking beyond just economics. The point to growth of the economy under Stalin, but that the nation still failed. It is also helpful to see and understand how the impacts of colonialism, which was not inclusive but very extractive, still effects those countries and peoples today. The point was driven home a little more for me because I live in the South, which they actually spend some time on. The impacts of slavery on the economics of white people is still being felt today, though less so than a few decades ago. The discussion centers on the fact that obviously slavery is extractive and was horrible for black people, but it also never would have worked politically because it included so few people in the institutions. Most white people were shut out of the economy and wages and this impact lasted a long time. They point out the that median income in the South was about 40% of the median income through the rest of the nation as recently as 1950.


All of this works back to a reminder that part of why life is good for me today is pure luck. From serfdom in England, to the Civil War, on through today. If Lincoln had let the South succeed and be it's own country, it clearly would have failed, based on the theories of the authors. Meaning, I could be living in a failed state right now, instead of America. They call it 'small differences and critical juncture' in history, but it is basically an accident of history; it is somewhat sobering to consider.


Overall, and interesting and challenging book. It could certainly be a bit shorter and cleaner, which is why I didn't rate it higher, but a book that is well worth the read and one to put on your list.


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T. Graczewski
5.0 out of 5 stars Politics isn't everything, it's the only thing
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2014
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In his 2000 bestseller “Development as Freedom” Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen made the uplifting argument that the cornerstone of international development ought to be the promotion and growth of human freedom. What his thesis notably lacked was evidence. It seems to me that evidence supporting Sen’s important hypothesis is precisely what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson present here in “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.” This 2013 bestseller argues that only open and inclusive political institutions – those most likely to provide the freedoms Sen claims are critical – can achieve sustainable economic growth (e.g. “The central thesis of this book is that economic growth and prosperity are associated with inclusive economic and political institutions, while extractive institutions typically lead to stagnation and poverty”).


To begin with, Acemoglu and Robinson shred three of the most commonly held theses on global economic inequality, while setting the stage to argue that politics and political institutions along with their associated incentives are what really matters for long term, sustainable economic growth. First, they dismiss the Geography theory, usually associated with Jared Diamond (but also Jeffrey Sachs), which suggests that north/south continents and tropical climates are poorly suited for economic growth. That’s simply not true, the authors say. North America was once far less economically desirable than South America; the Middle East was the cradle of civilization, yet non-oil Middle East countries today are as poor as Peru and Bolivia, which are far poorer than the UK or US. “History thus leaves little doubt that there is no simple connection between a tropical location and economic success.” Second, they reject Culture theory, which started with Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic, and is just as invalid as Geography according to the authors. How can one explain the differences between North and South Korea or the US versus Mexican sides of Nogales, Arizona? Or why is it that the US, Canada, Nigeria and Sierra Leone – all former English colonies and places that have shared cultures and/ or colonial heritage – have vastly different economies today? Finally, they critique Ignorance theory, which is favored by most modern development economists, especially Jeffrey Sachs, the doyen of the poverty-can-be-eradicated school, and essentially maintains that countries are poor because they make wrongheaded policy decisions. If only they had better advisors and made smarter choices to foster economic growth, Ignorance theory proponents argue, everything would work out just fine. Acemoglu and Robinson, on the other hand, claim that leaders rarely make stupid decisions. They make rational choices that may be economically disastrous for their country, but usually align well with economic incentives that are part of the institutions that they’ve created or, more often, inherited. There is no ignorance; it’s just that the system has been set up to encourage harmful policies. In other words, “They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose.”


So what then is required for sustainable economic growth? The authors claim that “…to understand world inequality we have to understand why some societies are organized in very inefficient and socially undesirable ways.” They argue that “the ability of economic institutions to harness the potential of inclusive markets, encourage technological innovation, invest in people, and mobilize the talents and skills of a large number of individuals is critical for economic growth…” and that “…explaining why so many economic institutions fail to meet these simple objectives is the central theme of this book.”


They lay out a simple and compelling hypothesis to support their position, although it does have some holes. The argument goes like this. First, a country needs to have a foundation of stable political centralization in order to provide basic law and order. This quickly excludes such international basket cases as Afghanistan and Somalia. Thus, from their perspective, without a firm political foundation there is no hope for meaningful growth. Next, the political institutions must be pluralistic, thereby ensuring that the required stability will come from the rule of law and the establishment of a level economic and political playing field for all, and not merely by the use of force flexed by some powerful entrenched elite. Nations that possess these political traits (centralized, pluralistic, rule of law) tend to have inclusive economic institutions, such as free labor markets, secure property rights and free market economies. The combination of these political and economic institutions fosters creative destructive, to use Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase, as long established elites cannot thwart the new technologies and processes that threaten the status quo and thus their privileged political and economic position. This focus on the centrality of creative destruction or what is now more commonly referred to as “disruption” from Clay Christensen’s seminal “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” is really the linchpin of the authors’ entire case. I found that it has special merit, although it is far from air tight.


The authors view the Korean Peninsula as a powerful example of their theory at work. The two halves of the peninsula share the same geography and culture, so clearly those two explanations do not apply. But what about Ignorance? Although the South was until recently authoritarian like the North, the regime in Seoul allowed for secure private property, unbiased rule of law, proper public services, and an open labor market. Authoritarian regimes of every political stripe tend to have extractive economic institutions, the authors say. The state – and thus the economy, as the two are fundamentally intertwined – is set up for the exclusive benefit of some small elite. More inclusive economic institutions, with the potential for more rapid and broader based economic growth, are often eschewed because such growth would almost certainly come at the expense of the elites.


That isn’t to say that extractive regimes cannot produce economic growth. They certainly can, so say the authors, but they are destined to sputter out and collapse eventually according to their theory. Acemoglu and Robinson muster a truly sweeping array of historical examples to make their case, from the Natufian society in the Levant around 9500 BC and the Mayan empire in Central America from 400-800 AD to the Bushong in the Congo in the 1600s and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. They also boldly predict collapse for the current Communist China economic juggernaut in the years to come (“China…is likely to run out of steam”). Indeed, extractive institutions come in all different shapes and sizes today, according to the authors. Some are Communist, others Socialist, a few are ostensibly free market democracies. But the inevitable common denominator is that the wealth of the nation is expropriated by a narrow and closed elite, whether that be the anti-communist Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the anti-FARC paramilitary in Colombia, the traditional Spanish elite in Argentina, the Sung family in North Korea, crony capitalists in Egypt, or the cotton kings of Uzbekistan.


These impressively diverse societies – as measured geographically, culturally, temporally – share many similar traits according to the authors: political centralization, often by force; forced re-allocation of productive resources and mainly for the enrichment of a narrow elite; general economic growth but technological and business process stagnation; and an inherently unstable political system as the incentives to displace the current elites and acquire the narrow stream of great wealth is overpowering. Thus, politically centralized (often absolutist) regimes with extractive economic institutions can deliver economic growth – often spectacular growth – but only for a limited period of time and almost never through technological innovation. The inherent conflicts in the system lead to a “vicious cycle” as “extractive political institutions [support] extractive economic institutions, which in turn [provide] the basis for extractive political institutions and the continuation of the power of the same elite.” The end result is always the same: economic and political collapse. However, the authors say nothing about how long such extractive regimes can continue to grow nor what sends them into collapse. In fact, many of the doomed extractive regimes survived and prospered for quite a long time: Rome (nearly a millennium), the Maya (half a millennium), and many European empires (centuries at least). Will China get its extractive institution comeuppance next year, next decade, next century or next millennium? The authors don’t hazard a guess.


A major theme of “Why Nations Fail” is the incredible long range importance of innovation: “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions,” the authors boldly claim. They go on to note how William Lee developed a knitting machine for making stockings in England in the 1580s. Queen Elizabeth quickly squelched the idea, fearing the potential disruptions to employment as a threat to political stability. The authors write that this is precisely what all extractive political regimes with non-inclusive political institutions are wont to do: block disruptive technology. It would be the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – an event the authors claim was nothing less than “…the most important political revolution of the past two millennia” – that would change everything. Indeed, they write that “World inequality today exists because during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some nations were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution and the technologies and the methods of organization that it brought while others were unable to do so.”


So what made the English Glorious Revolution so important? Well, to start, it promoted political centralization and pluralism, two key ingredients in their recipe for sustained economic growth. Indeed, politics is at the foundation of their case (“…while economics institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has”). As for the Glorious Revolution, it was a “…momentous event precisely because it was led by an emboldened broad coalition and further empowered this coalition, which managed to forge a constitutional regime with constraints on the power of both the executive and, equally crucially, any one of its members.” It gave England a Parliament that heard and responded to public petitions from a broad spectrum of society, which in turn laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. From this radical new system many popular initiatives were developed. Their combination had a profound impact, according to thesis of “Why Nations Fail”: new and improved property rights (i.e. no longer would Englishmen fear arbitrary confiscation by the Crown); improved infrastructure in the form of canals, turnpikes, and later railroads (because investors felt more secure in their investments); a fiscal regime that taxed land rather than hearths, thus shifting the tax burden to land owners rather than manufacturers (which further increased industrial investment); greater access to capital in the form of the Bank of England (a direct outcome of the Glorious Revolution allowing for ready capital to anyone with proper collateral); and aggressive protection of trade and manufacturing from outside competition, but accompanied by the dissolution of internal monopolies. In short, the authors claim that “The Glorious Revolution…was about a fundamental reorganization of economics institutions in favor of innovators and entrepreneurs, based on the emergence of more secure and efficient property rights.” Acemoglu and Robinson note just how dramatic were the waves of innovations that propelled the Industrial Revolution (e.g. the time to produce 100 lbs. of cotton fell from 50,000 hours by hand to 300 hours with a waterframe to 135 hours with a Spinning Jenny) and that these cumulative innovations were almost all developed by new men from humble backgrounds, the antithesis of the traditional ossified, hereditary elite.


Moreover, inclusive institutions tend to promote a “virtuous cycle” of “… constraints against the exercise and usurpation of power…[and also] tend to create inclusive economic institutions, which in turn make the continuation of inclusive political institutions more likely.” The exact opposite of “…extractive economic institutions [that] create the platform for extractive political institutions to persist…” The authors use Australia, the French Revolution, and China versus Japan to further their core thesis that inclusive political institutions were fundamental for taking full advantage of the Industrial Revolution, which they claim explains the global economic inequality we have today. States with an entrenched, absolutist political system and extractive economic institutions (Eastern Europe, Ottoman Empire, Africa, China) were dominated by elites that were inherently opposed to change. “The aristocracies would be economic losers from industrialization. More important, they would also be political losers, as the process of industrialization would undoubtedly create instability and political challenges to their monopoly of political power.”


“Rich nations [US, UK, Canada, Australia] are rich largely because they managed to develop inclusive institutions at some point during the past three hundred years. These institutions have persisted through a process of virtuous circles. Even if inclusive only in a limited sense to begin with, and sometimes fragile, they generated dynamics that would create a process of positive feedback, gradually increasing their inclusiveness.”


Acemoglu and Robinson conclude “Why Nations Fail” with some promising words about an unlikely economic hero: Brazil. “The rise of Brazil since the 1970s was not engineered by economists of international institutions instructing Brazilian policymakers on how to design better policies or avoid market failures. It was not achieved with injections of foreign aid. It was not the natural outcome of modernization. Rather, it was the consequence of diverse groups of people courageously building inclusive institutions.”


In closing, “Why Nations Fail” was much better and far more intellectually deep than I had anticipated. It has been one of the most thought-provoking reads I’ve had in a long time. It is an admirable blend of contemporary economic development theory to be read alongside Sachs, Easterly, Collier and Sen and an important contribution to strategic studies and cultural history, easily on par with Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and McNeil’s “Plagues and Peoples” or “The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000.” Overall, this is a book well worth reading.
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David Oldacre
5.0 out of 5 stars A very well reasoned theory – with few heroes and many villains
Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2016
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I bought this book because it was the first one found on the particular subject of “Failed Nations” since I had read “The Collapse of complex Societies” by Joseph Tainter. The two books however are entirely different in the way they answer the fundamental question as this is why nations fail.


Tainter’s theory is that powerful nations collapse because their institutions have become more and more complex and require more and more effort from their citizens with less and less to show for it, with the result that the fringes of the state start to crumble and the people either die off or move away. He cites many examples but the main ones he concentrates upon are Lowland Classic Maya of Central America, the Western Roman Empire, and the collapse of the Chacoan civilization of northern New Mexico . He argues that States ruling without competition compared with those ruling in polities of equal strength, leads him to the conclusion that collapse can only occur in a power vacuum.


The authors of this book take an entirely different approach. Their arguments are primarily ones which are based on economical and political institutions . They firmly reject that there are arguments that the reasons nations fail are due to geographic, cultural or ignorance. But they do recognize that all have one thing in common and that the rule is by a narrow elite whose main focus is on maintaining and/or expanding their own interests at the expense of the rest of the population which they govern.


The following is a summary of the contents of this book, which I will comment on later :


Chapter 1 SO CLOSE AND YET SO DIFFERENT
Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, have the same people, culture, and geography. Why is one rich and one poor?
Chapter 2 THEORIES THAT DON'T WORK
Poor countries are poor not because of their geographies or cultures, or because their leaders do not know which policies will enrich
their citizens. The interests of narrow elites and the long agony of the Congo.
Chapter 3 THE MAKING OF PROSPERITY AND POVERTY
How prosperity and poverty are determined by the incentives created by institutions, and how politics determines what institutions a nation has. Extractive and inclusive economic and political institutions
Chapter 4 SMALL DIFFERENCES AND CRITICAL JUNCTURES: THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY
How institutions change through political conflict and how the past shapes the present. The Black Death, the contingent path of history.
Chapter 5 "I'VE SEEN THE FUTURE, AND IT WORKS": GROWTH UNDER EXTRACTIVE INSTITUTIONS
What Stalin, King Shyaam, the Neolithic Revolution, and the Maya city-states all had in common and how this explains why China's current economic growth cannot last
Chapter 6 DRIFTING APART
How institutions evolve over time, often slowly drifting apart – Venice, Roman virtues and vices, Roman Britain, Diverging paths.
Chapter 7 THE TURNING POINT
How a political revolution in 1688 changed institutions in England and led to the Industrial Revolution
Chapter 8 NOT ON OUR TURF: BARRIERS TO DEVELOPMENT
Why the politically powerful in many nations opposed the Industrial Revolution and enduring backwardness: Ottoman Empire, Spain, Hapsburg and Russian Empires, Ming and Qing dynasties, Somalia,
Chapter 9 REVERSING DEVELOPMENT
How European colonialism impoverished large parts of the world – Dutch East Indies, African slave trade, South African apartheid.
Chapter 10 THE DIFFUSION OF PROSPERITY
How some parts of the world took different paths to prosperity from that of Britain – Australia, the French Revolution, Europe, Japan; The roots of world inequality.
Chapter 11 THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE
How institutions that encourage prosperity create positive feedback loops that prevent the efforts by elites to undermine them. British Reform acts, Trust busting in the US, Failed attempts to pack Supreme Courts.
Chapter 12 THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
How institutions that create poverty generate negative feedback loops and endure. Collapse of infrastructure in Sierra Leone, Land grab in Guatemala, Slavery to Jim Crow, Oligarchy in Ethiopia.
Chapter 13 WHY NATIONS FAIL TODAY
Institutions, institutions, institutions and why nations fail. ; Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Argentina, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Egypt,
Chapter 14 BREAKING THE MOLD
How a few countries changed their economic trajectory by changing their institutions. Botswana, US Civil Rights, China’s rebirth
Chapter 15 UNDERSTANDING PROSPERITY AND POVERTY
How the world could have been different and how understanding this can explain why most attempts to combat poverty have failed – Authoritarian growth (China), Failure of foreign aid (Afghanistan),Empowerment (Brazil)


The main thesis that the authors put forward is fairly straightforward. First of all the state must be sufficiently centralized that its rulers and ruling elite can actually govern it. The second is that Economic and Political institutions established in the state are inclusive enough that a significant portion of the population have significant powers to prevent the control by a narrow elite, and that the state is governed by the rule of law in which the rights of all – justice, property, education, economic and political - are adequately protected and are difficult to be removed.


The concept of contingent events – like the Black Death in which a major portion of the population died, provided an opportunity for a slow but sure change in the political development of western European countries as the rulers had to start to take into account the needs and demands of those which supported them – leading to the development of large cities, with merchants and guilds. Another was the discovery of the Americas which – particularly in Latin America – was primarily a looting operation that simply replaced the native ruling elites with European ones.


The authors use the establishment of the North American colonies (which was a century later than that of Latin America) to describe how those colonists found it extremely difficult to exploit the local population and had to be self sufficient for their own survival. The slow development of a larger more wealthy portion of the English populations led to the English Civil War, and the eventual establishment of a more constitutional monarchy. This is described in some detail in Chapter 7 and showed how Britain and subsequently the US industrialized and slowly established more and more inclusive institutions which are so important for the development of their modern democracies.


There are course, many descriptions of the ups and downs of this progress, but the book does an excellent job of explaining the successes and failures of various states in all continents of the world – and why this has resulted in the current world political reality.


The difficulty I have with this book is that the authors are unable to offer solutions to dealing with the problems of failed states. I suppose that is probably too much to ask for, and the final chapter makes an effort to address this issue – which is more or less an appeal to influential persons to be informed of the failures of aid programs to alleviate poverty, and to understand why those policies may fail if the funds only end up in the hands of the oligarchic rulers. And they certainly do not address the many powerful international organizations such as FIFA, IOC, (and to some extent the UNO) which are observably corrupt and tend only to serve the “narrow elite ” who run those organizations.


I am also dubious about some of the arguments used in favour of “Creative Destruction” which seem to be more effective in more successful democracies than those which are anything but democratic. What is the purpose of creative destruction when it can also destroy the foundations of a developing state?.


I do agree that the development of a successful state is a slow one – although it appears that the French experience after the Revolution and the Napoleonic era effectively swept away the institutions of the old regime, such that a new structure had to be created in its place – and today (even if you do not agree with its political philosophies) it is one of the more powerful and successful democracies. And I agree with the proposition that you cannot legislate prosperity. I think, however, that the authors are being somewhat optimistic in arguing that current success stories will actually lead to long term success.


What is interesting about the book is the there is little or no discussion on the impact of religion on the development of the state which is probably just as well, because once you can get on that topic then you enter the realm of beliefs and articles of faith, and any possibility of reasoned analysis tends to be glossed over as irrelevant.


I found this book to be very readable and the arguments in support of their thesis very easy to follow. But as they say, economics is a dismal science and there are indeed few heroes and many villains in this account. I can understand why this book has been so well received, because it is provides strong justification as to why the western democracies have been so successful. I would certainly recommend it to other readers who have similar interests to my own. I give it 5 stars.
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David Field
5.0 out of 5 stars A major step forward in Economics, and easy to understand
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2012
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If you write a book on World Economics, it says a lot if five of the blurbs are from winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics.


It also helps if you don't publish your theory in a learned journal, complete with plenty of math.


And if you produce your theory in an easy-to-read book that makes your point over and over again, you have a winner - maybe even your own Nobel Prize.


And here is that winner. I know I've been somewhat gushing about books lately, but this is the best one so far - this year, this decade, this century. So what's it about?


Authors Acemoglu and Robinson have taken on the vexing question of why some nations are prosperous and others not. They point out that there are many similar societies around the world, and that development should be similar in each of them. But the early examples - North and South Korea, and Mexican Nogales and U.S. Nogales - show that there is a vast divide between apparently similar peoples. They attribute this to certain man-made institutions in each country. What has made these differences hard to see has been the focus on politics. Is Capitalism better than Communism? Do revolutions and coups make everything right? These aren't the questions to ask.


The authors have made an intense study of many nations around the world, and they can show that the success or failure can be traced to the author's theory. They find that most countries are either extractive or inclusive societies. Extractive societies try to concentrate the wealth among the powerful, and even communist leaders can live the good life while their citizens starve. Inclusive societies try to engage as many groups as possible to share power, without creating an elite.


People in the U.S. live in a society that is mainly inclusive. Most Americans would agree that if you study hard and work hard you can get on in life. The state can't come around and take away what you have. You can start a business and make billions from it, if you are lucky. You can innovate and get a return for your processes and inventions. That isn't the case for everyone here, but it's what drives the country.


Or take an extractive society. Few people have access to education. Communist states suppress demand, and supposed "democracies" often preside over massive inflation. You may not be able to open a business. In agricultural nations there's often a state organization that is supposed to get higher prices for exports of the commodity, yet farmers find that the going rate is going down and down, and is less than what's available in a free market. So why look for better ways of producing your crops? It's simply not worth it.


People have complained that there is too much emphasis on England in the seventeenth century. That's purely sour grapes because I come from there (no, not really!). It's because England gradually moved from an extractive society to an inclusive one. In 1688, a hundred years after the Armada, King Charles II was deposed. But the important news was that England took steps to remove control from the King and his nobles. Over the next two hundred years, the Parliament became supreme, and this was done to make the democracy wider-spread, and not to succumb to the interests of the rich. So when the Industrial Revolution started, the steam engine wasn't a curiosity, like it was to the Greeks in the first century A.D., where there was enough free energy from slaves. Also in Britain, the aristocracy didn't fear the loss of power or money as much as in feudal countries.


I'm sure Karl Marx thought that Communism would solve the world's problems, but although the Soviet Union rose to be an industrial power, the strong control of the state led people to fix targets that were easily reached, and there was little incentive for innovation. So even with the supposed equality of everyone, the country couldn't maintain growth. So it's sad that the authors review Uzbekistan, an ex-satellite country of the Soviet Union, and show that the "free" people are subject to the same restrictions.


The most egregious examples come from Zimbabwe, and the reign of Robert Mugabe, who came to power by driving out the white minority rule of Ian Smith. At one point the national bank ran a lottery; the qualification was to keep $1,000 in an account for a month. The winner, on a "random" draw, was - Robert Mugabe. There have been constant allegation of vote-fixing in elections, and most people seem to expect Mugabe as a dictator.


But not all the news is bad. In Botswana, with its lack of natural resources in the 1800s and most of the 1900s, the British won control but did little to expose their rule, because there was nothing to exploit. After independence in 1966 the country was poverty-stricken, but the new rulers established a country where the leadership was nation-based rather than tribal-based. Then with the discovery of diamonds, Seretse Kharma proposed that mineral rights should also be the property of the government, so all Botswanans would benefit. That's led to Botswana having the standard of living equal to a typical Eastern European or Central American country, far better than any of the original colonies.


The best news comes from Brazil, where the Worker's Party has gradually taken over the country. They did this by approaching diverse social movements within Brazil to form a broad-based party, and the Worker's Party has encouraged these movements to play a part in deciding policies. Brazil is now the seventh-largest economy.


The world is full of quick solutions that turn out not be as simple as people had hoped, but the idea of extractive versus inclusive organizations seems to work over a vast range of countries over long time-scales. Some people here have criticized the (rare) errors of fact, but even if these had been fixed the argument would still have been extremely effective.


What this book gives us is a blueprint for progress. Up till now we've struggled to find a way forward with numerous plans being advanced, but this is the first book I've ever seen that covers such a wide range of governments and history to prove its point. Countries around the world, with apparently little in common, conform to its arguments.


So, I urge you to read this book. Whatever your political persuasion, it will tell you something that you don't already know. The rights you have today, wherever you are, need to be constantly checked to make sure that they're not eroded. Extremes of left or right are dangerous, and bear in mind that just about all the political parties in Europe, for instance, are to the left of the Democrats in the U.S.


So, it's easy enough to read, it contains important truths, and has earned the respect of the best minds on the subject. Get it today.
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kds
4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting, very important, very relevant for understanding the political climate today
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2014
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Overall: very very interesting and very important topic. I would give it 5 stars except it is very long, detailed, and not an easy read. However well worth it.


Thesis in brief: some countries are prosperous, and others are not. What causes the difference? Some are right next to each other and the difference in prosperity can not be explained by geography, climate, or even culture. Instead it is the system, and what is it about the system that explains the difference. They elaborate a theory that there are "inclusive" political and economic systems, and there are "extractive" political and economic system. A precondition to either of these is a minimal level of centralized political control.


To distill this to a very simplified level: a region needs to develop a minimal amount of centralized control. At that point it is possible to create a system that is inclusive, where power is somewhat distributed, and economic gains are shared, which helps make the economy grow in a sustained way. At some point it is possible to switch to an extractive system where the people in power manipulate the system to enrich themselves and to stay in power, and at that point sustained growth becomes impossible. The rest of the world passes it up, or in some cases the country descends into ruin.


The bulk of the book is a scholarly and encyclopedic study of different cultures, testing and demonstrating the theory.


Mexico vs. USA: neighboring countries and the difference in climate does not explain the extensive difference in the properity. Surprisingly, 500 years ago Mexico was far more prosperous than the land north of the border. Mexico had 500 times as many people per sq. mile than Virginia, it had an advanced civilization, and tremendous wealth by any measure. How did it come that today USA is so prosperous compared to Mexico? When the Europeans got to mexico, they immediately set up an extractive system to enrich themselves, while in Virginia the Jamestown settlers came close to extinction, and had to set up an inclusive system in order to survive. Once the pattern is set, it is very hard to change, and echos of these patterns survive today.


Chapter 2 addresses all of the common folk theories of why rich countries and poor countries are different: geography, culture, & ignorance. Evidence against is presented. The conclusion: "poor countries are poor because those that have power make choices that create poverty"


Chapter 3 explains extractive and inclusive using the example of South and North Korea which were identical before the border was drawn at the 38th parallel. "Nations fail when they have extractive economic institutions supported by extractive political institutions that impede and even block economic growth." Economic growth requires that 'creative destruction' that Adam Smith referred to, and in an extractive system, those in power oppose change because they fear it will dilute their power and wealth. They actively oppose change. However, without change you can't have growth. Congo and Soviet Union are given as examples of extractive systems that achieved limited growth because the elite actively directed the resources to this end ... but it does not last.


Chapter 4 talks about systems that change from one form to another at a critical juncture. The black death. The Glorious Revolution. Japan in transition from Edo to Meiji.


Chapter 5 is a wide ranging survey of countries (and periods of their history) with extractive systems.


Chapter 6 covers rise and fall scenarios: Venice, Rome, others.


Chapter 7 stands on its own and presents the answer to the question: "Why did the industrial revolution happen in England?" After all, England was not that different from the rest of Europe, but those small differences, and a critical juncture, pushed it in just the right way to be ready for the technological advances of the industrial revolution.


Chapter 8 gives many example (e.g. Somalia) of how the people in power of some countries avoided any advantage from the industrial revolution .. and were left economically behind because of it.


Chapter 9 gives some example (most notably the Spice Islands) where invaders managed actually to destroy inclusive cultures in order to line their own pockets.


Chapter 10 discusses the diffusion of prosperity and how that enabled key countries to benefit from the industrial revolution.


Chapter 11 explains the virtuous circle and how when a country manages to get inclusive economic and political institutions, it tends to stay that way in a stable configuration.


Chapter 12 explains the vicious circle, the pattern where extractive systems tend to reinforce themselves and become stable, even as the country sinks into ruin.


Chapter 13 brings us back to the present day, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leon, Argentina, Korea, and the US south (slave states).


Chapter 14: some positive stories of countries that made a narrow escape: Botswana started very poor, but has grown more than any of its neighbors into a country with the highest per-capta income in sub-saharan Africa. How the south escaped slavery, how those institutions persisted for a hundred years, but finally made it out.


Chapter 15: with all that groundwork behind you, you are finally prepared to fully understand properity, poverty, and their causes. They reject the idea that natural growth will bring prosperity once the country is educated enough. Foreign aid will never work in a country that has extractive institutions -- what has to happen is a change to inclusive, and there is nothing natural or easy about this change.


The book yeilds a lot of insight on the ways that countries can evolve, and indeed patterns that are sure to cause failure. I can't stop wishing that the authors could offer a sure fire way to solve the problem, to turn a country from extractive to inclusive, but alas this is not included in book. It is clear that no simple solutions exist. It would seem that each country to be "saved" would probably need a solution unique to it.


In poor countries they found extractive institutions; in rich countries inclusive institutions; however the cause and effect is not completely clear. We don't really know what causes the form encountered, nor what might cause a change of form. Thus is might simply be that a particular country just happens to be poor and extractive -- it is hard to say whether change to an inclusive structure is even possible. Maybe you have to growing to have inclusive systems. What is the chicken, and what is the egg?


This does not diminish the book in any way. Their 15 years of research are brought to expose patterns that I expect to enhance my way of viewing world politics, economics, and culture, for many years to come.


[...]
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A difficult read, but must read if you care about your country
Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2024
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This is an important work, actively discussed by economists and sociologists through the last decade. It give the driving forces that may lead a nation to success or failure. You will understand why the Western Europe and the USA are so successful, why China is going to fail, and why many countries barely survive without much chance for improvement. You will realize how fragile democracy. is
The book is written in academic style. Difficult to read even by those who read science journals daily.
The cope I receieved was not in good condition, previously wet and then dried.
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Dalton C. Rocha
3.0 out of 5 stars Why this book fails; at least sometimes
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2012
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Here in Brazil, I read this regular book.
The main five greatest points of this book:
1- This book is well organized.
2- This book is very easy to understand.
3- This book tells histories about about twenty famous cleptocrats, such as Idi Amin, Ismail Karimov, Kwame Nkrumah, etc.
4- This book is very fun to read.
5- The main idea of this book is that instituitions are decisive, to the destiny of nations. And this idea is mainly correct.


Even so, I must give three stars for this book, because:
1- This book has many sophisms. About American development, this book claims that American development happened despite American Indians were behind Mexican and Peruvian Indians. Well, Mexico remains deeply linked to the Aztec past and Peru remains linked to the Inca Empire, but United States hasn't any real link to its Indians. The American Indians were mainly exterminated and their culture became over. The Mexican Indians became one important thing of Mexican culture and politics. As an typical example of sophism in this book, there's nothing about Guyana. And Guyana was colonized by England and its instituitions. Why New Zealand became a rich country and Guyana became a poor one, under the same British instituitions? Well, the nature gave a sentence that in Guyana, European ways of life couldn't be replicated, while in New Zealand, they could. Nature, not instituitions, decided Guyana and New Zealand's fates.
2- About "Israel", I didn't found this word in all of this book. The word "Islam" is on page 61. Even so, this book fails when it doesn't recognizes how important is religion to a people's destiny. Religion is the most important of all instituitions, in all places and times. This book compares Mexico and United States, but hasn't any places to compares The Islamic Morocco and Catholic Spain. And never compares Israel with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan or Syria. Why Islamic Morocco is so poor and Catholic Spain is so rich? Because of their religions. Why Jewish Israel is so rich and Islamics Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are so poor? Because of their religions.
3- About Brazil, this book fails many times. See pages 455 to 460.
4- About former Soviet Union economy, this book remains as correct, the KGB's fake that there was economic prosperity in USSR between 1928 and 1970. Nonsense. There was ever failures, corruption and slavery in Soviet Union in this time. Never there was any great economic growing in USSR. USSR's agriculture was ever a calamity and Russian agricultural production in 1913 was more than the double of any Soviet harvest, in more than 70 years of history.
5- The paper of this book has just regular quality.
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Sergei Soares
5.0 out of 5 stars An Emancipation Proclamation for Economists Interested in Equality
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2012
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To an economist like me, reading Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, is akin to being set free from shackles worn since I began studying. However, first let me say that the book has many and serious shortcomings. Let me talk about these before I get into why this book set me free. Since I am going to strongly criticize aspects of the book, let me make clear that this is one of the best books on economics I have read in a long time.


Several criticisms have been leveled in other reviews against this book: it is simplistic and perhaps overly ambitious, the history is bad, it explains away competing explanations. They are all true.


The book is undoubtedly simplistic. Basically, the authors state that the institutions of a nation or society can be placed on a one dimensional continuum running from "extractive" to "inclusive" and this explains the history of humanity from the neolithic to the present day. A second leitmotif is that the economic and political institutions complement each other and that economically inclusive but politically extractive institutions cannot last for long (as well as the opposite). Finally, since political and economic institutions reinforce each other, they are quite difficult to change, leading to what the authors call "the iron law of oligarchy." Needless to say, this really oversimplifies the analysis of institutions and history. While Acemoglu and Robinson give many, many historical examples to illustrate their thesis, some are more convincing than others. They use a huge mallet to hammer all the facts into their mold, either ignoring or re-interpreting contrary evidence.


I am no historian, but I do know the history of the region in which I live, Latin America, reasonably well. When Latin American examples were used in the book, they were shallow and even wrong. For example, the authors talk quite a bit about the establishment of indigenous "serfdom", with terrible extractive institutions such as the encomienda and repartimiento, in much of Hispanic America. I agree the story they tell is quite important but they do not get it quite right. Acemoglu and Robinson tell the tale of these institutions as if they were simply set in place by colonizing Spaniards when the truth was much more complex, involving conflicts and constant negotiation between the Spanish colonizers, the Spanish Crown, and the conquered peoples themselves. The colonizers wanted to set up slavery instead of serfdom but were impeded from doing so by the Crown through the Leyes Nuevas. The story is told marvelously well in La Patria del Criollo by Severo Martinez Pelaez. The funny thing is that the correct narrative would fit well into the inclusive-extractive framework with a richness that comes from putting in two groups of elite actors with divergent interests, but Acemoglu and Robinson tell it so simplistically so as to miss out.


Likewise, the authors analyze, in different points of the book, Colombia and Brazil, with exceptional praise for Brazilian institutions while they heap abuse upon the Colombian ones. Brazil at the present time has, evidently, better institutions than a Colombia only (we hope) beginning to emerge from decades of civil war. But these two countries are much more alike than different. If you believe the tale told by Acemoglu and Robinson, they could have been comparing Japan and Burma, and not two nations with similar history, GDP, and institutions. While Colombia has seen many horrors and has a long road to travel, recent progress in reigning in lawlessness and chaos is undeniable. While Brazil has seen amazing institutional progress in the last fez decades, many of its cities suffer with murder rates higher than those of Colombian cities, de facto slave labor can be still found in some areas, and its income and especially property distributions are still among the most unequal in Latin America. Especially jarring is that, in other parts of the book, the authors place great emphasis on when institutions limit executive power, giving as an example the American system's unwillingness to allow FDR to pack the Supreme Court to get his way. The same happened in Colombia when Alvaro Uribe passed legislation allowing him to run for a third term and the Supreme Court shot it down with the broad support of Colombian society, including Uribe's allies.


The same can be said of their analysis of Mexico and Argentina: maybe not wrong, but terribly shallow. I know little of the Glorious Revolution, the Roman Empire, the Meiji Restoration, the history of Botswana, or much else of what the book is based upon. But if the standard is the same as the their Latin American examples, then much of the book based upon is poor history. In defense of the authors, it is difficult to draw the details with finesse when painting with a broad brush and the history of humanity from the neolithic to present day is about as broad as you can get in the social sciences.


A final criticism is that Acemoglu and Robinson do not give competing explanations for the backwardness of nations the credit they deserve. They explain away rather than seek dialogue. They classify competing explanations into the Geography Hypothesis, the Culture Hypothesis, and the Ignorance Hypothesis. One problem is that they ignore other competing explanations that go from scientific knowledge (see Margaret Jacob's Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West) to various Marxist explanations based upon capital accumulation. While Acemoglu and Robinson obviously admire Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel - which is very well-argued "geography is destiny" book - they ignore other important proponents of the Geography Hypothesis such as Kenneth Pommeranz. I feel their case would be made stronger if they argued that the two approaches were complementary and not adversarial. A relation between geography, technology, political institutions, and economic institutions would be a much stronger theory than institutions alone.


With regards to the Culture Hypothesis, they are (I believe) correct in criticizing it for being so fluid as to be virtually without content. But here my take is not entirely neutral as I particularly loathe the Culture Hypothesis.


But it is on the Ignorance Hypothesis that Acemoglu and Robinson fire their cannon with relish. Being intelligent economists in contact with the intellectual world of "development" I am sure they are very frustrated at the arrogance of policy advisors from the likes of the World Bank, United Nations, or IMF who believe they have the solution to all the developing world's problems "if only policymakers would listen to them." I am not unsympathetic to their disgust at these people but I think Acemoglu and Robinson throw the baby away with the dirty bath water. History is just too full of examples of disastrous policies (disastrous for those who implemented them, not only for the poor souls who inhabit their countries) for the Ignorance Hypothesis to be dismissed out of hand. The authors blame almost all, if not all, bad policies on the material interests of the elite whose position would be endangered by good policy.


A more subtle, and, in my opinion, much more serious, problem is that knowledge and interests are not independent. It is one thing for the elite to choose bad (bad for the many) policy if that policy can be dressed up in plausible and attractive intellectual robes and quite another if that policy is seen as nothing more than plundering of the many by the few (see Antonio Gramsci on role of the intellectual in allowing policy agendas to go forward or not). The "economic nationalism" that has destroyed so many African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern economies is not just pure extraction of wealth of the many by the few; it also dressed in a coherent economic theory espoused by a host of intelligent sociologists and economists (for a popular, if somewhat limited exposition, see The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano). This is why dismissal of the Ignorance Hypothesis is so dangerous: not only is knowledge power, but economic theories that are on your side are also power.


So the book has quite a few shortcomings. Why did I like it so much?


Because as economists we are taught from course one that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The trade-off between efficiency and equity has been fed to us since before we were weaned. The result to an economist very interested in equality such as myself are intellectual shackles that hobble and cripple our thinking.


Acemoglu and Robinson show us that in the real world, not some paretian maximum efficiency world, but the real one full of monopolies and other horrendous extractive institutions, there is no such trade-off. Equity is efficiency. Only egalitarian institutions allow for the full creative potential of people to be unleashed and thus only egalitarian institutions allow for boundless, unlimited growth based upon technology and productivity. There may be an equity-efficiency trade-off in Sweden or Norway, but certainly not in Mexico, Brazil, Haiti, Zimbabwe, or Pakistan. Much of this has been around in different guises since Schumpeter (who the authors cite extensively) and, more recently, in the endogenous growth literature, but nowhere has it been as clearly stated as in Why Nations Fail.


Why Nations Fail not only states this as its official position but, in spite of all its shortcomings, argues the point so well so as to be entirely convincing (at least to me). The fact that the authors get much of the history not quite right and that they fight rather than incorporate "competing" explanations does not reduce importance of the book and its central message. The sheer optimism of its viewpoint is as liberating as the Emancipation Proclamation.
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jukka aakula
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is maybe an oversimplified answer to the question of why but the best book written on the subject
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2012
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This book is maybe an oversimplified answer to the question of Why Nations Fail but the best book written on the subject so far. Also these Acemoglu and Robinson clearly state this is an oversimplification: "Our choice was motivated not by a naïve belief that such a theory could explain everything, but by the belief that a theory should enable us to focus on the parallels, sometimes at the expense of abstracting from many interesting details".


I think Acemoglu and Robinson are right when claiming inclusive institutions is what explains the success of the Nations and extractive institutions explain the fail. Not 100% ofcourse.


I admit some details irritates me a lot.


1. Emphasizing over and over again the importance of centralization as a necessary (even if ofcourse not sufficient) condition for the arise of inclusive institutions they forget totally to tell about the bottom-up spontaneous nature of the institutional change in the Chinese country side which in reality was the first step towards a Chinese market economy. John McMillanin Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets tells:


"China's agriculture switched from collective to individual production in the late 1970s. The marketization of agriculture lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of dire poverty. It was the biggest antipoverty program the world has ever seen....


Desperation had hit the farmers of Xiaogang village in China's Anhui province by 1978. The commune on which they worked collectively was dysfunctional. Known as the granary of China, Anhui contains some of the nation's most fertile land. But Xiaogang's twenty families were not producing enough rice to feed themselves. They had been reduced to relying on begging in other regions. In years of unfavorable weather they starved. Fearful of being arrested, the villagers met secretly and agreed to parcel out the communal land among themselves. They made a three-part resolution. First, as they were flouting government policy, the contracting of land to individual households was to be kept strictly secret; it was not to be divulged to any outsider. Second, they would continue to deliver the stipulated amount of rice taxes to the state. Third, if any of them were jailed, the others would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. They signed the pact with their thumbprints. A rapid turnaround followed. The farmers of Xiaogang immediately became more productive. "Now is different from the past," one said. "We work for ourselves." Working their own plots of land, they could see a direct link between their effort and their rewards. Any of their output beyond what they owed the state they now retained to use for themselves or to sell. The amount of land planted in rice nearly doubled in one year, and the village began producing a rice surplus. As a farmer said, "You can't be lazy when you work for your family and yourself...


Provincial Communist Party officials visited the village and gave their blessings. Then a high-level Beijing official traveled to Xiaogang and neighboring villages to study the effects of individual farming. His report, which concluded that individual farming increased output and improved living standards, became influential when it was circulated among the national leaders. At a Communist Party conference in 1982, four years after the Xiaogang villagers' meeting, China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping endorsed the reforms. In 1983 the central government formally proclaimed individual farming to be consistent with the socialist economy and therefore permissible. By 1984, just six years after Xiaogang started the movement, there were no communes left....)"


2. A second issue which irritates me is when they tell us about the success story of Botswana they again forget to tell about the other side of the story:


The national product of Botswana has - much thanks to the inclusive institutions - reached the level of some East European success countries like Estonia, but the Life Expectancy has collapsed. The Life expectancy is as low as 35 years according to World Bank figures - having been 64 years only in 1990.


This double development is nicely explained by the racialist Lynn-Vanhanen theory. Vanhanen and Lynn claim: National IQ explains some 50% of variation in GDP between nations and also variation in many other measures of Quality of Life. But for Life Expectancy National IQ explains even more than 50%: According to " IQ and Global Inequality " by Lynn and Vanhanen National IQ explains 60-70 % of the variation in Life Expectancy between nations. London School of Economics sociologist Satori Kanazawa has shown controlling of IQ makes factors like GDP to explain nothing of the variance in Life Expectancy.


Thus even if inclusive institutions make Botswana to prosper, Life Expetancy is low, fully in accordance with Lynn and Vanhanen. The ultimate explanation for low Life-expectancy is the low National IQ. The proximate explanation is AIDS.


But what then explains the high rates of AIDS in Africa? According to World Health Organisation it is very much probable HIV will never reach high rates outside Africa. For many years WHO speculated on a risk for AIDS epidemy in India, Russia or what ever country. The risk was never materialised. And now even WHO admits the risk will probably never materialise. How then does WHO explain the lack of AIDS epidemy outside Africa ? The explanation WHO is giving is the high rate of parallel sexual relationships in Africa - high compared to other geographical areas. In other words married African men and women are frequently having unprotected extramarital sex.


Low control of sex drive and disability to use condoms by low IQ people is probably the mechanism how low IQ is causing the lo
w Life-Expectancy in case of Botswana.
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