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?.Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? China has built an authoritarian growth machine.The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.īased on 15 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: Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions - with no end in sight. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. 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. 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?ĭaron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). None of these factors is either definitive or destiny.
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?
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?
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