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

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Profile Books

American academics Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend history, economics and politics into big, readable books.

Their 2005 collaboration, the 432-page Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, generated keen academic debate; and their 464-page Why Nations Fail has received largely glowing reviews from Western critics.

In the first 200 pages, Acemoglu, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robinson, a professor of government at Harvard, explain their theory in simple, engaging text: some countries get rich because they develop 'inclusive' political institutions that give people incentives to get ahead, the authors say. Others stay poor because an elite own and run their nation's resources, and devise 'extractive' political systems that keep them dominant.

Acemoglu and Robinson's theory might sound old, but the pair rivet readers when they trot the globe to illustrate their arguments from history, as if for a television series. In a David Attenborough-like visit to the US-Mexico border, they link the Americans' superior wealth and longevity to a political system that gives them a say and a stake in their future - and stems from the work ethic of Pocahontas' friend John Smith in inclusive Jamestown. Mexico, however, had an extractive Spanish conquistador elite who stifled their peons for centuries.

A nation's wealth has nothing to do with geography or ethnic values, the authors add, and prove so in a Michael Palin-esque flit up the Congo's River Kasai. Here, an inclusive tribe on one bank farmed, fished and thrived, while their neighbours across the river developed a manana attitude to making nets, they say, thanks to their constant fighting and taxation by extractive elites.