Podcast: Play in new window Download. Subscribe: Android RSS. Pingback: Should we keep providing foreign aid through governments? Ceteris Non Paribus. Pingback: Unit 3: The role of the state in development politics developmentsindelhi. My Development Politics Blog.
Absolutely outrageous comment saying there was no people in the temperate regions that were colonised Bill Nye. Sam Altman. Richard Branson. Peter Thiel. Andrew Wilkinson. Muna AbuSulayman. James Altucher. Sheryl Sandberg. Kate Beckinsale. Karlie Kloss. Satya Nadella. Nigella Lawson. Ed Catmull. Coleen Baik. Cynthia Johnson. Brian Koppelman. James Clear. Ryan Holiday. Walter Isaacson. Matt Mullenweg. 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.
Somehow they can generate both excitement and reflection. 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.
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.
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. 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. This highly accessible book provides welcome insight to specialists and general readers alike. 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.
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.
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.
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. Let tyrants everywhere tremble! Their answers are profound, lucid, and convincing. C o n t e n t s Preface Why Egyptians fi lled Tahrir Square to bring down Hosni Mubarak and what it means for our understanding of the causes of prosperity and poverty 1.
Why is one rich and one poor? 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 4. Small Differences and Critical Junctures: The Weight of History How institutions change through political confl ict and how the past shapes the present 5. Drifting Apart How institutions evolve over time, often slowly drifting apart 7.
The Turning Point How a political revolution in changed institutions in England and led to the Industrial Revolution 8. Reversing Development How European colonialism impoverished large parts of the world The Diffusion of Prosperity How some parts of the world took different paths to prosperity from that of Britain The Virtuous Circle How institutions that encourage prosperity create positive feedback loops that prevent the efforts by elites to undermine them The Vicious Circle How institutions that create poverty generate negative feedback loops and endure Why Nations Fail Today Institutions, institutions, institutions Breaking the Mold How a few countries changed their economic trajectory by changing their institutions 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 Acknowledgments Bibliographical Essay and Sources References Index.
Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. From this striking dichotomy, the authors draw thought-provoking conclusions.
While absolutist regimes with extractive economic institutions can sometimes achieve economic growth, that growth is based on existing technology, and is nonsustainable and prone to collapse; whereas inclusive institutions are required for sustained growth based on technological change.
One might naively expect dictators to promote long-term economic growth, because such growth would generate more wealth for them to extract. In their narrow focus on inclusive institutions, however, the authors ignore or dismiss other factors.
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. True, the book provides anecdotes of the resource curse Sierra Leone cursed by diamonds , and of how the curse was successfully avoided in Botswana. Nor does the book show how some big resource producers like the US and Australia avoid the curse they are democracies whose economies depend on much else besides resource exports , nor which other resource-dependent countries besides Sierra Leone and Botswana respectively succumbed to or overcame the curse.
Two major factors that Acemoglu and Robinson do mention, only to dismiss them in a few sentences, are tropical diseases and tropical agricultural productivity:.
Tropical diseases obviously cause much suffering and high rates of infant mortality in Africa, but they are not the reason Africa is poor. Disease is largely a consequence of poverty and of governments being unable or unwilling to undertake the public health measures necessary to eradicate them…. The prime determinant of why agricultural productivity—agricultural output per acre—is so low in many poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has little to do with soil quality. Rather, it is a consequence of the ownership structure of the land and the incentives that are created for farmers by the governments and institutions under which they live.
These sweeping statements, which will astonish anyone knowledgeable about the subjects, brush off two entire fields of science, tropical medicine and agricultural science. As I summarized above, the well-known facts of tropical biology, geology, and climatology saddle tropical countries with much bigger problems than temperate countries. A second weakness involves the historical origins of what Acemoglu and Robinson identify as inclusive economic and political institutions, with their consequences for wealth.
For instance, Britain adopted inclusive institutions, we are told, as a result of the Glorious Revolution of and preceding events; and Japan reformed its institutions after ; but Ethiopia remained absolutist. For instance, all Western European countries ended up richer and with better institutions than any tropical African country. Big underlying differences led to this divergence of outcomes. Agriculture in tropical Africa is only between 1, and 5, years old and based on less productive domesticated crops and imported animals.
Europe has glaciated fertile soils, reliable summer rainfall, and few tropical diseases; tropical Africa has unglaciated and extensively infertile soils, less reliable rainfall, and many tropical diseases. Within Europe, Britain had the further advantages of being an island rarely at risk from foreign armies, and of fronting on the Atlantic Ocean, which became open after to overseas trade. The chain of causation leading slowly from productive agriculture to government, state formation, complex institutions, and wealth involved agriculturally driven population explosions and accumulations of food surpluses, leading in turn to the need for centralized decision-making in societies much too populous for decision-making by face-to-face discussions involving all citizens, and the possibility of using the food surpluses to support kings and their bureaucrats.
This process unfolded independently, beginning around BC , in many different parts of the ancient world with productive agriculture, including the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Crete, the Valley of Mexico, the Andes, and Polynesian Hawaii.
An example is their attempt to expand their focus on institutions in order to explain the origins of agriculture. A century of research by botanists and archaeologists has shown that what made those areas exceptional was their wealth of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication such as wild wheats and corn. They assert further that the origins of farming depended on their preferred explanation of institutional innovation, rather than on the local availability of domesticable wild species identified by botanists and archaeologists.
What Zohary and Hopf actually showed was that wild emmer wheat is confined to the Fertile Crescent, and that the areas of extensive spread of wild barley and wild einkorn wheat are also confined to the Fertile Crescent, and that the wild ancestors of all the other original Fertile Crescent crops are also confined to or centered on the Fertile Crescent, and hence that the Fertile Crescent was the only area in which local agriculture could have arisen.
Acemoglu and Robinson do themselves a disservice by misstating these findings. Perhaps they provide 50 percent of the explanation for national differences in prosperity. Why Nations Fail offers an excellent way for any interested reader to learn about them and their consequences.
0コメント