● Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
By Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Review via The Guardian
Acemoglu and Robinson are intellectual heavyweights of the first rank, the one a professor of economics at MIT, the other a professor of political science at Harvard. Mostly, such people write only for other academics. In this book, they have done you the courtesy of writing a book that while at the intellectual cutting edge is not just readable but engrossing. This alone would be reason to take notice: a vital topic, top scholars, and a well-written book. But this is not the half of it. The reason that Why Nations Fail is not to be missed is that their thesis pulls apart the two big brute facts of global development. Far from seeing China as the clue to spreading prosperity, Acemoglu and Robinson see it as yet another instance of a society rushing into a cul-de-sac. China is not, on their analysis, on course for our own level of prosperity. Their argument is that the modern level of prosperity rests upon political foundations. Proximately, prosperity is generated by investment and innovation, but these are acts of faith: investors and innovators must have credible reasons to think that, if successful, they will not be plundered by the powerful.
