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694 reviews for:
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
3.83 AVERAGE
694 reviews for:
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
3.83 AVERAGE
Great ideas, but mediocre execution. Why Nations Fail presents a compelling theory that explains global inequality. The theory itself is strong, well argued and convincing, and the authors seem to never fail to run out of concrete examples in support. However, the writing itself can be dry and repetitive, at times. The authors really drive home the point that extractive institutions bad and inclusive institutions good but as the book progresses, I found that it seemed like similar arguments were being repeated over and over.
This is not an easy book to read because it is so full of information and explains complex ideas. I don't want to say academic because that implies dry and boring. It broad themes and it helps to know your history to connect with the examples shared to support the premise, that it is the political and economic institutions that work for the benefit of all that make nations successful.
A fuller review of the book that I wrote is here.
https://cocreativelythinking.com/why-do-nations-fail-a-trip-to-mexico/
A fuller review of the book that I wrote is here.
https://cocreativelythinking.com/why-do-nations-fail-a-trip-to-mexico/
Acemoglu and Robinson present a very interesting account of state development in the West and the rest. The book spends a lot of time discounting previously accepted or hypothesized theories of economic development (or the lack there of) across the world. For those readers interested in developmental economics, this is probably a good read to start with.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
For now I will leave it on hold.
informative
slow-paced
having goldman sachs on the front cover of a book is always a something that i think is a bit dodgy when talking about when nations are poor. but besides that point i really was exicited to read this book, the first 50 pages were really interesting and i enjoyed it. but after the first 50 eh it just becomes really repetitives and made me feel like this book was a pain to read.
My critique of this book is not as pointed as some of the others on this site, but I do think that this book is rather flawed - although, perhaps any book that seeks to offer an explanatory paradigm for our entire history will inevitably have its limits. I myself do enjoy such ambitious works that aim to, if not explain, then at least organise the past millennia of humanity's development with such overarching frameworks. In this case, the framework adopted is that of institutions - both political and economic, both inclusive and extractive. The authors essentially argue that those countries that have succeeded have done so because they have had inclusive economic institutions that create incentives for economic development by promoting effort and innovation. They further go on to evince that, in a worryingly neo-liberal fashion, inclusive political institutions (ie liberal democracies; liberal more important than democratic) lead to inclusive economic institutions and sustain it because of what they term the virtuous cycle. Conversely, they argue that extractive economic institutions - ie those that stifle the market with excessive concentration of power and revenues - prevent development. In an interesting qualification, they suggest that extractive institutions can still lead to growth (in instances like Soviet Russia and, less convincingly, the Mayan Empire and modern-day China) since they allow for greater centralisation and more efficient economic extraction. Nonetheless, they point to this as a short-term phenomenon, since extractive economic institutions that do not secure property rights disincentivise development and innovation. In a mirror of the virtuous circle, they point to the vicious circle, arguing that extractive economic institutions and extractive political institutions are mutually reinforcing, since a society where power is controlled by the few naturally offers this elite an incentive to prevent creative destruction that might reshape society and weaken their grip on power.
The strengths are fairly obvious - there's an astonishing breadth in the number of examples from which the authors draw, whether in comparing England to the rest of Western Europe on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe against Eastern Europe in the wake of the Black Death or the modern-day examples of failed states like Sierra Leone. Other interesting strands include the authors' highlighting of trends that can affect different groups of states in different ways - like colonisation, which destroyed any hope of inclusive development in colonised nations and even affected colonisers in different ways, for example, England vs Spain, due to the nature of the different groups such a process empowers. In this way, the authors are able to explain away some historical determinism as the product of small differences combined with important shifts in society. 'Institutional drift' was a snappy way of referring to an important historical development, the Iron Law of Oligarchy a fascinating example of why undertaking a shift from extractive institutions to inclusive ones is often easier said than done and the chapter on political centralisation was an important reminder that the lack of authority can often be a worse stumbling block than an overconcentration of it.
Nonetheless, the weaknesses of this much-praised book are in fact rather legion. For starters, there's their gobsmackingly dismissive treatment of historical research surrounding the Neolithic Revolution - despite an understandable paucity of definitive evidence, and certainly about organisational structures in the period, the authors dare to claim that it was the creation of institutions that led to the settling-down of humans into agricultural lifestyles, rather than the more-often believed reverse. Then there's their rather snooty dismissal of existing hypotheses that seek to explain the deviations in development across different nations: rather than engage with such theories, they merely contend that geographical theories cannot explain - to borrow their favourite example - the differences between such neighbouring towns as Nogales in Mexico and Nogales in the USA. What they obviously fail to realise is that while institutions may indeed be a finer-brush explanation, geographical differences are still relevant as a broader-brush definition (Jared Diamond, obviously, being an exponent of this) and also as a cause for the development of institutions - after all, in societies like Somalia, what's to say it wasn't the climate that prevented the establishment of a centralised authority and political institutions? Thirdly, the authors often twist evidence to suit their overly simplified paradigm. Because their approach rejects any possibility other than monocausality and a direct relationship between institutions and economic development, much of the evidence they raised is force-fitted into their framework. For example, they refer to the Mayan and Ottoman Empires as ultimately failed, drawing growth only from whatever short-term sustained growth extractive institutions can offer. Yet this fails to ignore that both spanned hundreds of centuries; in fact, this fails to ignore that throughout history most have been extractive and yet some have been more successful than others. In fact, this directly leads to the fourth criticism of the book, which is that their theory ultimately only works to explain human societal and economic development in the unique period of human history surrounding roughly the years from the Black Death (the 1300s) to modern-day society; hardly a universally applicable framework. After all, many of the developments they describe - the uniquely diverging impacts of colonialism, the importance of inclusive institutions in encouraging innovation - were only applicable in the unique historical exigencies and contingencies of the period. Finally, and most regrettably, the authors simply fail to translate their framework into any semblance of a predictive nor even corrective paradigm. The conclusion dwells upon such current issues as growth in China and its sustainability, the continual failure of developmental aid and conventional policy suggestions and briefly touches on the importance of media in today's society. And yet, it's a remarkably abrupt conclusion, for it acknowledges the inability of coherent policy suggestions to be formed based on this model, and swiftly moves on. This might be alright if the book is merely a historical exercise, like Ian Morris' brilliant Why the West Rules - For Now, yet the authors are evidently marketing it as a kind of "path to prosperity". So where is the path? The authors suggest that it mainly has to do with capitalising on unpredictable, nebulous critical junctures by forming broad coalitions in society to incentivise a shift to more inclusive institutions. Yet this is so vague and deterministic that it basically says nothing; I find it fitting that their model example of Brazil has spectacularly imploded in the years since they wrote their book, for it exposes just how difficult it is to use such a paradigm to do any form of prediction or correction.
I have pointed out many flaws, but this book is ultimately well-researched and (somewhat) well-argued, and someone looking for a broad, birds-eye view of history could do far worse than to read this book. Nonetheless, though, it's important that they not buy the hypothesis of the book wholesale, for it is certainly lacking in some areas.
The strengths are fairly obvious - there's an astonishing breadth in the number of examples from which the authors draw, whether in comparing England to the rest of Western Europe on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe against Eastern Europe in the wake of the Black Death or the modern-day examples of failed states like Sierra Leone. Other interesting strands include the authors' highlighting of trends that can affect different groups of states in different ways - like colonisation, which destroyed any hope of inclusive development in colonised nations and even affected colonisers in different ways, for example, England vs Spain, due to the nature of the different groups such a process empowers. In this way, the authors are able to explain away some historical determinism as the product of small differences combined with important shifts in society. 'Institutional drift' was a snappy way of referring to an important historical development, the Iron Law of Oligarchy a fascinating example of why undertaking a shift from extractive institutions to inclusive ones is often easier said than done and the chapter on political centralisation was an important reminder that the lack of authority can often be a worse stumbling block than an overconcentration of it.
Nonetheless, the weaknesses of this much-praised book are in fact rather legion. For starters, there's their gobsmackingly dismissive treatment of historical research surrounding the Neolithic Revolution - despite an understandable paucity of definitive evidence, and certainly about organisational structures in the period, the authors dare to claim that it was the creation of institutions that led to the settling-down of humans into agricultural lifestyles, rather than the more-often believed reverse. Then there's their rather snooty dismissal of existing hypotheses that seek to explain the deviations in development across different nations: rather than engage with such theories, they merely contend that geographical theories cannot explain - to borrow their favourite example - the differences between such neighbouring towns as Nogales in Mexico and Nogales in the USA. What they obviously fail to realise is that while institutions may indeed be a finer-brush explanation, geographical differences are still relevant as a broader-brush definition (Jared Diamond, obviously, being an exponent of this) and also as a cause for the development of institutions - after all, in societies like Somalia, what's to say it wasn't the climate that prevented the establishment of a centralised authority and political institutions? Thirdly, the authors often twist evidence to suit their overly simplified paradigm. Because their approach rejects any possibility other than monocausality and a direct relationship between institutions and economic development, much of the evidence they raised is force-fitted into their framework. For example, they refer to the Mayan and Ottoman Empires as ultimately failed, drawing growth only from whatever short-term sustained growth extractive institutions can offer. Yet this fails to ignore that both spanned hundreds of centuries; in fact, this fails to ignore that throughout history most have been extractive and yet some have been more successful than others. In fact, this directly leads to the fourth criticism of the book, which is that their theory ultimately only works to explain human societal and economic development in the unique period of human history surrounding roughly the years from the Black Death (the 1300s) to modern-day society; hardly a universally applicable framework. After all, many of the developments they describe - the uniquely diverging impacts of colonialism, the importance of inclusive institutions in encouraging innovation - were only applicable in the unique historical exigencies and contingencies of the period. Finally, and most regrettably, the authors simply fail to translate their framework into any semblance of a predictive nor even corrective paradigm. The conclusion dwells upon such current issues as growth in China and its sustainability, the continual failure of developmental aid and conventional policy suggestions and briefly touches on the importance of media in today's society. And yet, it's a remarkably abrupt conclusion, for it acknowledges the inability of coherent policy suggestions to be formed based on this model, and swiftly moves on. This might be alright if the book is merely a historical exercise, like Ian Morris' brilliant Why the West Rules - For Now, yet the authors are evidently marketing it as a kind of "path to prosperity". So where is the path? The authors suggest that it mainly has to do with capitalising on unpredictable, nebulous critical junctures by forming broad coalitions in society to incentivise a shift to more inclusive institutions. Yet this is so vague and deterministic that it basically says nothing; I find it fitting that their model example of Brazil has spectacularly imploded in the years since they wrote their book, for it exposes just how difficult it is to use such a paradigm to do any form of prediction or correction.
I have pointed out many flaws, but this book is ultimately well-researched and (somewhat) well-argued, and someone looking for a broad, birds-eye view of history could do far worse than to read this book. Nonetheless, though, it's important that they not buy the hypothesis of the book wholesale, for it is certainly lacking in some areas.
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
I found it, at times really interesting but then other times quite boring and going so far back that it wasn't of interest to me but then it would have a really fascinating section that would make the bit I found boring more interesting.