Why Nations Fail

ByDaron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson

Release Date: 2012-03-20
Genre: Economics

Score: 4

From 298 Ratings

Description

NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity”

“A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times

FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer

Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny.

Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous 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. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them:

• Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West?

• Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority?

“This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek

Reviews

Best book I’ve ever read
5
By Don Quijote XX
While highly uneducated, I’ve done a great deal of reading. Hands down this is the most convincing and documented recollection of why nations fail while others succeed.

I lived in China for a decade and I can confirm the environment was highly inclusive. Since I left, just before Xijing Ping came to power, plurality and state control has increased and some cracks are beginning to show in the economy, particularly in housing.

At the same time China dominates in EV, solar energy and has shown tremendous speed developing AI LLM and microchips that was thought were exclusive of the West.

It’s too early to call their demise and while creative disruption is yet to take hold, they show tremendous ability to develop technologies as they are surfacing.

The verdict is still out if China will debunk a theory that has explained the last millennia.
Thumbs Up
4
By wrconforti
Really interesting but tended to repeat the same things over and over.
Wonderful read
5
By alberaq
This book does a wonderful job at explaining a good portion of wealth inequality between countries. It also proves to be a nice primer on modern world history. Very interesting.
One of Best books
5
By fhasanpour
Perfect and Excellent
Why Nations Fail
5
By okunle
Best book I ever read!
Relevant and Interesting
4
By trangemo
I found the title to be very interesting and a different take on global dynamics than I've heard before. It's obviously well backed with research and therefore proves a valid theory. I did find some of the chapters to go on a bit too long, hence 4 stars instead of 5 due to the fact that I saw where the case could be made with a bit more brevity. Overall, fantastic!
Important model, difficult rendering
4
By LewMills
This book could have been written better. But the concepts are well worth the slog. I would recommend the last chapter, and maybe the first. The examples are confusing and perhaps ambiguous. The overall structure of the argument takes too long to come into focus. But the gist--that inclusive, non-extractive economics, and pluralistic politics are critical to economic prosperity--holds up well through the historical examples.

The reason that the book is important is that it challenges conventional wisdom that solutions lie in additional resources, or the education of leaders. Nor should we think that resource affluence will lead to democratization of institutions. The critical leverage points are in changing those oligarchic institutions that disempower citizens from strengthening their political and economic systems.

Certainly worth the read.