Why Nations Fail

The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

By: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Narrated by: Dan Woren

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 Failshows, 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?

*Includes a downloadable PDF of maps from the book

“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

interesting take on nations

The authors fail at their attempts to delegimitize cultural or geographical influences. Instead, they try to separate out inclusive institutions and extractive institutions from the cultural aspects by using their critical juncture model.

The inclusive and extractive models are a great insight into national structures. I feel like the inclusive model should be tested/researched further to develop the concept more. The extractive model seems to be the default settings for human civilization which is why their theory is missing cultural and geographical influences that spawned such a radical transformation of society.

It is a great book even with the authors attempts to dismiss cultural evolution and historical geographical constraints.

Must Read

Every Econ or PoliSci student should read this book. They present their theory in great detail.

The West was lucky

The book explains in a very interesting way why it is so difficult to change the course of history of a society or country. It explains how the West was lucky to break free from the standard of history - oppressive and exploitative regimes. And tells you that you should not expect that an authoritative place will change for the just because there was a popular revolution or successful invasion.

would highly recommend.

ideal for those who want to understand the news they see on Twitter and Facebook.

A vaccine of clear-thinking

Any additional comments?

A thoughtful, rigorously argued --and very readable!-- Economic History work by MIT professors Acemoglu and Robinson.Authors explore world history from the Neolithic to the present to support a central thesis: Equity is efficiency. Successful societies are the result of egalitarian institutions that allow the exercise of individual rights by everyone and competition based on performance.A vaccine of clear-thinking against both "realist" fatalism and revolutionary messianism. It should be compulsory reading for politicians (and for intellectuals at large) in Latin American and Southern European countries, including mine...