Until I finally decided to tackle it, Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail had been sitting on my bookshelf for two years. This voluminous book by well-respected economists from MIT and Harvard argues that man-made political and economic institutions determine economic success or failure of states. Specifically, inclusive political and economic institutions promote economic development, whereas what they call extractive institutions inhibit growth and development. What they provide is a self-consistent theory that seemingly accounts for the glaring inequality of the world. As the regular reader can probably guess, the Policy Tensor has great sympathy for this argument. Their institutional perspective on development gets much right—especially the primacy of politics—but it provides only half the picture. I will show how their own account calls for a different framing of issues. Let me start by summarizing their case.
The Element of Domination
The Element of Domination
The Element of Domination
Until I finally decided to tackle it, Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail had been sitting on my bookshelf for two years. This voluminous book by well-respected economists from MIT and Harvard argues that man-made political and economic institutions determine economic success or failure of states. Specifically, inclusive political and economic institutions promote economic development, whereas what they call extractive institutions inhibit growth and development. What they provide is a self-consistent theory that seemingly accounts for the glaring inequality of the world. As the regular reader can probably guess, the Policy Tensor has great sympathy for this argument. Their institutional perspective on development gets much right—especially the primacy of politics—but it provides only half the picture. I will show how their own account calls for a different framing of issues. Let me start by summarizing their case.