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OPINION/ Clive Crook
CROOK: “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson is getting lavish praise. Mostly, the book deserves it.
A kind of antidote to Jared Diamond’s megaselling “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” it asks why some countries are rich and others poor. The answer isn’t geography, as Diamond argued -- ingeniously though implausibly. It isn’t culture either, as others say. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, it’s politics. Get the politics right, and you’ll prosper."
AND : "Timid it is not. And no reader will suspect these authors of bluffing. The scholarship is carried lightly -- the book is an easy, engaging read -- but wide and deep."
"...the authors keep coming back to is one whose importance would be hard to exaggerate. Prosperity depends not on culture or geography or rulers’ expertise but on “institutions, institutions, institutions,” and on these above all: property rights, economic freedom, equality before the law, and trusted enforcement of contracts. Markets aren’t enough. For economies to prosper, governments must supply these institutions, and only governments can. Without them, people have no incentive to work, invest and innovate."
