It has some jokes, which are always welcome. Mostly, such people write only for other academics. In this book, they have done you the courtesy of writing a book that while at the intellectual cutting edge is not just readable but engrossing. Inclusive societies Extractive ones can have spurts of prosperity, but because they are ruled by a narrow elite guided by its own self-interest, their economic vigor eventually fades.
Econ Talk Podcast Acemoglu on Why Nations Fail Acemoglu draws on an exceptionally rich set of examples over space and time to argue that differences in institutions—political governance and the inclusiveness of the political and economic system—explain the differences in economics success across nations and over time. Acemoglu also discusses how institutions evolve and the critical role institutional change plays in economic success or failure, and the implications of the arguments for foreign aid.
The Economist Interview wtih Daron Acemoglu. His research areas include political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, innovation, search theory, network economics and learning. First, there are far more parasitic diseases such as elephantiasis and schistosomiasis in tropical areas, because cold temperate winters kill parasite stages outside our bodies, but tropical parasites can thrive outside our bodies all year long.
Second, disease vectors, such as mosquitoes and ticks, are far more diverse in tropical than in temperate areas. Hence tropical diseases impose a huge burden on economies of tropical countries. At any given moment, much of the population is sick and unable to work efficiently. As for agricultural productivity, it averages lower in tropical than in temperate areas, again for several reasons.
First, temperate plants store more energy in parts edible to us humans such as seeds and tubers than do tropical plants. Second, diseases borne by insects and other pests reduce crop yields more in the tropics than in the temperate zones, because the pests are more diverse and survive better year-round in tropical than in temperate areas.
Third, glaciers repeatedly advanced and retreated over temperate areas, creating young nutrient-rich soils. Young fertile volcanic and alluvial soils are exceptions. Fourth, the higher average rainfall of tropical than of temperate areas results in more nutrients being leached out of the soil by rain. Finally, higher tropical temperatures cause dead leaves and other organic matter falling to the ground to be broken down quickly by microbes and other organisms, releasing their nutrients to be leached away.
Hence in temperate areas soil fertility is on average higher, crop losses to pests lower, and agricultural productivity higher than in tropical areas. Thus, geographical latitude acting independently of institutions is an important geographic factor affecting power, prosperity, and poverty. The other important geographic factor is whether an area is accessible to ocean-going ships because it lies either on the sea coast or on a navigable river.
It costs roughly seven times more to ship a ton of cargo by land than by sea. That puts landlocked countries at an economic disadvantage, and helps explain why landlocked Bolivia and semilandlocked Paraguay are the poorest countries of South America.
It also helps explain why Africa, with no river navigable to the sea for hundreds of miles except the Nile, and with fifteen landlocked nations, is the poorest continent. The remaining major factor underlying wealth and poverty is the state of the natural environment. All human populations depend to varying degrees on renewable natural resources—especially on forests, water, soils, and seafood.
Countries that excessively deplete their resources—whether inadvertently or intentionally—tend to impoverish themselves, although the difficulty of estimating accurately the costs of resource destruction causes economists to ignore it.
It helps explain why notoriously deforested countries—such as Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, Madagascar, and Nepal—tend to be notoriously poor and politically unstable. These, then, are the main factors invoked to understand why nations differ in wealth. The factors are multiple and diverse. Within this frame, Acemoglu and Robinson focus on institutional factors: initially on economic institutions, and then on the political institutions that create them. Instead of being vested in a single individual or a narrow group, [inclusive] political power rests with a broad coalition or a plurality of groups.
Inclusive economic and political institutions provide individuals with incentives to increase their economic productivity as they think best. Such inclusive institutions are to be contrasted with absolutist political institutions that narrowly concentrate political power, and with extractive economic institutions that force people to work largely for the benefit of dictators. The ultimate development of inclusive political institutions to date is in modern Scandinavian democracies with universal suffrage and relatively egalitarian societies.
However, compared to modern dictatorships like North Korea and the absolute monarchies widespread in the past, societies such as eighteenth-century Britain in which only a minority of citizens could vote or participate in political decisions still represented a big advance toward inclusiveness. From this striking dichotomy, the authors draw thought-provoking conclusions.
While absolutist regimes with extractive economic institutions can sometimes achieve economic growth, that growth is based on existing technology, and is nonsustainable and prone to collapse; whereas inclusive institutions are required for sustained growth based on technological change.
One might naively expect dictators to promote long-term economic growth, because such growth would generate more wealth for them to extract. In their narrow focus on inclusive institutions, however, the authors ignore or dismiss other factors. Even within the focus on institutions, the concentration specifically on inclusive institutions causes the authors to give inadequate accounts of the ways that natural resources can be a curse.
True, the book provides anecdotes of the resource curse Sierra Leone cursed by diamonds , and of how the curse was successfully avoided in Botswana. Nor does the book show how some big resource producers like the US and Australia avoid the curse they are democracies whose economies depend on much else besides resource exports , nor which other resource-dependent countries besides Sierra Leone and Botswana respectively succumbed to or overcame the curse.
Two major factors that Acemoglu and Robinson do mention, only to dismiss them in a few sentences, are tropical diseases and tropical agricultural productivity:. Tropical diseases obviously cause much suffering and high rates of infant mortality in Africa, but they are not the reason Africa is poor. Disease is largely a consequence of poverty and of governments being unable or unwilling to undertake the public health measures necessary to eradicate them….
The prime determinant of why agricultural productivity—agricultural output per acre—is so low in many poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has little to do with soil quality. Acemoglu said he has optimism, however, because the country has already weathered storms, citing the Gilded Age, when there was an even more pronounced inequality with greater dominance of the economy by a few companies and much weaker political institutions. The Robert S. Eckley Lecture in Economics allows economics faculty to bring to campus a distinguished scholar to broaden the understanding of economic analyses and perspectives among others on campus and in the community.
President Emeritus Eckley received a Ph. He served as president of Illinois Wesleyan from Contact: Kim Hill , Twitter Facebook. All images and content.
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