Reading Why Nations Fail

Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

Phew!

That was a long read. And I cannot bring myself to rate ‘Why Nations Fail’ by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson because despite being quite tedious and repetitive at times, it’s also a wealth of knowledge, with several intriguing theories, all accompanied by fascinating historical anecdotes and real tales.

I began reading ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty’ in August 2024 and finally finished it in March 2025, during that duration, lots of things transpired, including Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for their theories in October 2024. At least, I picked the right book to understand why economies around the world struggle with growth in comparison to first world nations.

So what’s the crux of the book? The writers, through historical examples, illustrate how extractive institutions and extractive governments, the ones who are only interested in fattening their own coffers by exploiting citizens, cannot achieve long-lasting economic growth. That sounds pretty simple right, as if you could’ve come up with the finding yourself… but well, the real life applications and implications are far more complex than that. So the authors go centuries back, tracing the history of inclusive democracies, and why poorer nations are unable to repeat the same formula or success.

The book opens with a striking illustration: two cities with identical weather, topography, and people of the same racial background – yet vastly different in economic status and healthcare systems, simply because they lie on opposite sides of a border governed by two very different political systems. It reminded me of the time our family visited Nepal for the first time to attend a wedding. We were on the groom’s side, who lived in the Indian city of Raxaul, which borders Nepal’s Birgunj, where the bride’s family stayed. I was only 12 at the time, but I’ll never forget us walking from dusty Raxaul, where women still covered their faces with sarees, into Birgunj, which felt like stepping into a different dimension: it was cleaner, quieter, and the women wore hip jeans and shirts. It was like walking from the 1980s into the 2000s.

The point is, Why Nations Fail makes economic amateurs like me rethink the way we look at the world. From the fascinating history of how Australia became a dumping ground for Britain’s “unwanted,” to the differing ways South America and North America were colonized, the book is filled to the brim with historical examples that explain why modern institutions turned out the way they did.

This book can be tedious and repetitive, but it’s also absolutely worth a read if you aren’t an expert in Economics (like me) and enjoy historical anecdotes. What’s a fun non-fiction economics book? Freakonomics, an absolute breeze (both one & two), however, ‘Why Nations Fail’ offers a lot more ‘food for thought’ to readers.

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