Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty

by Daron Acemoğlu

Why Nations Fail THE ORIGINS OF POWER, PROSPERITY, AND POVERTY Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Why Nations Fail THE ORIGINS OF POWER, PROSPERITY, AND POVERTY Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

empfohlen auf people I mostly admire, interview mit Acemoglu. "favorite book" Levitts von diesem Autor. Februar 2024

WE HAVE SEEN that neither geographic- nor cultural- nor ignorance-based theories are helpful for explaining the lay of the land around us. They do not provide a satisfactory account for the prominent patterns of world inequality: the fact that the process of economic divergence started with the Industrial Revolution in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then spread to Western Europe and to European settler colonies; the persistent divergence between different parts of the Americas; the poverty of Africa or the Middle East; the divergence between Eastern and Western Europe; and the transitions from stagnation to growth and the sometimes abrupt end to growth spurts. Our institutional theory does.

7. THE TURNING POINT

TROUBLE WITH STOCKINGS

EVER-PRESENT POLITICAL CONFLICT

THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

the steam engine that were a result of James Watt’s ideas in the 1760s.

In all these areas technological innovations built on earlier work by others. In the context of the steam engine, this included early work by English inventor Thomas Newcomen and also by Dionysius Papin, a French physicist and inventor.

The story of Papin’s invention is another example of how, under extractive institutions, the threat of creative destruction impeded technological change. Papin developed a design for a “steam digester” in 1679, and in 1690 he extended this into a piston engine. In 1705 he used this rudimentary engine to build the world’s first steamboat. Papin was by this time a professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg, in the German state of Kassel. He decided to steam the boat down the river Fulda to the river Weser. Any boat making this trip was forced to stop at the city of Münden. At that time, river traffic on the Fulda and Weser was the monopoly of a guild of boatmen. Papin must have sensed that there might be trouble. His friend and mentor, the famous German physicist Gottfried Leibniz, wrote to the Elector of Kassel, the head of state, petitioning that Papin should be allowed to “. . . pass unmolested . . .” through Kassel. Yet Leibniz’s petition was rebuffed and he received the curt answer that “the Electoral Councillors have found serious obstacles in the way of granting the above petition, and, without giving their reasons, have directed me to inform you of their decision, and that in consequence the request is not granted by his Electoral Highness.” Undeterred, Papin decided to make the journey anyway. When his steamer arrived at Münden, the boatmen’s guild first tried to get a local judge to impound the ship, but was unsuccessful. The boatmen then set upon Papin’...

WHY IN ENGLAND?

NO PRINTING ALLOWED

SPICE AND GENOCIDE

THE ALL-TOO-USUAL INSTITUTION

MAKING A DUAL ECONOMY

DEVELOPMENT REVERSED

HONOR AMONG THIEVES

AUSTRALIA, LIKE THE UNITED STATES, experienced a different path to inclusive institutions than the one taken by England. The same revolutions that shook England during the Civil War and then the Glorious Revolution were not needed in the United States or Australia because of the very different circumstances in which those countries were founded—though this of course does not mean that inclusive institutions were established without any conflict, and, in the process, the United States had to throw off British colonialism. In England there was a long history of absolutist rule that was deeply entrenched and required a revolution to remove it. In the United States and Australia, there was no such thing. Though Lord Baltimore in Maryland and John Macarthur in New South Wales might have aspired to such a role, they could not establish a strong enough grip on society for their plans to bear fruit. The inclusive institutions established in the United States and Australia meant that the Industrial Revolution spread quickly to these lands and they began to get rich. The path these countries took was followed by colonies such as Canada and New Zealand.

BREAKING THE BARRIERS: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

EXPORTING THE REVOLUTION

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.

SEEKING MODERNITY

Though there were many similarities between China and Japan—the Tokugawa shogunate had also banned overseas trade in the seventeenth century, as Chinese emperors had done earlier, and were opposed to economic and political change—there were also notable political differences. China was a centralized bureaucratic empire ruled by an absolute emperor.

The structure of Japanese political institutions was different.

As with France, an important consequence of the British Industrial Revolution for China and Japan was military vulnerability.

The situation was similar in China, but the different initial political institutions made it much harder to overthrow the emperor, something that happened only in 1911. Instead of reforming institutions, the Chinese tried to match the British militarily by importing modern weapons. The Japanese built their own armaments industry.

each country responded differently to the challenges of the nineteenth century, and Japan and China diverged dramatically in the face of the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution.

ROOTS OF WORLD INEQUALITY

This and the previous three chapters have told the story of how inclusive economic and political institutions emerged in England to make the Industrial Revolution possible, and why certain countries benefited from the Industrial Revolution and embarked on the path to growth, while others did not or, in fact, steadfastly refused to allow even the beginning of industrialization. Whether a country did embark on industrialization was largely a function of its institutions.

Australia and the United States could industrialize and grow rapidly because their relatively inclusive institutions would not block new technologies, innovation, or creative destruction. Not so in most of the other European colonies. Their dynamics would be quite the opposite of those in Australia and the United States.

In these places, European colonists imposed a new brand of extractive institutions, or took over whatever extractive institutions they found, in order to be able to extract valuable resources, ranging from spices and sugar to silver and gold. In many of these places, they put in motion a set of institutional changes that would make the emergence of inclusive institutions very unlikely. In some of them they explicitly stamped out whatever burgeoning industry or inclusive economic institutions existed.

The dynamics in the rest of Europe were also quite different from those in Australia and the United States.

But the institutional transitions in Britain and the Industrial Revolution created new opportunities and challenges for European states.

The institutional dynamics we have described ultimately determined which countries took advantage of the major opportunities present in the nineteenth century onward and which ones failed to do so. The roots of the world inequality we observe today can be found in this divergence.

THE BLACK ACT

the Glorious Revolution was not the overthrow of one elite by another, but a revolution against absolutism by a broad coalition made up of the gentry, merchants, and manufacturers as well as groupings of Whigs and Tories. The emergence of pluralist political institutions was a consequence of this revolution. The rule of law also emerged as a by-product of this process.

THE SLOW MARCH OF DEMOCRACY

BUSTING TRUSTS

PACKING THE COURT

POSITIVE FEEDBACK AND VIRTUOUS CIRCLES

Inclusive institutions emerge during critical junctures, such as during the Glorious Revolution in England or the foundation of the Jamestown colony in North America, when a series of factors weaken the hold of the elites in power, make their opponents stronger, and create incentives for the formation of a pluralistic society.

once in place, inclusive economic and political institutions tend to create a virtuous circle, a process of positive feedback, making it more likely that these institutions will persist and even expand.

virtuous circle works through several mechanisms. First, the logic of pluralistic political institutions makes usurpation of power by a dictator, a faction within the government, or even a well-meaning president much more difficult,

Second, as we have seen several times before, inclusive political institutions support and are supported by inclusive economic institutions.

Finally, inclusive political institutions allow a free media to flourish, and a free media often provides information about and mobilizes opposition to threats against inclusive institutions,

YOU CAN’T TAKE THE TRAIN TO BO ANYMORE

Diamonds were discovered in Kono in eastern Sierra Leone in January 1930. The diamonds were alluvial, that is, not in deep mines. So the primary method of mining them was by panning in rivers. Some social scientists call these “democratic diamonds,” because they allow many people to become involved in mining, creating a potentially inclusive opportunity. Not so in Sierra Leone. Happily ignoring the intrinsically democratic nature of panning for diamonds, the British government set up a monopoly for the entire protectorate, called it the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, and granted it to De Beers, the giant South African diamond mining company. In 1936 De Beers was also given the right to create the Diamond Protection Force, a private army that would become larger than that of the colonial government in Sierra Leone.

Things only got worse after independence. In 1970 Siaka Stevens effectively nationalized the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, creating the National Diamond Mining Company (Sierra Leone) Limited, in which the government, effectively meaning Stevens, had a 51 percent stake. This was the opening phase of Stevens’s plan to take over diamond mining in the country.

What is remarkable is the extent of continuity between colonial and independent Sierra Leone.