Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

by Daron Acemoğlu

While it might be collectively desirable to become sedentary, this doesn’t mean that it will necessarily happen.

For instance, food shortage tends to create thin lines in people’s tooth enamel, a condition called hypoplasia.

Conflict resolution was probably much harder for sedentary groups,

So villages needed more effective ways of resolving conflict and more elaborate notions of property.

Rules had to be developed, and the institutions that made and enforced rules had to be elaborated.

institutional innovation concentrating power in the hands of a group that would become the political elite, enforce property rights, maintain order, and also benefit from their status by extracting resources from the rest of society.

They engaged in trade with distant places and had nascent forms of religion and political hierarchies.

The emergence of political elites most likely created the transition first to sedentary life and then to farming.

In fact, it is known that a major technological innovation, the introduction of the steel axe among the group of Australian Aboriginal peoples known as Yir Yoront, led not to more intense production but to more sleeping,

Institutional changes occurred in societies quite a while before they made the transition to farming and were probably the cause both of the move to sedentarism, which reinforced the institutional changes, and subsequently of the Neolithic Revolution.

it was a consequence of the society’s having experienced the types of institutional, social, and political innovations that would have allowed sedentary life and then farming to emerge.

the interaction of a critical juncture, the Long Summer, with small but important institutional differences that mattered.

farming spread into Europe from the Middle East starting around 6500 BC, mostly as a consequence of the migration of farmers. In Europe, institutions drifted away from parts of the world, such as Africa,

prosperity of Israel was largely imported by the settlement of Jewish people after the Second World War and their high levels of education and easy access to advanced technologies.

The Maya city-states in the area of southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Western Honduras in fact built a fairly sophisticated civilization under their own brand of extractive institutions.

the political instability that emerges and ultimately leads to collapse of both society and state as different groups and people fight to become the extractors.

Maya cities first began to develop around 500 BC. These early cities eventually failed, sometime in the first century AD. A new political model then emerged, creating the foundation for the Classic Era, between AD 250 and 900.

The Maya cities never unified into an empire, though some cities were subservient to others, and they often appear to have cooperated, particularly in warfare.

glyphs,

Long Count.

skilled builders who independently invented cement.

expansion of Maya cities and their subsequent contraction from the late eighth century.

At the Maya city of Copán, now in western Honduras, there is a famous monument known as Altar Q.

Mayas. K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ came to power in Copán in AD 426,

763. The last name on the altar is King Yax Pasaj Chan Yoaat, or “First Dawned Sky Lightening God,” who was the sixteenth ruler of this line

archaeologists AnnCorinne Freter, Nancy Gonlin, and David Webster.

obsidian hydration,

the creation of extractive institutions with some degree of state centralization.

Around AD 100, in the city of Tikal in Guatemala, there emerged a new type of dynastic kingdom. A ruling class based on the ajaw (lord or ruler) took root with a king called the k’uhul ajaw (divine lord) and, underneath him, a hierarchy of aristocrats.

expansion. The Maya’s economy was based on extensive occupational specialization,

They also traded obsidian, jaguar pelts, marine shells, cacao, salt, and feathers among themselves and other polities over long distances in Mexico.

used cacao beans for ...

Once this system had consolidated, by around AD 300, there was little further technological change,

constant warfare,

“star wars”

There were long contests for power between the larger states,

accessions. During this period, they start indicating that the smaller states were now being dominated by another, outside ruler.

the archaeologists Nikolai Grube and Simon Martin.

Maya collapse is that it coincides with the overthrow of the political model based on the k’uhul ajaw.

As political and social institutions unraveled, reversing the process of state centralization, the economy contracted and the population fell.

We know this took place in the context of intensified inter-city warfare, and it seems likely that opposition and rebellion within the cities, perhaps led by different factions of the elite, overthrew the institution.

This took place in only a few pockets where resources were being poured and where innovation was strongly rewarded because of its role in the competition with the West.

China under the rule of the Communist Party is another example of society experiencing growth under extractive institutions and is similarly unlikely to generate sustained growth unless it undergoes a fundamental political transformation toward inclusive political institutions.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was possibly the richest place in the world, with the most advanced set of inclusive economic institutions underpinned by nascent political inclusiveness.

series of contractual innovations making economic institutions much more inclusive.

commenda, a rudimentary type of joint stock company, which formed only for the duration of a single trading mission.

upward social mobility.

This economic inclusiveness and the rise of new families through trade forced the political system to become even more open.

After 1032 the doge was elected along with a newly created Ducal Council, whose job was also to ensure that the doge did not acquire absolute power.

The first doge hemmed in by this council, Domenico Flabianico, was a wealthy silk merchant from a family that had not previously held high office.