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In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted.
Africa was the part of the world with the institutions least able to take advantage of the opportunities made available by the Industrial Revolution.
Few emperors died of natural causes or in battle. Most were murdered by usurpers or their own troops.
until they were abolished after the 1974 revolution. Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. The income of an average Ethiopian is about one-fortieth that of an average citizen of England. Most people live in rural areas and practice subsistence agriculture. They lack clean water, electricity, and access to proper schools or health care. Life expectancy is about fifty-five years and only one-third of adults are literate. A comparison between England and Ethiopia spans world inequality.
most parts of colonial Africa, slavery continued well into the twentieth century.
By the 1850s, Australia had introduced adult white male suffrage.
On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, there were severe restrictions placed on Jews throughout Europe. In the German city of Frankfurt, for example, their lives were regulated by orders set out in a statute dating from the Middle Ages. There could be no more than five hundred Jewish families in Frankfurt, and they all had to live in a small, walled part of town, the Judengasse, the Jewish ghetto. They could not leave the ghetto at night, on Sundays, or during any Christian festival.
With a few exceptions, the rich countries of today are those that embarked on the process of industrialization and technological change starting in the nineteenth century, and the poor ones are those that did not.
British democracy was not given by the elite. It was largely taken by the masses, who were empowered by the political processes that had been ongoing in England and the rest of Britain for the last several centuries.
NATIONS FAIL TODAY because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate.
China broke the mold, even if it did not transform its political institutions.
BOTSWANA, CHINA, and the U.S. South, just like the Glorious Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, are vivid illustrations that history is not destiny.
Despite the vicious circle, extractive institutions can be replaced by inclusive ones.
THERE ARE HUGE DIFFERENCES in living standards around the world. Even the poorest citizens of the United States have incomes and access to health care, education, public services, and economic and social opportunities that are far superior to those available to the vast mass of people living in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America.
My trip to vietnam taught me this.
Today the party’s control over the media, including the Internet, is unprecedented. Much of this is achieved through self-censorship: media outlets know that they should not mention Zhao Ziyang or Liu Xiaobo, the government critic demanding greater democratization, who is still languishing in prison even after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went so far as to suggest that once a country got enough McDonald’s restaurants, democracy and institutions were bound to follow.
Billions of dollars were now coming to Afghanistan. But little of it was used for building infrastructure, schools, or other public services essential for the development of inclusive institutions or even for restoring law and order.
But if out of every dollar given to aid, ten cents makes it to the poorest people in the world, that is ten cents more than they had before to alleviate the most abject poverty, and it might still be better than nothing.
