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

by Daron Acemoğlu

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.

This is not a forgone o cluzion

a commission would investigate whether public lands were being illegally occupied and would redistribute land in excess of the legal limit of three hundred acres to landless Roman citizens. The three-hundred-acre limit was in fact part of an old law, though ignored and not implemented for centuries.

Rome’s increasingly extractive political and economic institutions generated its demise because they caused infighting and civil war.

By the fourth century, all were in decline, and after AD 411 the Roman Empire gave up on England. Troops were withdrawn; those left were not paid, and as the Roman state crumbled, administrators were expelled by the local population. By AD 450 all these trappings of economic prosperity were gone. Money vanished from circulation. Urban areas were abandoned, and buildings stripped of stone. The roads were overgrown with weeds. The only type of pottery fabricated was crude and handmade, not manufactured. People forgot how to use mortar, and literacy declined substantially.

Carey arranged for Queen Elizabeth to come see the machine, but her reaction was devastating. She refused to grant Lee a patent, instead observing, “Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”

The stocking frame was an innovation that promised huge productivity increases, but it also promised creative destruction.

The Scots realized that Charles did not have the support of the nation and invaded England, occupying the city of Newcastle. Charles opened negotiations, and the Scots demanded that Parliament be involved. This induced Charles to call what then became known as the Long Parliament, because it continued to sit until 1648, refusing to dissolve even when Charles demanded it do

Creative destruction redistributes not simply income and wealth, but also political power, as William Lee learned when he found the authorities so unreceptive to his invention because they feared its political consequences.

At the start of the century, one in five people in Spain was living in urban areas. By the end, this figure had halved to one in ten, in a process that corresponded to increasing impoverishment of the Spanish population.

is another example of small differences mattering during critical junctures. The small differences were in the strengths and nature of representative institutions; the critical juncture was the discovery of the Americas.

In the United States, southern slavery was often referred to as the “peculiar institution.” But historically, as the great classical

scholar Moses Finlay pointed out, slavery was anything but peculiar, it was present in almost every society.

Independence, the convicted criminals, convicts, were primarily sent to the American colonies. After 1783 the independent United States of America was

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.

French troops, but was unsuccessful.