In the modern age, no country as economically advanced as ours has regressed to an earlier stage of development, not yet. In their epic world history Why Nations Fail, an MIT economist and a University of Chicago political scientist explore what has distinguished, over aeons, the poor countries that stay poor from the ones that become fully developed. The basic conclusion is that successful countries keep their greedy elites from exercising too much control of their economies and governments. Likewise, in the recent book How Democracy Ends, a political scientist explains that for individual
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