One Good Read: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
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Welcome back to Surviving in the World (SIW), your newsletter written by students for those interested in global affairs. We always try to present select topics in global news in an easy-to-understand format.
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In today’s letter, we cover conflicts going around the United States.
Word Count: 469 / Time: 3minute read.
By Sihoon Baek, columnist (’23)
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What it is about: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson is an investigation into the factors that contribute to the prosperity and success (or alternatively, the stagnation and failure) of nations.
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Acemoglu and Robinson focus especially on the political structures of nations, citing these as the primary deciding factor rather than, say, the cultural or geographical differences between successful and unsuccessful states.
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To explain and justify this stance (as well as to contradict others), Acemoglu and Robinson utilize case studies from across time and space, from the first European settlers of the New World to the Asian Tigers.
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Who the author is: Daron Acemoglu is currently a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was named the most cited economist of the past decade in 2015. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1992, Acemoglu has published several books including Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Why Nations Fail, and most recently, The Narrow Corridor.
James A. Robinson is an equally distinguished academic, currently teaching as the Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago.
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Prior to teaching there, Robinson also taught as the Professor of Government at Harvard University.
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Robinson earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and has since co-authored the aforementioned three books with Acemoglu.
Photo of Daron Acemoglu (Source: Amazonaws)
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Why you should read his book: Needless to say, Why Nations Fail is not the definitive guide to international relations and understanding why certain countries are more prosperous than others.
There is no doubt that just as Acemoglu and Robinson were able to identify certain flaws in the other theories they attempted to rebut, other flaws exist in the theories presented in this book.
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These flaws highlight that fact which we all already know to be true: that the challenges our world faces today - including that of the economic disparity between nation-states - is a multifaceted issue that can not be fully understood or evaluated through only one lens.
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It requires us to understand and approach these issues from various different perspectives, and attempt to make sense of how this complicated web that is geopolitics actually works.
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Oftentimes, as citizens of advanced, relatively high-functioning democracies, it is too easy to forget that the challenges we face in our societies are hardly an accurate reflection of the challenges faced by people even just a few kilometers away across the border in countries like North Korea, let alone halfway around the world in Mexico and Venezuela.
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This is precisely the reason why Why Nations Fail is a must-read to broaden our scope and endeavor to look past domestic politics to truly ascend to global citizenship.
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