Book discussion on: Why nations fail?

“Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty?” 🤔

Well, these questions have been debated for years, if not centuries. Several explanations have been proposed, some stand the test of time, some don’t.

As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny.

Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (BTW Nobel Prize winners in economics in 2024) conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today.

If this is something that you wish to talk about, disagree with the authors’ point, deliberate whether we can predict the fate of the current superpowers, join us!