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

A physicist would be mocked for proclaiming that only one of the four subatomic forces really mattered.A chemist would be shunned for claiming that only covalent bonds should be studied.And a physiologist would be laughed at for arguing that only the digestive system determines an organism's wellbeing and development.But social scientists can still be applauded (as several Nobel Laureates do in the frontmatter of this book) for arguing that there is only one predominant cause of economic growth, and for actively dismissing all alternative explanations.This is not to say that the authors' core arguments lack merit.Many social sciences have in recent decades appreciated the importance of institutions that give people confidence, freedom, and incentives to invest and exchange.And many scholars have noted that this type of economic institution is more likely to be found in societies with political institutions that are characterized also by freedoms and rights and pluralism.Readers of this journal may especially appreciate the argument in the early chapters that it was low population densities that encouraged "inclusive" political and economic institutions in what would become the United States, whereas higher population densities (coupled with the resources to be extracted from these populations) encouraged elitist "extractive" institutions across much of Latin America.(Population is largely ignored in other case studies.)The determinism of these early chapters is cast away later in the book as the authors -laudably to be sure -appreciate the importance of historical contingency and path dependence (which they for some reason insist on calling institutional drift).But the recognition that small changes can have big effects imposes a heavy burden on historical analysis, for advocates of almost any theory can then potentially find some historical detail across a range of historical cases that supports their view of the world.These authors can be applauded for surveying widely across time and space, but they provide no insight into how they chose their cases.More importantly, one can read their discussion of European feudalism, the British Industrial Revolution, and a variety of other cases with no inkling whatsoever that historians have debated these historical cases -and the precise hypotheses favoured by these authors -for decades without achieving consensus.The authors maintain that "[t]he Industrial Revolution was manifested in every aspect of the English economy" (p.197).And they heap praise on the British patent system.While I myself have doubted some claims that the Industrial Revolution was hardly felt beyond textiles and iron, even I must admit that there is weak evidence of widespread productivity advances.And the Industrial Revolution period is littered with inventors who could not enforce their patent rights.The authors' claims here seem to reflect their theory more than the evidence.Admitting historical contingency must mean that the alternative explanations they took such pains to eliminate in chapter 2 sneak back in.Cultural explanations are panned in chapter 2, but it is admitted later that cultural attitudes might just affect which way a country turns in a time of transformation.Similar arguments could be made for any other causal variable.

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