Why Nations Fail: A Theory to Explain World Inequality
Mature, public conversation about issues that matter is foundational for democratic society. I am delighted that Mark Zuckerberg's " A Year of Books " offers such an opportunity. To contribute to that dialog, I will offer commentary on each of the readings proposed by Zuckerberg. Somewhere in the back of my head, I recalled seeing Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in footnotes or the content of some book. After concluding Why Nations Fail , I embarked on a fruitless search to find the reference. I thought maybe Moises Naím included it in The End of Power . Or Hank Paulson, given the lengthy examination of China by Acemoglu and Robinson, might have referred to it in Dealing with China . Finding no reference to it, I even turned to Steven Plinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature , but such a discovery would have been anachronistic as Plinker wrote before Acemoglu and Robinson. While I cannot rec...