Daron Acemoğlu Quote

In our theory, Peru is so much poorer than Western Europe and the United States today because of its institutions, and to understand the reasons for this, we need to understand the historical process of institutional development in Peru. As we saw in the second chapter, five hundred years ago the Inca Empire, which occupied contemporary Peru, was richer, more technologically sophisticated, and more politically centralized than the smaller polities occupying North America. The turning point was the way in which this area was colonized and how this contrasted with the colonization of North America. This resulted not from a historically predetermined process but as the contingent outcome of several pivotal institutional developments during critical junctures. At least three factors could have changed this trajectory and led to very different long-run patterns. First,