Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain peop...
The Black Death is a vivid example of a critical juncture, a major event or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society. A critical juncture is a double-edge...
The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites.
There could be some economic growth without innovation, relying on existing technology, but it was growth without creative destruction. And it did not last.
These monopolies, and many more, gave individuals or groups the sole right to control the production of many goods. They impeded the type of allocation of talent, which is so crucial to economic prosp...
This idea goes back to one of the classical theories of political sociology, the theory of modernization, formulated by Seymour Martin Lipset. Modernization theory maintains that all societies, as the...
WE WILL ARGUE that to understand world inequality we have to understand why some societies are organized in very inefficient and socially undesirable ways. Nations sometimes do manage to adopt efficie...
WHAT CAN BE DONE to kick-start or perhaps just facilitate the process of empowerment and thus the development of inclusive political institutions? The honest answer of course is that there is no recip...
What is crucial, however, is that growth under extractive institutions will not be sustained, for two key reasons. First, sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoup...
Yes, countries such as Syria and Egypt are poor, and their populations are primarily Muslim. But these countries also systemically differ in other ways that are far more important for prosperity. For...
Economic growth is not just a process of more and better machines, and more and better educated people, but also a transformative and destabilizing process associated with widespread creative destruct...
Selling patents was a good idea only for someone like Edison, who had ideas faster than he could put them to practice. (He had a world-record 1,093 patents issued to him in the United States and 1,500...
While in England the profits of the slave trade helped to enrich those who opposed absolutism, in Africa they helped to create and strengthen absolutism. Farther
Economic growth Stalin style was simple: develop industry by government command and obtain the necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very high rates. The communist state did not have a...
THE SOVIET UNION was able to generate rapid growth even under extractive institutions because the Bolsheviks built a powerful centralized state and used it to allocate resources toward industry.
Breaking another mold: Rosa Parks challenges extractive institutions in the U.S. south The Granger Collection, NY
Creating banking monopolies and giving loans to politicians is good business for politicians, if they can get away with it. It is not particularly good for the citizens, however.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, many parts of the world, especially in Africa, lacked a state that could provide even a minimal degree of law and order, which is a prerequisite for having a mod...
BOTSWANA, CHINA, and the U.S. South, just like the Glorious Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, are vivid illustrations that history is not destiny. Despi...
Both feared that the mechanization of stocking production would be politically destabilizing. It would throw people out of work, create unemployment and political instability, and threaten royal power...
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