Tropical diseases obviously cause much suffering and high rates of infant mortality in Africa, but they are not the reason Africa is poor. Disease is largely a consequence of poverty and of government...
Max Weber, who we met in the previous chapter, provided the most famous and widely accepted definition of the state, identifying it with the monopoly of legitimate violence in society. Without such a...
Growth thus moves forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be...
Creative destruction redistributes not simply income and wealth, but also political power,
Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will be ultimately short lived.
Without the changes in political institutions and political power similar to those that emerged in England after 1688, there was little chance for absolutist countries to benefit from the innovations...
The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so bac...
The people who suffer from the extractive economic institutions cannot hope for absolutist rulers to voluntarily change political institutions and redistribute power in society. The only way to change...
The growth generated by extractive institutions is very different in nature from growth created under inclusive institutions, however. Most important, it is not sustainable. By their very nature, extr...
Fear of creative destruction is often at the root of the opposition to inclusive economic and political institutions.
Stagnation
How to engineer prosperity. These engineering attempts come in two flavors. The first, often advocated by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, recognizes that poor deve...
Today we still call the standard method of achieving secrecy in voting in elections the Australian ballot. The
This synergistic relationship between extractive economic and political institutions introduces a strong feedback loop: political institutions enable the elites controlling political power to choose e...
The great inequality of the modern world that emerged in the nineteenth century was caused by the uneven dissemination of industrial technologies and manufacturing production. It was not caused by div...
The government in North Korea is a communist dictatorship opposed to private property and markets. But it is difficult to control black markets, and black markets make transactions in cash. Of course...
The Manchester Act was a significant victory for the nascent cotton manufacturers. But its historical and economic significance was in fact much greater. First, it demonstrated the limits of entry bar...
Many citizens in Rome did not need to work: they lived off the handouts from the government.
Inclusive economic institutions require secure property rights and economic opportunities not just for the elite but for a broad cross-section of society. Secure
In North Korea, the state built an education system to inculcate propaganda, but was unable to prevent famine. In colonial Latin America, the state focused on coercing indigenous peoples. In neither t...