The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives we...
The Spanish strategy of colonization was highly effective. First perfected by Cortés in Mexico, it was based on the observation that the best way for the Spanish to subdue opposition was to capture th...
Stalin himself said in 1937 that only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develo...
Inequality in the modern world largely results from the uneven dissemination and adoption of technologies,
Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extracti...
If these rulers would only get the right advice from the right advisers, the thinking goes, prosperity would follow.
Hua could not repudiate the Cultural Revolution, and this weakened him. He was also a comparative newcomer to the centers of power, and he lacked the web of connections and informal relations that Den...
Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leader...
Extractive institutions are so common in history because they have a powerful logic: they can generate some limited prosperity while at the same time distributing it into the hands of a small elite. F...
But 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...
But all this does not imply that foreign aid, except the humanitarian kind, should cease. Putting an end to foreign aid is impractical and would likely lead to additional human suffering. It is imprac...
About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a s...
These densely settled civilizations interacted in a perverse way with European colonialism to create a reversal of fortune, making the places that were previously relatively wealthy in the Americas re...
Every elite would, all else being equal, like to encourage as much growth as possible in order to have more to extract. Extractive institutions that have achieved at least a minimal degree of politica...
Albeit of a particularly vicious and inefficient type. Countries become failed states not because of their geography or their culture, but because of the legacy of extractive institutions,
We have to understand why the politics of some societies lead to inclusive institutions that foster economic growth, while the politics of the vast majority of societies throughout history has led, an...
Though Mexico had constitutions in the nineteenth century, they put few constraints on what Iturbide, Santa Ana, and Díaz could do. These men could be removed from power only the same way they had att...
The synergies between extractive economic and political institutions create a vicious circle, where extractive institutions, once in place, tend to persist. Similarly, there is a virtuous circle assoc...
The solution to the economic and political failure of nations today is to transform their extractive institutions toward inclusive ones. The vicious circle means that this is not easy. But it is not i...
The patent system, which protects property rights in ideas, was systematized in the Statute of Monopolies legislated by the English Parliament in 1623, partially as an attempt to stop the king from ar...