Those controlling political power will eventually find it more beneficial to use their power to limit competition, to increase their share of the pie, or even to steal and loot from others rather than...
Though the extractive institutions that the Mayas created produced sufficient wealth for the cities to flourish and the elite to become wealthy and generate great art and monumental buildings, the sys...
Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. The income of an average Ethiopian is about one-fortieth that of an average citizen of England. Most people live in rural areas and practic...
Why did this unique process start in England and why in the seventeenth century? Why did England develop pluralistic political institutions and break away from extractive institutions? As we have seen...
Authoritarian regimes currently experiencing some growth are likely to reach the limits of extractive growth before they transform their political institutions in a more inclusive direction—and in fac...
Growth under extractive institutions is limited not only because of lack of technological progress but also because it will encourage infighting from rival groups wishing to take control of the state...
Poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose. To understand this, you have to go beyond economics...
The colonists in Jamestown perished. Of the five hundred who entered the winter, only sixty were alive by March. The situation was so desperate that they resorted to cannibalism.
When a critical juncture arrives, these small differences that have emerged as a result of institutional drift may be the small differences that matter in leading otherwise quite similar societies to...
Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties...
But in many other cases, just the opposite takes place, and the process of political centralization also ushers in an era of greater absolutism.
Chinese economic growth today also has several commonalities with both the Soviet and South Korean experiences
Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people.
Cuando el Estado no logra prácticamente ninguna centralización política, la sociedad, tarde o temprano, llega al caos,
Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Ada...
Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As...
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 the indigenous leader. This strategy enabled the Spanish to c...
Fruits of unsustainable extractive growth: Zheng He’s ship alongside Columbus’s Santa Maria Gregory A. Harlin/National Geographic Stock
Ignorance can explain at best a small part of world inequality.
Improved health and life expectancy were not the cause of England’s economic success but one of the fruits of its previous political and economic changes.
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