4.7 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2012
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts |
0:13.9 | of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org |
0:21.2 | where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to |
0:26.5 | another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd |
0:33.6 | love to hear from you. Today is March 14, 2012, and my guest is Darren Asimoglu, the Killing |
0:43.5 | and Professor of Economics at MIT, and the author along with James Robinson of Why Nations Fail, |
0:49.2 | the origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Darren, welcome back to Econ Talk. |
0:54.0 | Thanks very much, Russ. It's great to be talking to you. Your books are unbelievably ambitious and |
1:00.0 | sweeping account of historical economic issues. What are you trying to explain? What are you trying |
1:07.8 | to understand and illuminate with this book? I think one of the key questions that gets many |
1:14.0 | people interested into social science is the same one that Adam Smith sort of posed. The wealth |
1:19.4 | of nations, why some countries are poor, some countries are rich, and 250 years or so after Adam |
1:24.8 | Smith wrote the book that shaped economics, the puzzle is deeper. The gaps between rich and |
1:32.4 | poor nations have widened, even though we live in a very integrated world. We haven't developed |
1:39.5 | a satisfactory and comprehensive answer to what factors are at the root of these differences, |
1:44.8 | and why there are such glaring gaps in prosperity across nations. That's the question that we're |
1:50.6 | trying to answer in this book. There are a number of attempts that have been made to explain, |
1:54.3 | and of course, it's possible there isn't one theory that explains everything, but we, as human |
2:00.0 | beings, seem to be drawn to single idea theories. Talk about some of the alternative explanations |
2:06.2 | that you reject in the book that have been prominent and used to explain growth and poverty. |
2:11.8 | Yeah, I used to say that there are as many theories on this as the number of authors who wrote |
2:16.4 | on it, and then I realized that actually some of them developed more than one theory. That's right. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Library of Economics and Liberty, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Library of Economics and Liberty and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.