Daron Acemoglu on Why Nations Fail

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2012

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Daron Acemoglu of MIT and author (with James Robinson) of Why Nations Fail talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his book: why some nations fail and others succeed, why some nations grow over time and sustain that growth, while others grow and then stagnate. Acemoglu draws on an exceptionally rich set of examples over space and time to argue that differences in institutions--political governance and the inclusiveness of the political and economic system--explain the differences in economics success across nations and over time. Acemoglu also discusses how institutions evolve and the critical role institutional change plays in economic success or failure. Along the way, he explains why previous explanations for national economic success are inadequate. The conversation closes with a discussion of the implications of the arguments for foreign aid and attempts by the wealthy nations to help nations that are poor.

Transcript

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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.
	...

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