Daron Acemoglu: Why Nations Fail

It’s what you do with what you’ve got

by Adam Taggart
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity

Why do some nations rise while others wither? Why have some of the world’s largest empires eventually crumbled? What are the ‘best practices’ that a modern nation should follow if it desires sustainable prosperity for its citizenry?

To answer these questions, we welcome MIT professor Doran Acemoglu and co-author of the book Why Nations Fail. His observations? Yes, national prosperity has some correlation to the resources available to the State, but importantly, it’s determined by how those resources are put to productive — and fair — use:

It all depends on incentives and opportunities. If people have opportunities to become rich, to open businesses, be innovative, do things that are going to further their interests and at the same time the nation’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and they have incentives to do so, that’s going to lay the foundations of economic prosperity. It sounds extremely simple but the thing is that most nations don’t provide those sorts of opportunities and incentives to their citizens and therein lies sort of the big divide. How do we summarize those opportunities and incentives? It’s the institutions, the rules, formal and informal regulations, and organization of society that determines what sort of opportunities are available to different people, to people from different walks of life, and what sorts of incentives they function under.

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