Daron Acemoğlu’, 2012
This was a worthwhile read to provide an alternate perspective on why certain nations fare better than others throughout history and current times. I’ll admit that Jared Diamond’s, Guns, Germs, and Steel has framed my worldview on this topic for the past 15 year. Daron Acemoğlu’s argument that history and political structure are more significant than geography and technology on the influences that benefit or limit a nations potential for prosperity is an important perspective to consider. Acemoğlu argues that “extractive governments,” those that extract resources for short term gain may experience growth and prosperity, but is is a short lived cycle that won’t continue indefinitely unless the political structure of said governments transition into a pluralistic society that aims to benefit the many over the few. This argument makes sense and Acemoğlu provides several examples throughout history from the past 500 years to demonstrate how many nations, even empires, ultimately collapsed due to their reliance on oligarchy and extractive economic systems. Acemoğlu also provides several examples to demonstrate how current states in Central and South America, Subsaharan Africa, and Eastern Europe are struggling to compete in the modern world because they are carrying the limiitng burden of feudal and colonial history’s influence on their current political structures.
Despite the thought provoking ideas in these pages, the book could have really, really benefited from some aggressive editing to provide more focus to the book’s organization. There are 15 chapters, but aside from the first introductory chapter and the closing synopsis, I couldn’t really distinguish how the themes in each chapter were different from each other. Each chapter jumps around with several examples of different historical nation’s experiences with politics and often jumps between different continents just to say “hey this nation from this time period is very similar to this other nation I’m talking about, so why not include this here,” in such a discombobulated fashion that it just seems like a long list of examples that are difficult to coalesce into a cohesive story. The one consistent theme tying every chapter and subchapter digression together is that Acemoğlu repeats “extractive institution” over and over again an infinitum in his story telling to really hammer down his point. All of this could have benefited from some editing to shorten the primary narrative with footnotes to dive deeper into Acemoğlu’s many observations about similar nations throughout history.
If you are a patient reader who can look past Acemoğlu’s meandering storytelling style, this is a worthwhile read, but if you are less patient, this book may be a colossal frustration for you. Other reviewers have noted that this would have been better suited as a long journal article and I’d agree with that sentiment.
HardlyWritten 