00:00Why nations fail is a sweeping attempt to explain the gut-wrenching poverty that
00:04leaves 1.29 billion people in the developing world struggling to live on less than $1.25 a day.
00:11You might expect it to be a bleak, numbing red. It's not. It's bracing, garrulous, wildly
00:18ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece.
00:24Aaron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, two energetic, widely respected development
00:29scholars, start with a bit of perspective. Even in today's glum economic climate,
00:34the average American is seven times as prosperous as the average Mexican,
00:3810 times as prosperous as the average Peruvian, about 20 times as prosperous as the average
00:42inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa and about 40 times as prosperous as the average citizen of
00:47such particularly desperate African countries as Mali, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone.
00:53What explains such stupefying disparities?
00:56The author's answer is simple, institutions, institutions, institutions.
01:01They are impatient with traditional social science arguments for the persistence of poverty,
01:05which variously chalk it up to bad geographic luck,
01:08hobbling cultural patterns, or ignorant leaders and technocrats.
01:12Instead, Why Nations Fail focuses on the historical currents and critical junctures that
01:17mold modern polities, the processes of institutional drift that produce political
01:22and economic institutions that can be either inclusive, focused on power-sharing, productivity,
01:27education, technological advances and the well-being of the nation as a whole,
01:31or extractive, bent on grabbing wealth and resources away from one part of society to benefit another.
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