Why Nations Fail

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Walk across the fence that splits Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora and you cross from wealth into poverty without changing the desert, the climate, the language, or even the families, many of whom have relatives on both sides. What changes is institutions. On the Arizona side, people choose their work, get schooling, and hold their government to account; on the Sonora side, corruption bends all of it. Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson build their whole argument on comparisons like this. The tenfold income gap between South and North Korea, identical in culture and geography until 1945, makes the same case: prosperity comes from the rules a society lives by, not the land it sits on.

Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson on SummaryShelf

Why Nations Fail