Sobre Why Nations Fail de Acemoglu y Robinson

Paul Collier

"Their argument is that the modern level of prosperity rests upon political foundations. Proximately, prosperity is generated by investment and innovation, but these are acts of faith: investors and innovators must have credible reasons to think that, if successful, they will not be plundered by the powerful."

The Economist

"They offer instead a striking diagnosis: some governments get it wrong on purpose. Amid weak and accommodating institutions, there is little to discourage a leader from looting. Such environments channel society’s output towards a parasitic elite, discouraging investment and innovation. Extractive institutions are the historical norm. Inclusive institutions protect individual rights and encourage investment and effort. Where inclusive governments emerge, great wealth follows."

Pete Boettke

William Easterly:

"For Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson, it is institutions that determine the fate of nations. Success comes, the authors say, when political and economic institutions are "inclusive" and pluralistic, creating incentives for everyone to invest in the future. Nations fail when institutions are "extractive," protecting the political and economic power of only a small elite that takes income from everyone else."

"Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson insist that getting the economics right requires getting the politics right."

"Just as inclusive institutions feed on each other, so do their opposites: Extractive political institutions support the economic institutions that protect the interests of the elite against new entry from competitors. The wealth of the elite so created can make the hierarchical, authoritarian state even larger and more repressive, increasing elite wealth even more. This vicious cycle means that bad history persists into bad present outcomes."

"'Why Nations Fail' also offers this crucial insight: Experts cannot engineer prosperity with the right advice to rulers on policies and institutions. Rulers "get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose." Change happens only when a broad coalition revolts, forcing the elite to allow more pluralistic political competition (e.g., the Glorious Revolution in England, the Meiji overthrow of Japanese feudalism and Botswana's democratic ouster of British colonizers)."

"Extractive states can have bursts of growth. After all, even a kleptocratic elite will covet a larger economy ripe for plundering. The elites have an incentive to invest in their own businesses. But authoritarian growth miracles cannot last."

Francis Fukuyama

"So far, so good. AR have done a great deal over the years to focus the attention of both theorists and policymakers on institutions, and to shape the emerging consensus on the importance of politics to growth within the economics profession. It is, then, very disappointing that their more fully fleshed out book fails to go very much further than these broad conclusions, skirting critical issues of exactly what sort of institutions are necessary to promote growth, and failing to come to grips with some critical historical facts."

"The first problem with their analysis is conceptual. They present a sharply bifurcated distinction between what they call good “inclusive” economic and political institutions, which are sometimes also labeled “pluralistic,” in contrast to what they call bad “extractive” or “absolutist” ones. Unfortunately, these terms are way too broad, so broad indeed that AR never provide a clear definition of everything they encompass, or how they map onto concepts already in use."

"'Inclusive' political institutions would seem to imply modern electoral democracy, but they also include an impersonal centralized state as well as access to legal institutions, and forms of political participation that fall well short of modern democracy. We find, for example, that England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 was incipiently inclusive, despite the fact that well under ten percent of the population had a right to vote. When AR first used the term 'extractive' in their early articles, it referred to truly extractive practices like the mines of Potosí or the sugar plantations of the Caribbean which extracted commodities out of the labor of slaves. In the current book extractive seems to mean any institution that denies any degree of participation to citizens, from tribal communities to ranchers in 19th century Argentina to the contemporary Chinese Communist Party."

"Since each of these broad terms (inclusive/extractive, absolutist/pluralistic) encompasses so many possible meanings, it is very hard to come up with a clear metric of either. It also makes it hard to falsify any of their historical claims. Since more real-world societies are some combination of extractive and inclusive institutions, any given degree of growth (or its absence) can then be attributed either to inclusive or extractive qualities ex post."

"All of the good things in the “inclusive” basket, in other words, don’t necessarily go together, and in some cases may be at odds."

"Like many other works making use of history but written by economists, the AR volume contains some pretty problematic facts and interpretations. It makes the case, for example, that Rome shifted away from an inclusive Republic towards absolutist Empire, and that this was then responsible for Rome’s subsequent economic decline. Leave aside the fact that Rome’s power and wealth continued to increase in the two centuries after Augustus, and that its eastern wing managed to hold on remarkably until the fifteenth century. It can be argued that the shift from the narrow oligarchy of the Republic to a monarchy with highly developed legal institutions actually increased access to the political system on the part of ordinary Roman citizens, while solving the acute problem of political instability that bedeviled the late Republic.

Similarly, following on a tradition begun by Douglass North and Barry Weingast, AR point to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 as a critical juncture marking both the establishment of secure property rights and an “inclusive” political system. The latter point is fair enough, but English property rights were rooted in a much older tradition of common law dating from the Norman invasion, and had created a strong commercial civilization well before 1689. The Glorious Revolution was much less important in establishing the credibility of property rights per se, than of the Crown as a borrower, which explains why English public debt exploded in the century following that event."

"Given their overall framework, the hardest thing for AR to explain is contemporary China. China today according to them is more inclusive than Maoist China, but still far from the standard of inclusion set by the US and Europe, and yet has been the fastest growing large country over the past three decades. The Chinese restrict access to the market, engage in financial repression, fail to secure property rights, have no Western-style rule of law, and are ruled by a non-transparent oligarchy called the Communist Party. How to explain their economic success? Rather than see this as a threat to their model (i.e., more inclusion, more growth) AR pull a slight of hand by arguing that Chinese growth won’t last and that their system will eventually come crashing down (like Rome did, after about 200 years?). I actually agree that China will eventually crash. But even if that happens, a theory of development that can’t really explain the most remarkable growth story of our time is not, it seems to me, much of a theory."

"The broad conclusions of Why Nations Fail are, thus, incontrovertible and of great importance to policy (which is why, incidentally, I gave it a positive blurb). One only wishes then that the authors had made better use of basic categories long in play in other parts of the social sciences (state, rule of law, patrimonialism, clientelism, democracy, and the like) instead of inventing neologisms that obscure more than they reveal."

Jared Diamond

Arvind Subramanian. Respuesta de Acemoglu y Robinson

A y R le responden a Jeffrey Sachs

Bill Gates. The Economsit sobre la opinión de Gates. Respuesta de A&R