Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography?
Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities.
The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.
Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine.
Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity?
More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world."
Chief, the NuriaStore bookseller –
This 2018 book is what anyone who has studied why Africa is poor, so much through the lenses of John Perkin’s Confessions of an economic hitman, must get their hands on.
The 226-paged book written by Tom Young, a lecturer in politics at the Oriental and African studies, at the University of London, opens up with how the western vandals IMF and World bank did in Mozambique.
In We Need To Talk About Africa, Professor Young calls upon each one of us to really think about what was, has and is being said about us. An easy explanation, he actually delves into how perceptions about ourselves and the stories repeatedly told to us about our past shape the exploitation and defeatist mentality that we carry even now, as Africans.
He calls it Guilt tripping, the stories about slavery, colonialism, and race. Where he argues that these three topics have been used to control Africans for the worst.
In using the three topics, the west, USA, UK or white people have cashed from it by making Africans look upon themselves as defeated and that only the experts, who are mostly whites can salvage the situation.
This is the same mentality that drives aid dependency. And on Aid, how has it really helped over the past 40 years or so? Hasn’t poverty increased?
In the opening story, Prof Young tells of how Mozambique was doing well, but in the late 1990s the country was forced by IMF and World Bank to privatize its state-owned banks in a process that turned out to be very corrupt and ended taking the lives of a Mozambican Investigative Journalist (jicho pevu) and head of the supervision unit of that country’s central bank.
It was a hostile takeover by the Bretton Woods institutions that went ahead to promise a debt-reduction strategy; followed by high volumes of foreign aid. Then it was hailed in glossy magazines and TV screens as a success story.
What isn’t said, however, is the increasing poverty level in that country since then.
If an African country is doing good and doesn’t get influenced by the IMF or World Bank, a scheme is hatched in soft terms, such as in the case of Mozambique or in harsh terms such as in the case of Libya (everyone knows what happened there).
The repetition of the overarching stories about race, slavery and colonialism, which often has an agenda of leaving out some elements which are not comfortable with the white Supremacy beliefs, gloss over others in their narratives, is what makes most African leaders approach the world defeated.
“…a constant pressure to emulate the giver (donor) to take the advice, to follow the guide, erodes self-belief”, Young says.
In the miasma of seal-loathe, African leaders don’t even ask why have these donors, if they are experts, not succeeded in making Africa the same level as their own countries. Because then, what’s the point?
So, through the lies by IMF and World Bank, the African sheeple is easily lied to about a ‘new project, agree on new treaties, issue another statement, have another round of negotiations’, which seems like work towards good but often is the west exercising control towards doom.
It is the same western prescriptions that we have seen intervene in conflicts only to make them worse; announcing Africa rising in one year, the next year it is not.