Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail, The Origins of Power,
Prosperity and Poverty. ©2012 The authors start in Nogales. North of the border there is an array of
public services and general prosperity.
South of the border it’s just the opposite. The question is why? When we look at the world we are tempted by
all sorts of cultural hypotheses to explain why some regions are prosperous and
others are not. Africans are lazy; South
Americans have a mañana culture; the Chinese are still all tied up in Confucianism
perhaps reinforced by the legacy of Maoism.
Then there’s Jared Diamond, who proposes a geographical and climactic
explanation for differences in development.
And there are the economists who always get it wrong, because they
assume political problems have been solved and look only at the economic
side. The authors propose a different
idea. In general, they say, political
and economic institutions can be divided into “inclusive” and “extractive.” The meaning of inclusive is clear for both
political and economic institutions. A
very large percentage of a population participates in the political process and
on the economic side there are no great inequities in the distribution of
wealth. What extractive means on the
political side is that few individuals have all the power and can direct all
benefits to themselves. This means, of
course, that on the economic side, the people with the political power can arrange
to extract the bulk of the benefits from the economy for themselves. This leaves much of the population to
languish near subsistence level as the rich and powerful get richer and more
powerful. Then the authors race through
history and all over the world to make the case that when both political and
economic institutions are inclusive, countries experience sustained
growth. When institutions on either the
political side or the economic side are not inclusive, growth falters --
China right now is one of their examples. Their favorite case study seems to be the
England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which led to inclusive political and
economic institutions and sustained growth from then until now. In another chapter they explain why Venice became
a museum. It was a great economic power
until it changed the rules for membership in its Great Council in 1297 to say
that once a man was appointed he could stay there. By 1315 Venice had developed a hereditary
aristocracy, which then changed the rules governing trade to favor themselves,
i.e., the economy shifted from inclusive to extractive. The most surprising success story in the book
is Botswana. They had neither gold nor
diamonds so the colonial powers more or less ignored them. Their traditional society had always been
inclusive on the political side, and in the absence of outside interference
they were able to maintain that as they developed a modern and inclusive
economy. It all came as a surprise to
me, but apparently Botswana is doing just fine.
The scope of the book is incredible, and in the end their thesis that
both political and economic institutions must be inclusive seems obvious. I’m not happy with my effort to summarize the
authors’ ideas, so all I can do is recommend the book. As a final note I can say that all through
the book I was thinking of the Koch brothers, the Supremes’ decision that money
is speech, our do nothing Congress, and the bottom line mentality of Wall
Street. April 2014
.
Jon Meacham. Thomas
Jefferson, The Art of Power.
©2012 This is an excellent
biography. Meacham is very thorough in
covering both Jefferson’s private life and his public life. The whole history is well known and there is
no point in my trying to cover it here, but there were several points in the
book that particularly interested me. Apparently
there are no longer any doubts about Jefferson being the father of Sally
Hemings’s children, but we may never know how they related to each other. In 1775 Jefferson had to deal with the threat
of Lord Dunsmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, to destroy the plantations
and free all the slaves to fight for the Brits.
Already in 1774 Benjamin Rush and other politicos had advised John Adams
to let Virginia take the lead and this seems to be the reason Adams insisted
Jefferson draft the “Declaration of Independence.” Jefferson had lots of excellent editors for
his work. It was Franklyn who supplied
the phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” In 1789 Jefferson advised Lafayette on the
wording of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” For some time, Merriweather Lewis lived in
the White House with Jefferson. Perhaps
Jefferson’s greatest accomplishment was the Louisiana Purchase. Although he had never been west, he seems to
have had a vision of the United States stretching coast to coast. Jefferson and John Quincy Adams worked on
development of the Monroe Doctrine. April
2014
.
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers. Zoobiquity, What Animals Can Teach Us About
Health And The Science of Healing.
©2012 I only read a couple of
chapters, but this was enough to get the idea that scientists are finding
correlations between animal and human diseases that may lead to advances in
treatment possibilities for both. April
2014
.
Note: I am about halfway through Doris Kearns
Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore
Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism, and I can
say that it is the best work of history I have ever read. The book is long, but I wish it could go on
indefinitely. Perhaps my main conclusion
when I do finish will be that what this country needs are S.S. McClure and his
magazine and Ida Tarbell and her journalist colleagues.
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