Why Nations Fail

They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose. To understand this, you have to go beyond economics and expert advice on the best thing to do and, instead, study how decisions actually get made, who gets to make them, and why those people decide to do what they do. This is the study of politics and political processes.

Keep those people in check with effective democracy or watch your nation fail.

In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman Empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of adult males and 40 percent of adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher.

The most famous was the commenda, a rudimentary type of joint stock company, which formed only for the duration of a single trading mission. A commenda involved two partners, a “sedentary” one who stayed in Venice and one who traveled. The sedentary partner put capital into the venture, while the traveling partner accompanied the cargo. Typically, the sedentary partner put in the lion’s share of the capital.

Extractive institutions are so common in history because they have a powerful logic: they can generate some limited prosperity while at the same time distributing it into the hands of a small elite.

Farther east, the Russian emperor Peter the Great was also consolidating an absolutism far more intense and extractive than even Louis XIV could manage.

The enduring implications of the organization of colonial society and those societies’ institutional legacies shape the modern differences between the United States and Mexico, and thus the two parts of Nogales.

Spain conquered and colonized most of central, western, and southern South America, while Portugal claimed Brazil to the east.

naming the river the Río de la Plata, “River of Silver,”

Residents of Nogales, Sonora, live with politicians’ corruption and ineptitude every day.