Ray,
You ask whether anybody has read "Why Nations Fail" (Daron Acemoglu
and James A. Robinson). I read it a week or two ago. Although it's a
stupendous work of scholarship and full of fascinating historical
detail I found it unpersuasive. Its case is that the economic success
of a nation is due to its institutions. Mine is the opposite one --
Marxist point of view that a nation's institutions (and underlying
social order) are shaped according to the characteristic production
process(es) and the relative success of its products. As production
processes are more nearly due to climate, geology and geography then
I'm also in the Jared Diamond camp. In short it's Acemoglu and
Robinson versus Marx and Diamond -- and I'm with the latter.
The book is well worth reading and, quite rightly, it makes a big
thing out of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as initiating some of
the institutions (such as the Bank of England, 1694) that rose in the
course in the industrial revolution. What it fails to point out --
and this is a serious omission -- is the prior existence of hundreds
of small private groups (countryside banks) which launched the
initial projects. And these, in turn, were only byproducts of new
scientific minds that were arising as if from nowhere as a
consequence of the death of Papal dictatorship and the Reformation.
For example, we can instance sheep farmers who realized how to breed
sheep more effectively in order to retain their wool until manually
sheered, or to amateur geologists discovering new coalfields and
metallic ores, or those who were beginning to develop mighty steam
engines out of methods of boring cannon barrels, etc.
If you like, economic success comes about from the conceptual vacuum
created by the death of out-of-date institutions rather than brand
new ones. The latter appear on the scene very quickly but only after
the innovative events.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
