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NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

Written by two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, recognized for illuminating the crucial impact of societal institutions in determining a nation’s prosperity, “Why Nations Fail” confronts one of the biggest and most fundamental questions in social science: why do some countries succeed economically while others fall into poverty and deprivation?

Praised by The New York Times as “a wildly ambitious work that explores history and spans the globe,” Acemoglu and Robinson examine the stark contrasts between nations in terms of wealth and poverty, health and disease, abundance and famine. Rejecting popular explanations such as climate, geographic location, or cultural differences, they persuasively argue that political and economic institutions created by human beings are the real driving forces behind national prosperity or decline.

Through fifteen years of rigorous and original research, the authors use vivid historical examples to demonstrate their arguments. For instance, they highlight the significant economic differences between North and South Korea—a homogeneous culture divided sharply by institutional differences, with North Koreans among the poorest people globally and South Koreans prospering as one of the richest societies on earth—in order to clearly illustrate their thesis.

Acemoglu and Robinson draw compelling historical evidence from diverse historical contexts including the Roman Empire, ancient Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and multiple regions across Africa, creating a powerful theoretical framework with profound contemporary significance. They use this framework to address pressing questions of today: Will China continue its rapid economic growth and eventually surpass the West? Is America declining, trapped in a cycle that benefits and strengthens only a small elite at the expense of broader prosperity?

Named a finalist for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and selected as one of the best books of the year by numerous prestigious publications—including The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Plain Dealer—this groundbreaking book reshapes our understanding of economic prosperity and national success. BusinessWeek highlighted it as a revolutionary work, comparing its ambition and scope to Jared Diamond’s influential “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” and predicting that it “will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations.”