Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
HIS BOOK IS
the culmination of fifteen years of collaborative research,
and along the way we have accumulated a great deal of practical and
intellectual debts. Our greatest debt is to our long-term collaborator
Simon Johnson, who coauthored many of the key scientific papers
that shaped our understanding of comparative economic
development.
Our other coauthors, with whom we have worked on related
research projects, played a significant role in the development of our
views, and we would like to particularly thank in this capacity
Philippe Aghion, Jean-Marie Baland, María Angélica Bautista, Davide
Cantoni, Isaías Chaves, Jonathan Conning, Melissa Dell, Georgy
Egorov, Leopoldo Fergusson, Camilo García-Jimeno, Tarek Hassan,
Sebastián Mazzuca, Jeffrey Nugent, Neil Parsons, Steve Pincus, Pablo
Querubín, Rafael Santos, Konstantin Sonin, Davide Ticchi, Ragnar
Torvik, Juan Fernando Vargas, Thierry Verdier, Andrea Vindigni, Alex
Wolitzky, Pierre Yared, and Fabrizio Zilibotti.
Many other people played very important roles in encouraging,
challenging, and critiquing us over the years. We would particularly
like to thank Lee Alston, Abhijit Banerjee, Robert Bates, Timothy
Besley, John Coatsworth, Jared Diamond, Richard Easterlin, Stanley
Engerman, Peter Evans, Jeff Frieden, Peter Gourevitch, Stephen
Haber, Mark Harrison, Elhanan Helpman, Peter Lindert, Karl Ove
Moene, Dani Rodrik, and Barry Weingast.
Two people played a particularly significant role in shaping our
views and encouraging our research, and we would like to take this
opportunity to express our intellectual debt and our sincere gratitude
to them: Joel Mokyr, and Ken Sokoloff, who unfortunately passed
away before this book was written. Ken is sorely missed by us both.
We are also very grateful to the scholars who attended a conference

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we organized in February 2010 on an early version of our book
manuscript at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.
We would particularly like to thank the co-organizers, Jim Alt and
Ken Shepsle, and our discussants at the conference: Robert Allen,
Abhijit Banerjee, Robert Bates, Stanley Engerman, Claudia Goldin,
Elhanan Helpman, Joel Mokyr, Ian Morris, Şevket Pamuk, Steve
Pincus, and Peter Temin. We are also grateful to Melissa Dell, Jesús
Fernández-Villaverde, Sándor László, Suresh Naidu, Roger Owen, Dan
Trefler, Michael Walton, and Noam Yuchtman, who gave us extensive
comments at the conference and at many other times.
We are also grateful to Charles Mann, Leandro Prados de la
Escosura, and David Webster for their expert advice.
During much of the process of researching and writing this book we
were both members of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s
(CIFAR) program on Institutions, Organizations, and Growth. We
presented research related to this book many times at CIFAR meetings
and have benefited hugely from the support of this wonderful
organization and the scholars that it brings together.
We also received comments from literally hundreds of people in
various seminars and conferences on the material developed in this
book, and we apologize for failing to attribute properly any
suggestion, idea, or insight that we got from those presentations and
discussions.
We are also very grateful to María Angélica Bautista, Melissa Dell,
and Leander Heldring for their superb research assistance on this
project.
Last, but certainly not least, we have been very fortunate to have a
wonderful, insightful, and extremely supportive editor, John
Mahaney. John’s comments and suggestions have greatly improved
our book, and his support and enthusiasm for the project made the
last year and a half much more pleasant and less taxing than it might
have been.

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