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

particularly Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002), and has
also been heavily influenced by Coatsworth (1978, 2008) and
Engerman and Sokoloff (1997).

---

C
HAPTER
 2 : T
HEORIES
 T
HAT
 D
ON’T
 W
ORK
Jared Diamond’s views on world inequality are laid out in his book
Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). Sachs (2006) sets out his own version of
geographical determinism. Views about culture are widely spread
throughout the academic literature but have never been brought
together in one work. Weber (2002) argued that it was the Protestant
Reformation that explained why it was Europe that had the Industrial
Revolution. Landes (1999) proposed that Northern Europeans
developed a unique set of cultural attitudes that led them to work
hard, save, and be innovative. Harrison and Huntington, eds. (2000),
is a forceful statement of the importance of culture for comparative
economic development. The notion that there is some sort of superior
British culture or superior set of British institutions is widespread and
used to explain U.S. exceptionalism (Fisher, 1989) and also patterns
of comparative development more generally (La Porta, Lopez-de-
Silanes, and Shleifer, 2008). The works of Banfield (1958) and
Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti (1994) are very influential cultural
interpretations of how one aspect of culture, or “social capital,” as
they call it, makes the south of Italy poor. For a survey of how
economists use notions of culture, see Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales
(2006). Tabellini (2010) examines the correlation between the extent
to which people trust each other in Western Europe and levels of
annual income per capita. Nunn and Wantchekon (2010) show how
the lack of trust and social capital in Africa is correlated with the
historical intensity of the slave trade.
The relevant history of the Kongo is presented in Hilton (1985) and
Thornton (1983). On the historical backwardness of African
technology, see the works of Goody (1971), Law (1980), and Austen
and Headrick (1983).
The definition of economics proposed by Robbins is from Robbins
(1935), p. 16.
The quote from Abba Lerner is in Lerner (1972), p. 259. The idea
that ignorance explains comparative development is implicit in most

---

economic analyses of economic development and policy reform: for
example, Williamson (1990); Perkins, Radelet, and Lindauer (2006);
and Aghion and Howitt (2009). A recent, forceful version of this view
is developed in Banerjee and Duflo (2011).
Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002) provide a
statistical analysis of the relative role of institutions, geography, and
culture, showing that institutions dominate the other two types of
explanations in accounting for differences in per capita income today.

---