Daron Acemoglu on How States Succeed—And Why Many Don’t

Well, the way that I've come to express that in the context of technology is that I'm not an optimist, but I'm hopeful. And there are, you know, several things to be hopeful about. I mean, we are apes and we've come so much further than apes. I mean, you know, one of the things that I think chimpanzees or gorillas would find completely impossible to understand is how we build these amazing power concentrations and then we use them for mostly for decent things like providing public services.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today needs a little introduction. Darren Atsemalu is the Institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the co author among many influential and important books of Why Nations Fail with James Robinson, another recent podcast guest.

And he is, of course, the 2024 winner of a Nobel Prize in economics. This is the kind of conversation I love having on the podcast, a conversation in which I both try to introduce the width and breadth of an important thinker's work to the audience, but also push them on a bunch of those questions. So we covered why historical approaches to economics revealed so many things that other approaches might miss. How it is that the particular way in which colonial institutions were set up in, say, the United States as opposed to Colombia drove their differential economic developments.

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