hte china issue? OK, I see where you’re coming from. But I think their point si that China can’t grow sustainably and stable within it’s current state-of-affairs, so there is not so much for Westerners to worry about. Except that it can get really really messy whenever China hits the wall. Or reform, for that matter. China is a bigger threat to itself and its immediate neighbours than it is to the US or the EU, so it’s a bit wasteful to worry so much about it.

And what are they really asking for? Their new articel in teh Spectator holds some answers: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9121361/why-aid-fails/

Also, with regards to the role of industrial policy, we need to raise a question on why that was possible in the first place. For instance, to successfully employ an industrial policy, we need a network of competent government bureaucrats, scientists & engineers, and entrepreneurs. Where they came from? On that issue, such early social innovations like land reform in the 1950s paved a different path for South Korea compared to other developing countries. The reform made South Korea more equal or inclusive and those individuals who got educated during that period did important works later. I know this partly because I observed these things happened in my country. And from that perspective, I agreed that inclusive institutions are critical.

Nonetheless, I agreed with your point that his view on China is somewhat inaccurate. It is not because his theoretical framework is wrong but his data is limited. China is a dragon with a long tail and the country has multiple centers of growth that cannot be judged by a snapshot.

a. after you read 400 odd pages, it boils down to- just and democratic governance is at the heart of development. this is scarcely an earth shaking revelation.
b. low predictive or prescriptive capacity of the fairly teleological theory.

Was fun reading it, but not sure what I take back after completing it (beyond an understanding of some lesser known but absolutely fascinating periods of history).

I’m surprised to see in the same review that you find the book too ambitious of a theory to explain everything, and then criticize it for its lack of predictive power vis-a-vis China. I’m of the mind that the most valuable way to treat the book is as history, and that its restraint from saying “now here’s a recipe for this based on our sweeping review” is a strong point. I’d be much more critical if they suggested that they could predict when China will run into challenges to growth due to its political model not being inclusive enough to allow the current elite to suffer creative destruction.

It’s very powerful as a narrative, so long as we resist the idea that because we’ve heard the narrative, we have new prescriptions for the one true thing to be done in a country context for it to move to a better pathway. And that tendency (and resulting criticism) seems to be as much about reader expectations as about author intentions.

I’d submit that it’s the small things that matter – as in the Maxwell review above, which highlights a cutting edge to the governance agenda around APPP and Pritchett and Andrews – but that in retrospect, one can see how the small things aggregated into critical decisions, as this book shows. It’s precisely because we can’t know in advance which of the small things will be decisive that we can’t take a shortcut to work only on “big” or “right” things or introduce a single best practice. We just have to keep muddling through.

http://www.simonmaxwell.eu/blog/review-of-why-nations-fail-the-origins-of-power-prosperity-and-poverty-by-daron-acemoglu-and-james-robinson.html