Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012) by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu and Harvard professor James A. Robinson is a lengthy examination set apart from other works describing indicators of economic success of nations by its emphasis on politics. Politics, in one way or another, has always been about the power to make choices. In the case of the authors’ examination, it is primarily about the type of political institutions, people’s access to them, and the unique historical events that created them.
