By contrast, Acemoglu and Robinson have resolutely focused on only the largest of macro questions: how contemporary institutions were shaped by colonial ones, why it was that regions of the world that were the richest in the year 1500 were among the world’s poorest today, or how rich elites were ever persuaded to redistribute their wealth. Whether such studies will ever aggregate upwards into an understanding of development is highly questionable. The latest fad in development studies has been to conduct controlled randomized experiments on a host of micro-questions, such as whether co-payments for mosquito bed nets improves their uptake. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have just published Why Nations Fail, a big book on development that will attract a lot of attention.
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