Quotes from Daron AcemoÄŸlu

in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies.

La Revolución francesa creó mucha violencia, sufrimiento, inestabilidad y guerra. No obstante, gracias a ella, los franceses no quedaron atrapados en instituciones extractivas que bloqueaban el crecimiento y la prosperidad económicos, como hicieron los regímenes absolutistas de Europa oriental como Austria-Hungría y Rusia.

The U.S. experience in the first half of the twentieth century also emphasizes the important role of free media in empowering broad segments of society and thus in the virtuous circle.

Putting an end to foreign aid is impractical and would likely lead to additional human suffering. It is impractical because citizens of many Western nations feel guilt and unease about the economic and humanitarian disasters around the world, and foreign aid makes them believe that something is being done to combat the problems.

Para ser inclusivas, las instituciones económicas deben ofrecer seguridad de la propiedad privada, un sistema jurídico imparcial y servicios públicos que proporcionen igualdad de condiciones en los que las personas puedan realizar intercambios y firmar contratos; además de permitir la entrada de nuevas empresas y dejar que cada persona elija la profesión a la que se quiere dedicar.

Markets can be dominated by a few firms, charging exorbitant prices and blocking the entry of more efficient rivals and new technologies. Markets, left to their own devices, can cease to be inclusive, becoming increasingly dominated by the economically and politically powerful. Inclusive economic institutions require not just markets, but inclusive markets that create a level playing field and economic opportunities for the majority of the people.

Many citizens in Rome did not need to work: they lived off the handouts from the government.

Las instituciones económicas inclusivas implican la existencia de derechos de propiedad seguros y oportunidades económicas no solamente para la élite, sino también para la mayor parte de la sociedad.

selling patents was a good idea only for someone like Edison, who had ideas faster than he could put them to practice. (He had a world-record 1,093 patents issued to him in the United States and 1,500 worldwide.)

The synergies between extractive economic and political institutions create a vicious circle, where extractive institutions, once in place, tend to persist. Similarly, there is a virtuous circle associated with inclusive economic and political institutions.

Hua could not repudiate the Cultural Revolution, and this weakened him. He was also a comparative newcomer to the centers of power, and he lacked the web of connections and informal relations that Deng had built up over many years.

Solamente cuando muchos individuos y grupos tienen voz en las decisiones y el poder político para sentarse en la mesa, empieza a tener sentido la idea de que todos deben ser tratados con justicia.

The reasoning of the Ming and Qing states for opposing international trade is by now familiar: the fear of creative destruction.

Creating banking monopolies and giving loans to politicians is good business for politicians, if they can get away with it. It is not particularly good for the citizens, however.

how the institutions of Western Europe diverged from those in Eastern Europe and then how those of England diverged from those in the rest of Western Europe. This was a consequence of small institutional differences, mostly resulting from institutional drift interacting with critical junctures.

As the United States began to experience the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, Mexico got poorer.

after 1688 the state began to rely more on talent and less on political appointees, and developed a powerful infrastructure to run the country.

We have to understand why the politics of some societies lead to inclusive institutions that foster economic growth, while the politics of the vast majority of societies throughout history has led, and still leads today, to extractive institutions that hamper economic growth.

Why does the path of institutional change differ across societies? The answer to this question lies in institutional drift. In the same way that the genes of two isolated populations of organisms will drift apart slowly because of random mutations in the so-called process of evolutionary or genetic drift, two otherwise similar societies will also drift apart institutionally—albeit, again, slowly.

The consequence of all this absolutist control of the economy was predictable: the Chinese economy was stagnant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while other economies were industrializing. By the time Mao set up his communist regime in 1949, China had become one of the poorest countries in the world. T

Fruits of unsustainable extractive growth: Zheng He's ship alongside Columbus's Santa Maria Gregory A. Harlin/National Geographic Stock

Las instituciones económicas inclusivas también allanan el camino para otros dos motores de prosperidad: la tecnología y la educación.

The growth generated by extractive institutions is very different in nature from growth created under inclusive institutions, however. Most important, it is not sustainable. By their very nature, extractive institutions do not foster creative destruction and generate at best only a limited amount of technological progress. The growth they engender thus lasts for only so long. The Soviet experience gives a vivid illustration of this limit.

In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman Empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of adult males and 40 percent of adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write. Given