Two American professors, Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of Harvard, have tackled the question of what makes societies empowered head-on in their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, which has won praises from a line of Nobel laureates. In their landmark study of development paths around the world, using examples ranging from the Spanish colonisation of South America to the Arab Spring, they argue that an open and pluralistic political culture, which allows the development of inclusive economic institutions, is the key to sustained prosperity.
The authors say inclusive economic institutions are important because they ''give people freedom to pursue the vocations in life that best suit their talents'' and also ''provide a level playing field that gives
them the opportunity to do so''. Open society a pathway to prosperity
Speak Your Piece: Why Regions Fail: State capitalism will persist so long as existing elites are able to maintain it. To understand the logic of state capitalism, it is useful to recall some early examples—not the socialist command economies or modern societies seeking to combat market failures, but ancient civilizations. Indeed, it seems that, like farming or democracy, state capitalism has been independently invented many times in world history. Study of Elite: exchanging brutalism without open society
