Development economics is a morale-building discipline. Its practitioners get called upon to explain why certain peoples are rolling in wealth while others have to live with hookworm and kleptocracy. In such explanations optimism is mandatory, taboos are many and a bias towards progressive internationalism is assumed. Development economists are not expected to say that such-and-such a nation lacks the wisdom to rule itself or the get-up-and-go to prosper. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of Harvard, both prolific economists, lay out an explanation for the causes of wealth and poverty that differs a bit from those of their colleagues.
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