Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

cadres; and the Party controls the news.”
    But of course a free media and new communication technologies can help only at the margins, by providing information and coordinating the demands and actions of those vying for more inclusive institutions. Their help will translate into meaningful change only when a broad segment of society mobilizes and organizes in order to effect political change, and does so not for sectarian reasons or to take control of extractive institutions, but to transform extractive institutions into more inclusive ones. Whether such a process will get under way and open the door to further empowerment, and ultimately to durable political reform, will depend, as we have seen in many different instances, on the history of economic and political institutions, on many small differences that matter and on the very contingent path of history.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
    T HIS BOOK IS the culmination of fifteen years of collaborative research, and along the way we have accumulated a great deal of practical and intellectual debts. Our greatest debt is to our long-term collaborator Simon Johnson, who coauthored many of the key scientific papers that shaped our understanding of comparative economic development.
    Our other coauthors, with whom we have worked on related research projects, played a significant role in the development of our views, and we would like to particularly thank in this capacity Philippe Aghion, Jean-Marie Baland, María Angélica Bautista, Davide Cantoni, Isaías Chaves, Jonathan Conning, Melissa Dell, Georgy Egorov, Leopoldo Fergusson, Camilo García-Jimeno, Tarek Hassan, Sebastián Mazzuca, Jeffrey Nugent, Neil Parsons, Steve Pincus, Pablo Querubín, Rafael Santos, Konstantin Sonin, Davide Ticchi, Ragnar Torvik, Juan Fernando Vargas, Thierry Verdier, Andrea Vindigni, Alex Wolitzky, Pierre Yared, and Fabrizio Zilibotti.
    Many other people played very important roles in encouraging, challenging, and critiquing us over the years. We would particularly like to thank Lee Alston, Abhijit Banerjee, Robert Bates, Timothy Besley, John Coatsworth, Jared Diamond, Richard Easterlin, Stanley Engerman, Peter Evans, Jeff Frieden, Peter Gourevitch, Stephen Haber, Mark Harrison, Elhanan Helpman, Peter Lindert, Karl Ove Moene, Dani Rodrik, and Barry Weingast.
    Two people played a particularly significant role in shaping our views and encouraging our research, and we would like to take thisopportunity to express our intellectual debt and our sincere gratitude to them: Joel Mokyr, and Ken Sokoloff, who unfortunately passed away before this book was written. Ken is sorely missed by us both.
    We are also very grateful to the scholars who attended a conference we organized in February 2010 on an early version of our book manuscript at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. We would particularly like to thank the co-organizers, Jim Alt and Ken Shepsle, and our discussants at the conference: Robert Allen, Abhijit Banerjee, Robert Bates, Stanley Engerman, Claudia Goldin, Elhanan Helpman, Joel Mokyr, Ian Morris, Şevket Pamuk, Steve Pincus, and Peter Temin. We are also grateful to Melissa Dell, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Sándor László, Suresh Naidu, Roger Owen, Dan Trefler, Michael Walton, and Noam Yuchtman, who gave us extensive comments at the conference and at many other times.
    We are also grateful to Charles Mann, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, and David Webster for their expert advice.
    During much of the process of researching and writing this book we were both members of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIFAR) program on Institutions, Organizations, and Growth. We presented research related to this book many times at CIFAR meetings and have benefited hugely from the support of this wonderful organization and the scholars that it brings together.
    We also received comments from literally hundreds of people in various seminars and conferences on the material developed in this book, and we apologize for failing to attribute properly any suggestion, idea, or insight that we got from those presentations and discussions.
    We are also very grateful to María Angélica Bautista, Melissa Dell, and Leander Heldring for their superb research assistance on this project.
    Last, but certainly not least, we have been very fortunate to have a wonderful, insightful, and extremely supportive editor, John Mahaney. John’s comments and suggestions have greatly improved our book, and