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Why Nations Fails Book Review

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Why Nations Fails book review

Why Nations Fail In this essay, I am reviewing a book entitled Why Nations Fail written by Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson. The book was written in 2012, and the authors mention the ongoing Arab Spring as they were putting together their ideas in writing. This coincidence makes me wonder if these authors were also impacted by the information revolution or the information outburst as Nye (2013) often chooses to call. In fact, the authors did not mention the term ‘information revolution’ in the book; they simply state that Egyptians are on the street not because they are poor, as many scholars and political analysts suggest, but because power has resided in the hands of a few elites, and these elites have used political power to amass personal wealth at the expense of the bigger mass. But why the Egyptian revolution took place at this particular time, instead of a decade ago, for example? As far as I understand political theories, the answer lies behind globalization and information revolution which opened a new gate to information. That is, since billions of people around the globe are capable of reaching the internet (about 1.7 million according to Nye), many are able to read online news, or even watch them live as they are being broadcasted. Thus, it is possible to associate the Egyptian revolution or the Arab Spring to globalization and information revolution. Acemoglu et al, (2012) also indicate that Egypt’s ex-president, Hosni Mubarak gathered a huge amount of Egyptian wealth (about $70 billion), and this greediness might explain why a generation of the information revolution—one that does not tolerate unaccountability in public sectors—took its anger to the Tahrir Square. The central argument of the authors of the book is that nations become poor predominantly because their leaders are absolute, and thus are not willing to share power or develop an inclusive economic policy from which the mass would benefit. Before they present their...

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