By Cihan Güneş
Earlier this week we learned that Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, which has been long awaited because they have managed to create a serious literature. I can also say that their productivity in academia has been incredible. For example, I wanted to look at Acemoğlu’s works published in 2024, which he listed on Google Scholar. 25 in one year. Even if the majority of these are working papers, it requires a great effort to focus on nearly twenty different topics in roughly the same period of time. We have heard and known for years that Acemoğlu is a hard worker and spends most of his day working. That’s why I didn’t find it strange. I saw that the most cited work of all three of these scholars in their careers was the book “Why Nations Fail” and the article “The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation”, which is the precursor of this book. Therefore, it is clear that the book “Why Nations Fail” is the work that contains the strongest idea in their careers, and of course we have been paying attention for years to what these colleagues explain, how they explain, what examples they give, and even what they omit to explain.
This book has a history of more than ten years in our academic world. The book has been much discussed over the years. The majority of people liked it. It has also received serious criticism from time to time. But what I remember in recent years is that Acemoğlu was frequently invited to Turkey in the run-up to the May 14, 2023 elections. Although he did not make concrete statements about Turkey (he probably did not follow Turkey’s current data), he repeated his claims in this book and warned Turkey. Although he could not express his examples very clearly, he tried to explain that exclusionary institutions are becoming dominant in Turkey. However, in this book, he even mentioned the Ottoman Empire, but said nothing about modern Turkey. If he had something to say, why didn’t he write it? Interestingly, at a meeting of the CHP, we learned that he had been appointed as an economic advisor. I remember being very surprised because Acemoğlu, who we know from academia, as far as we know, had no ambition to do politics. He shouldn’t have had time for this kind of work. Then Ali Babacan, the leader of another opposition party, was citing this book as an example wherever he went. This book was so important that it became the official ideology manual of the opposition table of six. It was an obligation for us Turkish social scientists to re-evaluate this book, which could have been the main source of governance for the opposition. However, although this book has been evaluated almost to the extent of creating a literature abroad, it has not been seriously evaluated in Turkey despite being a bestseller. A few blurbs. A few newspaper columns criticizing it. Moreover, apart from a few historians like Şükrü Hanioğlu, no economic historian from Turkey has expressed an opinion. I waited for the great professors of economic historiography in Turkey, whose knowledge I trusted. Since they did not express an opinion in such a long time, I decided to write my opinion, thinking that it was my right to do so. This is the reason for the lateness of this article.
I was a PhD student when this book came out. I remember reading it piece by piece in reading groups of economic historians and discussing each chapter amongst ourselves before it was even translated. The book had a fascinating way of drawing the reader in with its narrative style. It was extremely fluent and professionally written. The references in the book, from Adam Smith to Dani Rodrik, were interesting. It is very likely that they had editorial support. Because Acemoğlu’s articles were not this fluent. (I remember that we were tortured trying to read Kenneth Pomeranz’s “The Great Divergence” in our reading group before. One of our friends even sent an e-mail to the lecturer. How did you write this text so incomprehensible?) One of the reasons why the book attracted attention was that it was a “grand theory” type of work. It claims to be able to explain big questions systematically. Nowadays, this kind of thesis is not seen much in academia. Academics are now producing cause and effect from quick and small applications without taking risks or spending a lot of time. The big questions are not asked or answered by brilliant social scientists. I remember being impressed by the book Why Nations Fail in such an environment at the time, but as I gained experience in the field, the content of the book started to diminish in my eyes. Many mistakes and shortcomings started to catch my eye. This book is such a work that the examples in it are like the Encyclopedia Britannica! There are examples from Peru, Jamaica and even Greenland. Of course, I am not knowledgeable enough or an encyclopedia reader to interpret the political systems in Greenland! But I can at least comment on how they approach the subject, how they try to solve a problem. My aim is not to cast a shadow on their Nobel Prize in Economics in the eyes of the reader. It is only and only to open up for discussion issues that do not make sense to me. In a scientific world where even Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein can be wrong, anyone can be wrong. No matter how famous the claimants are, they are not exempt from criticism. Because we will arrive at the truth through discussion.
Even if it was not the fault of the authors of the book, the title of the book in Turkish always caught my eye. I think it was a wrong choice to translate the title “Why nations fail” as “The Fall of Nations”. In fact, there is no basic rule of translation. Mot a mot translations can sometimes be very unpleasant. So the translator may prefer to use words that express the meaning better. I can accept it so far. But the expression “The Fall of Nations” does not fulfill the content of the book in terms of meaning. It creates the impression that nations that have achieved a certain level of economic success have fallen back from that level. However, the authors are not telling a story of decline. They are telling a direct story of failure. Therefore, I think the title should have been translated literally. I am not a linguist, but I was also struck by some subject-predicate mismatches in the book and the strange choice of words for some concepts. I must also express my surprise that Acemoğlu, one of the authors, did not intervene in this title and its content despite his knowledge of Turkish. He had time to advise the opposition parties in Turkey. But he did not have time to read the Turkish version of the book that explains his most important idea!
Having made this long introduction, I would now like to list my thoughts on the content of the book. This book basically questions the most ancient topic of economic historiography. And that is why some countries are richer and others poorer. This question is almost the same age as the emergence of economics. There have been many answers to this question over the last 250 years. The answers in the literature can be grouped into several categories such as race, geography, culture, ignorance, luck, imperialism, etc. This book explains that such views are wrong and that the most fundamental factor is institutions. The claim of institutions is not actually Acemoğlu’s thesis. While it is possible to trace institutionalism back to Veblen, the foundations of the new institutionalism that Acemoğlu joined were laid in the 1940s with Ronald Coase. Over time, many great economists such as Oliver Williamson and Douglass North developed this idea theoretically. The theoretical addition of this book is the division of institutions into inclusive and exclusive. In fact, at this point, we have to admit that they succeeded in revising North’s similar discourse, albeit slightly. Other than that, it is clear that they do not bring a theoretical approach that is very different from the institutionalists before them.
The book is most critical of the assumption that geography is destiny. The authors decided to throw their strongest punches in the first part of the book. Instead of the classical academic style of first explaining the theory and then giving the evidence, they preferred to give the example first and then reach the theory from there. The example they give in the first sentence of the book is the summary of the whole book. The book starts with a city called Nogales, which I had never heard of before. This city is divided into two by a fence. The north was within the borders of the USA and the south was within the borders of Mexico. Therefore, two different institutions were built in the same geography. They cite the difference in economic success between them as proof of their theory. From this point of view, it seems really logical. But why should we only consider physical geography? Aren’t the borders that make up political geography also included in geography? Those who claim that geography is destiny are perhaps trying to express that they would have lived more prosperously if they had been born in the country 200 meters across the border. For some reason, they have preferred to evaluate geography in a narrow sense. Jared Diamond’s bestseller “Guns, Germs and Steel”, which states that geography is an important factor, is mentioned on page 55. They begin by emphasizing that Diamond is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist. However, when describing Max Weber or Karl Marx, they did not feel the need to mention their professions.
I guess they felt the need to emphasize that the person they are criticizing is not an economist or a social scientist so that they can beat him more easily. They say that Diamond’s argument cannot explain the town of Nogales or the North-South Korean dilemma. The authors may be right about that, but Diamond’s book, as far as I remember, did not aim to explain such contradictions of the modern world. He wanted to know how it all started, that is, its origins. According to Diamond’s account, thousands of years ago, people living in New Guinea had to labor for days to use the sap between the bark of trees to feed themselves, while wheat and barley were available in the Fertile Crescent. Can it really be said that geography has no influence on the difference in prosperity between hunter-gatherer societies from these two different regions? So, when examining the differences in the development of prehistoric societies that Diamond cites as an example, should we look to patent laws for inclusive institutions? In fact, even in the modern world, we cannot say that geographical conditions have no influence on wealth. For example, living in an oil region does not guarantee that a region will become richer. We know this from today’s example of Venezuela. But isn’t it advantageous compared to Mongolia? In fact, if the authors of the book had given Diamond his due and said that political institutions in the modern world have begun to overcome geographical conditions, they would have reached an acceptable conclusion. But this time, since they cannot claim to have refuted Diamond, the book will not be a bestseller. It was necessary to bring down the king to sit on the throne! For the sake of being popular, they highlighted examples that supported their thesis and falsified everything else.
They also rejected the determinants of economic development such as religion, culture and morality. Weber’s famous thesis is attacked under this heading. But do faith and culture have no influence at all? In medieval Catholicism, where interest was forbidden, did this belief have no effect on the economy? Then a new heading was opened under the name of the ignorance hypothesis. They stated that the economic failure caused by economists and politicians not knowing how to deal with market failures was exaggerated. So did rational economists and politicians create the German hyperinflation of 1923? Even in a big country like the USA, we learned 40 years later that the reason why the 1929 Depression lasted as long as 3 years according to some and 7 years according to others was the lack of intervention in the shrinking money supply. Wasn’t the failure in these two examples due to the ignorance of the decision-making actors? Of course, neither culture, nor ignorance, nor geography, nor institutions alone can give us a formula for prosperity or failure that can be valid in all parts of the world and in all periods of time.
All of them have had more or less influence in the course of history. Interestingly, they chose not to mention the Marxist-Leninist claim of imperialism, which has lost much credibility in serious academic circles. More precisely, in chapter 5, they opened the subject of Soviet Russia. They attribute it to the exclusionary institutions of the Soviet regime and argue that the political choice led to its failure. The authors may be right in this respect. After all, economic failure brought down the Soviet regime that even the Second World War could not destroy. Given this conclusion, it seems easy to describe Soviet institutions as exclusionary and score an empty goal. But why don’t they test their basic claims against the idea of imperialism, which was the main argument of the Soviet regime? However, the Marxist-Leninist claim of imperialism was an idea that was strong enough to build a state. Max Weber or Jared Diamond never had such an opportunity or power! Where is the dependency theory or Wallerstein’s center-periphery thesis? And why don’t the authors of this book test their own ideas with these theories that ask the same question to the same economic history? As far as we understand the spirit of the book, it is clear that they would have tried to falsify them even if they had addressed these issues. But we are no longer living in the 1970s. There have already been strong criticisms in this field. Attacking Marxist-Leninist based views would no longer bring any popularity. Maybe that’s why they didn’t mention it.
Since the book is aimed at a general readership, it includes a lot of historical examples. There are many examples from different societies from different centuries. The authors jump from here to there. The book turns into soup in this abundance of examples. Most of the time it falls into repetition. Therefore, although the book is written in a fluent style, it tires the reader. If the book had been in the hands of a good editor, perhaps it could have been refined. But what is more troubling is that none of the historical examples given are analyzed in depth. When a historical example is given, Wikipedia-level information is listed chronologically (this criticism has been made by others). The relevant example then supports its own claims. There are three main problems with this method. The first is the issue of researcher blindness. Researchers with bad intentions (sloppy if well-intentioned) tend to select examples that support their theories. Sometimes this is conscious. Sometimes it happens unconsciously because of researcher blindness. For example, to avoid this mistake, I spend a lot of time reviewing the literature. When I write, I read it over and over again at intervals of a few days. If I am not sure, I have others read it. We do not know whether the authors have this concern or not.
However, the fact that they have chosen only those who support their own claims from thousands of years of human history while choosing examples for the most fundamental problem of humanity, and that they have repeated this over and over again, points to an ethical problem that goes beyond the blindness of the researcher. The second problem with this narrative style they have chosen is that they do not examine the historical examples in depth or do not have the opportunity to go deeper than listing examples. This error is more serious. There are many examples of this, but I would like to illustrate what I mean with the Ottoman example in the book. The Ottoman example is included in the book to give examples of exclusionary institutions. For example, on page 59 they write the following sentence; “It was not its geography that impoverished the Middle East. It was the expansion and strengthening of the Ottoman Empire, and it is the institutional legacy of this empire that keeps the Middle East poor today.” Now this is a very big claim.
It would take years of research just to prove this claim. Forget myself, even our professors who have spent a lifetime in the Ottoman archives have not made such a claim. Of course, the authors of the book may have seen what the experienced professors of the field could not see. But what is the source of their ambitious ideas? There is none. In fact, I am writing in capital letters: NONE. Unbelievable. Look! Putting forward a scientifically based thesis is like writing a prosecution indictment. If you put forward a thesis, you have to write the evidence. You cannot just throw words around and run away. Many questions come to mind regarding this claim for which there is no evidence. What does Ottoman expansion and strengthening mean? If he is talking about geographical expansion, where was the influence of geography? If Ottoman institutions are the reason why the Middle East is poor today, what is the reason for the poverty in the part of the Middle East that was not under Ottoman rule? Why don’t you explain the Middle East in terms of the parts that belonged to the Ottomans and the parts that didn’t belong to the Ottomans, when you can even find the unnamed city of Nogara on the world map, separate it with a ruler and explain it?
Besides, the Ottoman Empire was not a homogeneous, stable structure. Which century of the Ottoman Empire are you talking about? And if economic historians can detect economic growth in port cities like Istanbul, Izmir and Trabzon, did the same institutions fail in the Middle East? If there was a failure (by the way, it has not been tested whether the Ottoman Middle East was a failure or not), can one generalize when success is observed in another region? Why were the 19th century Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, legal codifications, trademark registration and patent laws not inclusive institutions? These were the first questions that quickly came to my mind when I read the relevant sentence. After a lot of historical examples from different societies, from different centuries, on pages 116 and 117, they bring up the Ottoman Empire again. After mentioning World War II, Japan and the Soviets in the previous paragraph, they jump to the 15th century Ottoman Empire in the next paragraph. They open up new questions in the reader’s mind before they have fully grasped the previous topic. Perhaps this preferred narrative style is to hide the fact that they are unable to analyze historical examples in depth. If we go back to the Ottoman example of the book, on pages 116-117 we see that they decided to explain the sentence I wrote above, which they mentioned on page 59. So I focus on what they wrote with complete curiosity.
In the first sentence they wrote: “Just as the political and economic institutions of Latin America were shaped by Spanish colonialism for 500 years, those of the Middle East were shaped by Ottoman colonialism.” They carry the same claim further this time. They state that Ottoman institutions were exclusionary/colonialist. Again, it is not clear which century’s Ottomans! This time they have also continued the sentence. In 1453, Mehmet II captured Constantinople (not Istanbul!) and made it the capital. For the rest of the century they conquered the Balkans and the rest of Turkey. From there they spread to the Middle East and then to Africa. In between came Suleiman the Magnificent, and by the time he died, the geography of the state stretched from I don’t know where to I don’t know where. Look at the pretentious sentence they wrote at the beginning of the relevant paragraph. Look at the Wikipedia-like review they write afterwards. In the same paragraph, they continue as follows: “The Ottoman Empire was absolutist. Sultans were responsible to very few people and did not share power with anyone.” Then, looking at the examples given in the same paragraph, the following question is asked: Was there democracy in the world when Istanbul was conquered? Was there a parliament in Europe but not in the Ottoman Empire? This is one of the most important problems of the book: Failure to explain historical examples with the spirit of the time, with the conditions of the period. Unfortunately, there are dozens of examples of such mistakes in the book.
I wondered where they learned about the Ottoman Empire, what were the sources that led them to this conclusion. They even examined articles/books on the history of Ethiopia and Uzbekistan. They did not examine a single source on the Ottoman Empire, which they claim exploited the entire Middle East. Therefore, we can easily say that the claim that the Ottoman Empire caused the Middle East to remain backward stems from the fantasy world of the authors. Moreover, even in the case of other countries, I believe that one cannot make a “Grand Theory” with secondary sources. What is always essential for scientists is to interpret the main source by examining it. Literature can be reviewed from secondary sources such as articles/books. But you can get the main information from the primary source and build your theory that way. Because the secondary articles and books you examine can also be wrong. Historical methodology requires doing this.
If we were to ask the authors of the book about all this, they would say that our aim was not to explain the Ottoman Empire. So why are you making big words about things you don’t know and don’t want to research? Let’s say you did. How do you show these as evidence for your big idea that will win you the Nobel Prize in economics in the future? Let’s see, you have shown that too. How can we economic historians take unsupported, evidence-free claims seriously. Fortunately, the authors don’t need our attention. According to Google scholar, this book has been cited 17,000 times. In my opinion, the number of citations is no longer an indicator of value. Because this rating shows how popular the work is. Not how valuable it is. And the goal of scientists should not be to prioritize popularity.
As a result, this book has turned into a work that is over-generalizing, manipulates history to serve its own purpose, selects biased examples, throws hundreds of confusing and irrelevant examples in front of the reader, fails to examine any of the examples in depth, and overestimates the importance of institutions that we already know. While the idea of institutions being effective in economic success is undoubted, this state of the book has rendered the work worthless in my opinion. It could have been done better, but it would not have been a bestseller with the general readership behind it. I think it is quite sad that the subject was manipulated for the sake of being popular. It may be a bit harsh to say that Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson did not deserve the Nobel Prize in economics. It may also be unfair to destroy their entire careers with a single book. Anyway, the prize is not usually awarded to a single work. After this book, I had my doubts. The authors’ ambitious articles in the same framework should also be evaluated. But I think they do not have as revolutionary views as Coase or North. These people created a school of economics out of nothing by discovering the economic impact of institutions that economics could not understand for hundreds of years. When we remove this brick in the structure, all that remains of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson is beautiful math and statistics.
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