Andrej Karpathy's Review of Why Nations Fail

“I read this as part of the Mark Zuckerberg book club :) Why are some nations rich and some poor? Is it geographical? Cultural? This book argues that, to a first order approximation, it is the economic and political institutions that influence this property, based on whether they are inclusive and pluralistic, or extractive, where a small elite rules over the population. The book goes over many examples of countries/regions throughout history, e.g. Maya, Rome, Venice, France/Spain/Britain/New World, and in modern days the focus is around South America, North vs. South America, Subsaharan Africa, and China. In each case, the authors point to the institutions as the source of the divide. In short, throughout history, small number of rich and powerful people have incentives to keep it that way. They do this by keeping the population misinformed (e.g. media control), conservative ("keep everything as is"), and by explicitly avoiding creative destruction that is core to sustained progress, b