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

I have to be upfront about something before diving into this review, I'm genuinely bad at math, and I'm equally bad at economics. My knowledge of economics is, let's say, subpar at best, and it's something I try to remedy whenever I get the chance, picking up books here and there to slowly patch the gaps. I first heard of Mr. Acemoğlu through our local media here in Turkey, since he's a fellow Turk who made it big internationally, and once he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, I decided to give this book a shot. Going in, I knew basically nothing about his political or economic views, and I had little to no background in economic theory to draw on. So as you read this review, keep that context in mind, this isn't coming from an economist or someone with a strong academic foundation in the subject, this is coming from a fairly average reader trying to understand a complex topic for the first time.

So what's this book actually about? In short, Acemoğlu and Robinson set out to answer one big question, why are some countries rich and others poor. Not down to weather, not down to geography, not down to culture either, even though that's usually what most people assume when they think about it. Their answer is institutions, basically the rules a country sets up for itself, and whether those rules let regular people actually participate in the economy and politics, or whether they're built to funnel everything, money and power both, into the hands of a small elite at the top. They call the first kind inclusive institutions and the second kind extractive institutions, and pretty much the whole book is built around proving that difference with examples pulled from all over history, ancient Rome, the Soviet Union, colonial Latin America, North versus South Korea, you name it.

This book leaves me genuinely conflicted, as someone who's economically hard left-leaning but somewhere more in the middle socially. The reason I say that is because, throughout the book, the author repeatedly insists that culture has essentially nothing to do with why some countries end up poor, even though that's an assumption a lot of right-leaning people tend to make. And I really like that. It directly refutes race and culture-based supremacist thinking, the idea that certain countries or peoples are just inherently more industrious or civilized than others, and that's something I can always get behind, no matter what else the book gets right or wrong. The core framework the book builds everything around is a simple binary, inclusive institutions versus extractive institutions. Inclusive institutions are the ones that let ordinary people actually participate in the economy and politics, protect property rights broadly, and create real incentive for innovation, while extractive institutions are designed from the top down to funnel wealth and power into the hands of a narrow elite, at the expense of everyone else. According to Acemoğlu and Robinson, that single distinction, more than geography, more than climate, more than culture, is what ultimately decides whether a nation thrives or stagnates.

What I really don't like, and what left me genuinely conflicted, is how heavily the authors downplay the role of colonialism throughout the book. As far as I remember, they spend a good amount of time comparing different colonial powers, Spain, Portugal, and England specifically, using the differences between how each set up their colonial institutions to support their broader argument about inclusive versus extractive systems. And look, I agree with the core premise of the book, it's genuinely hard to argue against the evidence they lay out for how institutions shape long-term prosperity. But downplaying the role colonialism itself played in building up the wealth of these nations, that hard, just doesn't sit right with me. I mean, where would the UK's entire economic position even be without the free labor, stolen resources, and extracted wealth that colonialism handed them for centuries? I'm writing this review in 2026, at a point where the UK no longer holds any colonies, and its economy has been visibly decaying for years now. That timing alone feels like it should say something the book doesn't really want to sit with.

As for the writing style itself, it's okay, nothing particularly bad about it, but sometimes it gets genuinely boring to read, and more than a few times I found myself taking breaks from it just to get through certain sections. That said, I'll admit that might partly be on me rather than the book itself, since I feel like I have to read books like this to fill in gaps in my knowledge, rather than genuinely enjoying reading about economics for its own sake, so take that with a grain of salt. Beyond just the pacing issue, though, the book does repeat itself a lot structurally. The entire book, at its core, is really just example after example of inclusive versus extractive institutions playing out across different countries and time periods, nothing more, nothing less. If that's exactly what you're looking for, a deep, example-driven case for this one core framework, you'll walk away completely satisfied. But if you're looking for something a bit more, more nuance, more counterarguments seriously engaged with, more variation in structure, like I was, you'll probably end up a little disappointed the way I did.

One of my bigger problems with the book comes down to this. Sure, free markets matter, I'm not disputing that, but the real question for me is how free is too free. To be clear, I fully agree that extractive institutions are bad, there's no version of this where I'd defend those, that part of the argument is solid and honestly kind of undeniable. But I don't think inclusive economies need to mean fully unregulated, hands-off free markets either, and at times I felt like the book was blurring that line. In my opinion, a free market left completely unchecked, with no real guardrails or regulation, can spiral out of control just as easily as an extractive one can concentrate power, just through a different mechanism. There were multiple points throughout the book where I genuinely felt like the authors were bordering on neoliberalism, treating market freedom almost as an unquestionable good in itself, rather than something that also needs boundaries and oversight to actually stay inclusive in practice rather than just in name.

On top of that, and as I mentioned earlier in the colonialism part of my review, the authors sometimes seem to conveniently gloss over or ignore parts of history when it doesn't quite fit the point they're trying to make. It's not that the historical examples they do use are wrong exactly, they're generally well-researched and accurate as far as I can tell, but there's a selectiveness to which parts of the story get emphasized and which parts get quietly skipped over or minimized. Colonialism is the clearest example of this for me, but it didn't feel like an isolated case, it felt more like a pattern throughout the book, where inconvenient complications to the inclusive-versus-extractive framework get smoothed over rather than genuinely wrestled with. For a book built almost entirely on historical case studies, that selective framing ends up undercutting some of my trust in the broader argument, even when I agree with the general direction it's pointing in.

Overall, this was an okay read for me. The book could have been shorter, and honestly, I expected a bit more depth going in than what I actually got. If you're someone like me, who doesn't know a lot about economics and is looking to learn more, you won't get everything you need from this book alone, but you will walk away with a solid, foundational premise to build on.

3 out of 5 stars.