The rule of law is a key part of a nations success as argued by AJR. A very good exposition for the layman on the rule of law provided by Tom Bingham in the eponymous 'The Rule of Law):https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7734691-the-rule-of-law

While the above is informed by the UK's constitutional arrangement, the 8 principles are near universal when considering nations that have or aim for The Rule of Law.

The principles are:

(1) The law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable.

(2) Questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved by application of the law and not the exercise of discretion.

(3) The laws of the land should apply equally to all, save to the extent that objective differences justify differentiation.

(4) Ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.

(5) The law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights.

(6) Means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide civil disputes which the parties themselves are unable to resolve.

(7) The adjudicative procedures provided by the state should be fair.

(8) The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law.

I also recommend Acemolgu's recent book "Power and Progress" on the relationship between labor and technology [0].

If you don't like reading, Acemoglu gave a talk about it at HKS recently [1]

[0] - https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2023/longl...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT0NzlATjf0

After reading "Why Nations Fail", which I really enjoyed, I wondered whether we could develop an LLM with a wide enough context window where I could input the lessons from such books along with data and metrics about a specific country. Then, the AI could prescribe tangible solutions and policy recommendations tailored to that nation's unique situation. I'm curious what an AI system like that might look like. I also wonder if it's possible to experiment with a smaller-scale version of this concept using today's technology.

> Krugman

Not sure I'd spend time on a Krugman book. He predicted in 1998 that the internet would cease having an economic impact by 2005 and that it would be no greater than fax machines. He's like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of economics.

I read the summary from the review and I am not convinced that neoliberal US and EU have a less extractive governance structure than China has, as the authors seem to claim. It's been a decade since the book was published and China is still going strong. We will see.

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> Wage Effects: AI's productivity benefits may not substantially raise wages, particularly for low-skill workers.

Yeah no shit. It’s going to spike them down hard.

Not being the original does not make it any less meaningful. Repeating the same "Not real Nobel" spiel every time Nobel price in Economics is discussed as it is some kind of refutation is silly.

>Is there any reason

Yes there is. Nobel committee has accepted Nobel in economics as one of the Nobel prices. Its in their website, in their documents and its given out in the same ceremony in Stockholm. Laureates are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

"created by a bank "

Sveriges Riksbank is the central bank of Sweden. It's not a just some random private bank.

> The Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars of Science”, recognizes the world’s top scientists working in the fundamental sciences – the disciplines that ask the biggest questions and find the deepest explanations.

> Each prize is $3 million and presented in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics.

> The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. The Prizes have been sponsored by the personal foundations established by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.

https://breakthroughprize.org/About

We already have the Turing Award, and a prize sponsored by Google.

It's not even a non-original Nobel. It's simply "Not a Nobel Prize".

The headline should read "Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson won Not a Nobel Prize in Economics."

We shouldn't validate the idea that one can earn a Nobel in economics. It's simply not possible because such a prize does not exist. Shame on economists for attempting to legitimize economics using the memory of Alfred Nobel. It is low, even for them.

> Is there any reason Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk can't endow a Prize in Computer Science?

Even without searching, I'm sure they back a number of organizations that do endow various awards, scholarships, and so on. I doubt they could come up with a "flagship" one that would be as prestigious as the Nobel Prize, though. Our attitudes toward modern-day "industrialists" and their pet projects are quite different today. Whatever controversies surround the Nobel Prize, they would be many times worse for the Bezos-Gates-Zuck-Musk Medal of Merit.

Is CS even a real discipline when a physicist (or two) can win the Turing Award? /s

i don’t fully understand your post, but I don’t think

“grassroots organization against oppression is the only tool that works to preserve freedom for the majority of the people in a country”

is a good takeaway for native americans and i struggle to imagine a counterfactual where native americans having this knowledge at the start of colonization would make any significant difference to the course of events

In most settler-colonial situations during history, unless strict separation between races and nations was maintained, the conquerors intermingled with the conquered so thoroughly that you cannot tell them apart nowadays (Who is a Norman and who is an Anglo-Saxon? Who is a Roman and who is a Celt?). That included a lot of Amerindians in the US.

This is pretty much the norm across the ages. You could probably say that it is wise from the vanquished to adapt at least partially the culture of the conquerors; after all, it might be better suited for victories in wars, and that was a major factor in survival until recently. (In some places, still is.)

Well it’s kind of a moot point if we only care about “those who survive”.

> Seems like one conclusion that can be drawn is that the indigenous people who get colonized should just shut up and enjoy their new reservations

Colonial institutions ARE extractive.

This is a fairly prominent point in Acemoglu, Simon, and Robinson's works.

Their seminal book literally opens with explaining how most colonial institutions were created to extract the wealth of natives and slaves, institutions that live on today through the authoritarian regimes that inherited them.

> indigenous people who get colonized

Academic talking points. Talk about the indigenous Irish who got "colonized" by the Celts, or the Britons who got "colonized" by the Saxons, Danes, and Normans, or the native American tribes who got "colonized" by other tribes, or the Gauls who got "colonized" by migrant tribes.

The fact is, everyone is on "stolen land" including the "indigenous." The Spaniards were more exploitive than the English and other northern Europeans (look up "Potosi"), but that doesn't make the latter perfect.

The New World was going to be integrated with the Old World sooner or later, no matter who did it.

Here is what your boy Branko Milanovic says: https://x.com/BrankoMilan/status/1845850368221032590

> Good decision. They deserve it. Obviously, there is a lot to disagree with in their work, but AJR initial papers were excellent, and broadened economic work to include politics and economic history. Congratulations!

There’s nothing racist about stating that strong institutions and rule of law lead to economic success.

It’s an obvious truth, which many Africans reject for some reason. I’m Nigerian, and my country is a clear example of how excessive corruption and dependence on a natural resource (oil) makes a country mediocre.

> defined Acemoglu's naive theorizing

It sounds like you are parroting arguments without explaining those arguments.

"Wikipedia entries with regressions" is a facile argument that can be applied to Picketty and Milanovic as well.

Plus, Milanovic congratulated AJR and agreed to a number of their initial works in the space (which are the ones that won them the Nobel)

> The narrative that you can get economic growth with "good institutions" is a fable

Bullshit. We don't invest in Uganda or Kenya because we know we won't be able to get a contract enforced.

A major reason FDI to PRC skyrocketed in the 2000s was because individual provinces worked on building SEZs with ease of contract enforcement, as well as a number of harmonizing business regulation reforms (eg. the Guiding Cases Project).

And that same FDI outflow from China that we are now seeing is due to the opaqueness that now permeates the judicial and regulatory environemnt in China after a number of backwards reforms in 2018-22.

> it can't explain why Western economies like the US have prospered despite being as corrupt as China is today.

Over a century of major reforms and regulations.

This was a major reason why the PRC began the Guiding Cases project.

More rules doesn’t mean stronger rule of law.

Having lots of weakly enforced or discretionary laws is net worse for rule of law and a stable non-corrupt society.

The slow and messy process of reaching consensus (or close) via a complex web of institutions help “western” (in the sense that Kotkin uses) societies avoid really bad policy and adapt to mistakes.

Some people are frustrated by this and think it would be much better to substitute their judgment for this process. They don’t necessarily hold this view selfishly or maliciously, they are just short sighted.

The pro-Trump tech folks are 90% about crypto. It's single-issue politics, like abortion or gun rights.

Scratch the surface on a SV Trump supporter like Marc Andreessen, and you'll find a big bag of crypto that they want to keep dumping on retail investors.