In what might be a rather embarrassing psychological avoidance mechanism, the prospect of reading more about the many horrible things various people did to Virginia Roberts Giuffre made me put
Nobody's Girl to the side and instead go back to
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, which zompist reviewed here:
https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/08/2 ... ions-fail/
I'm somewhere between one third and halfway through the book. Interesting thoughts. I quite like the way they sometimes mention imperial colonies and Stalinist regimes in one breath as very similar examples of what they call "extractive" systems where not much prosperity can be expected. That's a fun way to troll and annoy tankies, and, for that matter, right-wing colonialism apologists.
That said, I already have the impression that they are sometimes stretching things to the breaking point to maintain the story they're trying to tell, by bending their categories so that everything fits into the category their story requires to be in.
For instance, they acknowledge that sometimes, there's economic growth, even rapid economic growth, under some types of what they call "extractive" systems. But they assert that this is always temporary. Well, what kind of economic growth isn't? Sounds to me suspiciously as if they've built their theory in such a way so that economic growth under
any kind of system neatly confirms their theory.
They sometimes seem to have a "convenient" way of deciding what's an "extractive" and what's an "inclusive" system. For instance, in the decades after 1688, both England/Britain and Poland were de facto ruled by a large oligarchy with a relatively weak monarch at the top. In England/Britain, the monarch was implicitly a creature of the oligarchy; in Poland the king was explicitly elected by the oligarchy. England/Britain was doing fairly well economically during that time; Poland, apparently less so. The authors explain that the English/British oligarchy of that time was "broad-based" and "inclusive", while the Polish one was "extractive". But they don't seem to elaborate much on that point. A cynic might say that they call the English/British system of that time "inclusive" because it
has to be "inclusive" in order for their theory to work, and that they call the Polish system of that time "extractive" because it
has to be "extractive" in order for their theory to work.
They have an, IMO, disturbing tendency to equate free markets and individual freedom. Now, I think that, if you measure individual freedom not based on legalistic standards, but based on how many real opportunities to choose between different options actually exist in the lives of most people, not just in the sense that they're theoretically legally allowed to do something, but in the sense that they
can really do it, then most people will effectively have the less individual freedom the closer their society is to a pure free-market system.
Early in the book, they bring up, discuss, and try to refute various
other possible explanations for differences in wealth between different places. I think at that point, they should at least have
mentioned the "It's all just looting and plunder"-theory. That's the idea, apparently popular in some of the less sophisticated parts of the Left, that wealth and prosperity would, naturally, exist to the same extent everywhere in the world, and that, if some places are wealthier than others, that was clearly because they stole the wealth of other places. Now, I don't agree with that idea. For a start, the only major imperial powers whose wealth was probably
all just stolen from their colonies were Portugal and Spain, and those two were, historically, among the poorest ones of the imperial powers, and among the ones with the strongest tendency towards domestic authoritarianism. And, there's a lot more overall wealth in the world today than there was at the start of the colonial era. That wouldn't be possible if all that would have happened during that time would have been wealth being moved around through theft. But, the whole idea has a strong intuitive appeal, and it looks as if it fits the historical facts well if you don't look too closely, so I think the authors should at least have acknowledged it.
So far, they never seem to have gotten the idea that a system can be effectively very much what they call "extractive" even if it is legally a free-market economy. That's what the world seems to be moving towards right now. But perhaps they'll get to that later in the book.
One interesting minor point: long ago, Jane Jacobs argued, against the traditional view at the time, that early cities (well, permanent settlements that were big by the standards of the time) had appeared not after, and as a consequence of, the development of agriculture, but before, and as a
cause of it. The authors seem to tell us that modern archeological research has at least partly confirmed Jacobs' position.
On the whole, I think I should withhold judgment until I've finished the book.
There was some important difference between England and Poland in 1688. After all, just over a century later, Britain was well on its way to dominating the world and Poland was gone. And the difference is surely not restricted to events of that century.
