Acemoglu/Robinson reply to Jeff Sachs

This blog had pointed to Jeff Sachs’ review of Why Nations Fail.

A/R duo respond to the criticism in their typical style.

Several people asked us why we haven’t responded to Jeffrey Sachs’s review of Why Nations Fail in Foreign Affairs. Well the answer was sort of in-between the lines in our response to Arvind Subramanian review (the original review is here and our response is here): we said that thoughtful reviews deserve thoughtful answers. What about not-so-thoughtful ones?

Be that as it may. We cave in to pressure.

Sachs charges that we are “simplistic” and our argument “contains a number of conceptual shortcomings”. But in each case, these are either just stated (and are wrong) or he is criticizing something we haven’t said. The Sachs strategy seems to be to throw a lot of mud, hoping that some of it would stick — did we say that we didn’t think it was quite thoughtful?

Let’s go through each one of his points in turn.

They look at a total eleven criticisms made by Sachs. Fabulous stuff.

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