Here is the link to to a very good lecture about: Why Nations Fail and down below is about the book the lecturer, has co-written.
To the video that is in my place for such stuff: Hyperpicture
http://hyperpicture.blogspot.se/2012/04/why-nations-fail-origins-of-power.html
20 May 2012 Update
The New York Review of Books
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
By Jared Diamond, June 7, 2012
Diamond´s final remark:
Why Nations Fail should be required reading for politicians and anyone concerned with economic development. The authors’ discussions of what can and can’t be done today to improve conditions in poor countries are thought-provoking and will stimulate debate. Donors and international agencies try to “engineer prosperity” either by foreign aid or by urging poor countries to adopt good economic policies. But there is widespread disappointment with the results of these well-intentioned efforts. Acemoglu and Robinson pithily diagnose the cause of these disappointing outcomes in their final chapter: “Attempting to engineer prosperity without confronting the root cause of the problems—extractive institutions and the politics that keeps them in place—is unlikely to bear fruit.”http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-makes-countries-rich-or-poor/?pagination=false
