Free Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoğlu, James Robinson

Singapore, and South Korea. The prosperity of these latter three is in turn part of a broader pattern in which many East Asian nations, including Taiwan and subsequently China, have experienced recent rapid growth.
    The bottom of the world income distribution paints as sharp and as distinctive a picture as the top. If you instead make a list of the poorest thirty countries in the world today, you will find almost all of them in sub-Saharan Africa. They are joined by countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and Nepal, which, though not in Africa, all share something critical with African nations, as we’ll explain. If you went back fifty years, the countries in the top and bottom thirty wouldn’t be greatly different. Singapore and South Korea would not be among the richest countries, and there would be several different countriesin the bottom thirty, but the overall picture that emerged would be remarkably consistent with what we see today. Go back one hundred years, or a hundred and fifty, and you’d find nearly the same countries in the same groups.
    Map 3 shows the lay of the land in 2008. The countries shaded in the darkest color are the poorest in the world, those where average per-capita incomes (called by economists GDP, gross domestic product) are less than $2,000 annually. Most of Africa is in this color, as are Afghanistan, Haiti, and parts of Southeast Asia (for example, Cambodia and Laos). North Korea is also among this group of countries. The countries in white are the richest, those with annual income per-capita of $20,000 or more. Here we find the usual suspects: North America, western Europe, Australasia, and Japan.
    Another interesting pattern can be discerned in the Americas. Make a list of the nations in the Americas from richest to poorest. You will find that at the top are the United States and Canada, followed by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay, and maybe also Venezuela, depending on the price of oil. After that you have Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Peru. At the bottom there is another distinct, much poorer group, comprising Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay. Go back fifty years, and you’ll find an identical ranking. One hundred years: same thing. One hundred and fifty years: again the same. So it is not just that the United States and Canada are richer than Latin America; there is also a definite and persistent divide between the rich and poor nations within Latin America.
    A final interesting pattern is in the Middle East. There we find oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which have income levels close to those of our top thirty. Yet if the oil price fell, they would quickly fall back down the table. Middle Eastern countries with little or no oil, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, all cluster around a level of income similar to that of Guatemala or Peru. Without oil, Middle Eastern countries are also all poor, though, like those in Central America and the Andes, not so poor as those in sub-Saharan Africa.
    While there is a lot of persistence in the patterns of prosperity we see around us today, these patterns are not unchanging or immutable. First, as we have already emphasized, most of current world inequality emerged since the late eighteenth century, following on the tails of the Industrial Revolution. Not only were gaps in prosperity much smaller as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, but the rankings which have been so stable since then are not the same when we go further back in history. In the Americas, for example, the ranking we see for the last hundred and fifty years was completely different five hundred years ago. Second, many nations have experienced several decades of rapid growth, such as much of East Asia since the Second World War and, more recently, China. Many of these subsequently saw that growth go into reverse. Argentina, for example, grew rapidly for five decades up until 1920, becoming one of the richest countries in the