Why Nations Fail

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
HIS BOOK IS
the culmination of fifteen years of
collaborative research, and along the way we have
accumulated a great deal of practical and intellectual debts.
Our greatest debt is to our long-term collaborator Simon
Johnson, who coauthored many of the key scientific papers
that shaped our understanding of comparative economic
development.
Our other coauthors, with whom we have worked on
related research projects, played a significant role in the
development of our views, and we would like to particularly
thank in this capacity Philippe Aghion, Jean-Marie Baland,
María Angélica Bautista, Davide Cantoni, Isaías Chaves,
Jonathan Conning, Melissa Dell, Georgy Egorov, Leopoldo
Fergusson, Camilo García-Jimeno, Tarek Hassan,
Sebastián Mazzuca, Jeffrey Nugent, Neil Parsons, Steve
Pincus, Pablo Querubín, Rafael Santos, Konstantin Sonin,
Davide Ticchi, Ragnar Torvik, Juan Fernando Vargas,
Thierry Verdier, Andrea Vindigni, Alex Wolitzky, Pierre
Yared, and Fabrizio Zilibotti.
Many other people played very important roles in
encouraging, challenging, and critiquing us over the years.
We would particularly like to thank Lee Alston, Abhijit
Banerjee, Robert Bates, Timothy Besley, John Coatsworth,
Jared Diamond, Richard Easterlin, Stanley Engerman,
Peter Evans, Jeff Frieden, Peter Gourevitch, Stephen
Haber, Mark Harrison, Elhanan Helpman, Peter Lindert,
Karl Ove Moene, Dani Rodrik, and Barry Weingast.
Two people played a particularly significant role in
shaping our views and encouraging our research, and we
would like to take this opportunity to express our intellectual
debt and our sincere gratitude to them: Joel Mokyr, and
Ken Sokoloff, who unfortunately passed away before this
book was written. Ken is sorely missed by us both.
We are also very grateful to the scholars who attended a
conference we organized in February 2010 on an early
version of our book manuscript at the Institute for

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Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. We would