Daron Acemoglu

The people who suffer from the extractive economic institutions cannot hope for absolutist rulers to voluntarily change political institutions and redistribute power in society. The only way to change these political institutions is to force the elite to create more pluralistic institutions.

Wael Khalil, the software engineer and blogger who emerged as one of the leaders of the Egyptian protest movement,

Not only do you risk robbery, but getting all the permissions and greasing all the palms just to open is no easy endeavor

Other aspects, such as the extent to which people trust each other or are able to cooperate, are important but they are mostly an outcome of institutions, not an independent cause

we will show, poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty.

They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose.

We are living in an age that is even more blindly optimistic and more elitist about technology than the times of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. As we document in , people making the big decisions are once again deaf to the suffering created in the name of progress

In fact, a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing abundantly clear: there is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity. Whether they do or not is an economic, social, and political choice.

Optimism regarding shared benefits from technological progress is founded on a simple and powerful idea: the “productivity bandwagon

First, productivity growth increases the demand for workers as businesses attempt to boost profits by expanding output and hiring more people. Second, the demand for more workers increases the wages that need to be offered to attract and retain employees. Unfortunately, neither step is assured, as we explain in the next two sections.