For starters, it's important to realize that it is not a history book. Acemoglu and Robinson are both economists that are also well known in political science. They are interested in developing a general theory for why some nations are rich while others are poor. They are not trying to offer a holistic explanation for why any particular nation is rich or poor. If their theory is supported by historical evidence from multiple cases, then their theory likely has some truth to it, but it is not THE final explanation for why any single country or region is rich or poor.

Regarding their actual theory, I think it makes sense as far as it goes. Different political and economic institutions create different incentives for producers. Inclusive institutions lead to wide spread economic growth, and exclusive institutions allow elites to concentrate wealth at the expense of the rest of society. Geography and cultural hypotheses have limited explanatory power because countries like North and South Korea, or East and West German, have/had very similar geography and culture, but different economic trajectories.

Where I think their argument is weakest is that they don't really develop a theory for how institutions come to be or change over time. The roots of today's institutions are always located at some place in the past, which casts people today as having very little agency or control over conditions within society. Mexico is poor because when the Spanish showed up they were able to place themselves at the top of the Aztec's political system and take their gold. So Mexico developed exploitative institutions. The U.S. is rich because settlers did not find gold, and the Native Americans there weren't united under any central authority, so Europeans had to develop institutions that gave settlers economic incentives to invest and work hard. These explanations place the root cause of Mexico's poverty and U.S. prosperity hundreds of years into the past, as if nothing that happened between now and then mattered.

So that's my take on the book. The quality of a country's institutions surely help explain why some countries are richer than others, but without a theory for how institutions change overtime, the strength of their argument is limited.

I haven’t read the book, but looking over the reviews here, here, and here, its clear there is a defficiency in the historical analysis.

Wonderfully explained by Levin (third link), the institutional argument at the heart of the book—a divide between ‘inclusive’ and ‘extractive’ institutions is essentially flawed, in that the distinction can only be applied retroactively and is therefore circular. Regimes that were economically bad were extractive, regimes that were not were somehow inclusive.

This gets hilariously incorrect when this methodology is applied to the same state at different periods: the Roman Empire being at one point inclusive before becoming exclusive, Venice following the same pattern. This would imply some kind of major shift in the institutions of these states, which is baffling in the case of Rome (I’ll get to that in a moment) and just plain incorrect regarding Venice. Venice was called the Serene Republic based on its institutional protection of the political system. They had secret police, very limited suffrage, and a complicated division of powers, all with the explicit purpose of providing stability for the plutocrat class. I wonder what definition of ‘inclusive’ could possibly apply. While, it did take time for these institutions to crystalize—their development did not follow Venetian successes, they predate or were concurrent with them. Rome, without getting too detailed, never underwent a political or economic transformation that excluded lots of people from the system. The transition from Republic to Empire is very mischaracterized: the Roman economy certainly didn’t decline—and the continuation of Roman statehood for over a milennia afterward suggests they weren’t horribly managed. It also relies on a pretense that the Senate was in any way representative, which is untrue. If anything, the gradual reduction of slavery in the late Empire meant a more inclusive economy, right? Honorable mention to Spain, whose early colonial economy based on mineral extraction would be characterized as ‘inclusive’ and later diversification as ‘extractive’.

The fatal flaw in my view, is the attempt to apply these modern economic notions so far in the past. It would be a lot easier to attempt to tie the industrial revolution and all subsequent development to this framework. Applying it any earlier is very, very, problematic.

Also, I’d mention the extreme ‘Western’ bias—not willing to admit China to the ‘inclusive’ camp despite them being open economically, and much more open politically than a Patrician Republic like Rome or Venice. In other modern ‘extractive’ regimes in Africa, problems are blamed on the ‘cliques’ at the top of those nations, not the countries that benefit most from that extraction i.e. the Western ‘inclusive’ nations. How ‘inclusive’ regimes create and prop up ‘extractive’ regimes is not considered at all, but ought to be. After all, how inclusive is a society with colonial possessions?

Why Nations Fall is reductive, and muddles its own arguments. It, like many manifestos presents an interesting and compelling worldview, but one that is ultimately self-congratulatory toward Western policy, dismissive of other methods of social organization, and sports a historical analysis that does not follow with historical realities. Average english-language pop-politics I’d say.