Category: Why Nations Fail

Why have some countries prospered and created great living conditions for their citizens, while others have not? This is a topic I care a lot about, so I was eager to pick up a book recently on exactly this topic. Why Nations Fail is easy to read, with lots of interesting historical stories about different…

“Why Nations Fail” is a sweeping attempt to explain the gut-wrenching poverty that leaves 1.29 billion people in the developing world struggling to live on less than $1.25 a day. You might expect it to be a bleak, numbing read. It’s not. It’s bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It may, in fact, be…

Peter Singer in his paper Famine, Affluence and Mortality believe that people of higher wealth should be morally obligated to donate more to humanitarian causes than what is considered normal in western cultures. It’s Singers premice that if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable…