Controversial opinions on “Great Books” and authors

The book's admittedly simplistic core thesis is that there are essentially two types of institutions: inclusive and extractive. Inclusive institutions are things like democratic government, freedom of expression, and market based economies. The idea being that the more people you have voluntarily participating in the institution, the better off the society is. More buy in and reward, the better off that society is. Take the US, it has its problems, but the institutions there evolved there because they existed to an extent in Great Britain. They also didn't have a resource like gold or silver, or an easily enslaveable native population to do what the Spanish did. As for corruption in the US, it's by the expansion of the franchise, the growing middle classes, and America's favorite past time: litigation.

Extractive institutions are set up to extract resources from a population to enrich a few. These are things like totalitarian government, slavery, colonialism in the broad sense. To the point of South America, India, and Africa. Those colonies were never set up to be self governing, they were set up with the explicit intent of extracting resources. So when the Brits/French/Spanish left, there was a massive power vacuum. To say it's only Whitey's fault is r-slurred though. People are people, the Ottomans were a perfect example of that, the kingdoms in Africa were the same thing. During the slave trade the things the African kings wanted most were guns and gunpowder so they could kill their neighbors. It's why a dictatorship is stable for about 40 years, until the dictator dies.