Reasons for failing, reasons for succeeding

Kind of flawed as I think is Acemoglu's over-reliance on institutional effectiveness as the total explanation for the varying degrees of economic development/productivity around the world. See Occam’s Butter Knife by Steve Sailer for a sharp take down of Acemoglu's theory. And to be clear, it is not that I think institutional effectiveness is unimportant. It is simply that I view it as one among several important conditions necessary to optimize personal and group prodictuivity.

But I am a sucker for lists and here is one on a topic near and dear. 10 Reasons Countries Fall Apart by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.

Acemoglu and Robinson's list of ten reasons:

Lack of property rights
Reliance on coercion in production
Rent seeking
Monopolies
Rejection of innovation
Absence of law and order
Weak government
Poor services/infrastructure
Repression
Zero Sum orientation

I have renamed their ten items to better reflect the underlying principles. I think there is relative merit in most of these items, particularly recast as they are. I think they were running out of steam to get to ten because weak government doesn't seem to belong here or is a duplication of other items already on the list.

So these ten items (or nine) serve the function of a canary in a coal mine. The greater degree to which a country manifests any or all of these factors, the more likely they are to be a failure in terms of sustained productivity. What is interesting to me is that in many ways these seem to be the inverse elements of the attributes which have underpinned classical liberalism/age of enlightenment culture:

Agency
Freedom
Natural Rights
Pluralism
Rule of Law
Consent of the Governed
Property Rights
Competition
Trade
Trust
Empiricism
Logic
Scientific Method
Checks and Balances
Connectivity
Specialization

With these two lists, you have the opportunity of doing the wrong things as well as the opportunity to cultivate the right things. Ought to be able to make some progress on that basis.