Robinson's Arguments In Guns, Germs And Steel By Jared Diamond

As I noted earlier, Why Nations Fail minces no words with respect to the geography and particularly Diamond’s argument. While Acemoglu and Robinson do admit that it “is a powerful approach to the puzzle on which he focuses,” they dismiss it offhand because it cannot be extended to explain “modern world inequality,” or regional/intracontinental disparities (52). It is here that they lose a huge opportunity by falling into fallacious reasoning. Geography played an initial roll — just because it might not substantially effect things now, doesn’t mean it didn’t have a hand in influencing how things came to be. Acemoglu and Robinson understand that Diamond is making an argument for why eurasia was where growth would arise — the questions of where within eurasia and when are not addressed. But instead of explaining how Acemoglu and Robinson’s argument builds on Diamond’s argument, they take five pages to explain how Guns, Germs, and Steel isn’t valid because it doesn't answer questions that it was never designed to answer. Instead of grafting Diamond’s story into larger story combined their own, they dismiss it and in doing so leave themselves vulnerable to …show more content…
They do not offer the limitations of their argument’s explanatory scope which again leaves them vulnerable to a great amount of criticism. They do, however, caveat their story with the limitations of their argument’s predictive scope. This is an very important. Towards the end their section entitled You Can’t Engineer Prosperity, notes that while the ignorance hypothesis has a very simple answer, education, the institutions hypothesis has no such solution. Both the incentives leaders have and the institutions they are (or are not) constrained by will dictate what happens in a country no matter how well educated/economically literate the politically dominant group