http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-de ... e17481308/

It kind of seems like his framework doesn't add much that isn't already obvious -- Ukraine should try to create inclusive rather than extractive institutions.

Thanks Dexter. Sorry I have not been posting more in this book discussion. I am reading a closely related book, How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters by Daniel Hannan, a conservative member of the European Parliament. His point is that the English common law, the law of the land, is the foundation of inclusivity in politics. I quite like this Anglosphere type of view. I went to hear Hannan when he visited Canberra last month. He emphasised the importance of traditional symbols for political stability and values, but had no comment when I asked him in the question time if Australia should become a republic.

I had a letter published in The Australian last Saturday on Ukraine and Crimea

Crimea is not worth a war. It has been Russian since Catherine the Great took it from the Turks in 1770. Nikita Khrushchev’s hubristic gift of the peninsula to Ukraine in 1954 assumed the Soviet Union would always be in control. Let Ukraine join NATO and the EU, and let Crimea join Russia through democratic partition.

I appreciated reading Acemoglu on Ukraine. I have been deeply interested in Ukraine since reading Robert Conquest's wonderful but tragic book The Harvest of Sorrow about the famine engineered by Stalin. Also the Australian prize-winning novel The Hand That Signed The Paper by Helen Demidemko is a superb book about Ukraine.

This extractive versus inclusive heuristic looks simple, but the problem is that an inclusive society has some deeply conservative traits, especially running a market economy. All points of the political spectrum have capacity to produce extractive governance, whereas an inclusive program sits fairly narrowly within the centre-right.

Yeah, I haven't kept up with the book, I would like to finish it at some point.

This extractive versus inclusive heuristic looks simple, but the problem is that an inclusive society has some deeply conservative traits, especially running a market economy. All points of the political spectrum have capacity to produce extractive governance, whereas an inclusive program sits fairly narrowly within the centre-right.

How about countries like Denmark and Canada? They seem to be market economies (both are now above the US in the index of economic freedom) that also have relatively high levels of redistribution.

Inclusion is not the same as redistribution. In fact, redistribution can serve the political interests of an extractive state.

An inclusive state provides equality of opportunity through strong administration of merit-based rule of law. Inclusion enables people to achieve their potential, especially in business, reducing the need for welfare. By contrast, a socialist government buys votes from the poor through promises of higher taxes on the rich to fund social transfers. Such tactics involve behaving in an extractive way - extracting wealth from those who earn it in order to bribe strategic electorates.

So the current political jargon around "social exclusion" is a different thing from what Why Nations Fail calls an inclusive state.

I was chatting the other day with friends at work about some related themes in feminist discourse around intersectionality which I felt basically involved finding some sweet-sounding words to cover up advocacy of communist revolution.