Ronald Bailey on the Cure for Abject Poverty

Humanity's natural state is abject poverty, observes Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. So how did some humans manage to claw their way to prosperity? An insightful new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard University economist James Robinson, provides an answer to that perennially urgent question. The answer, in a word: institutions.