Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Encyclopedic knowledge apparently fools everyone. Consider the elements of the so-called theory: contingency (chance), critical junctures, virtuous circles, vicious circles, and political or cultural drift. Each is non-quantitative and subjective, perfectly able to fit into whatever historical narrative you have in order to 'explain' whatever cherry-picked cases you have. Together they make a great example of a theory that explains everything (via tweaking), and therefore explains nothing. Then you have vague, un-quantified 'inclusive' and 'exclusive' economic and political systems, which via all the historical anecdotes are seen to be perfect correlates of successful or failed (respectively) nations. Nations are in no sense quantitatively classified according to these economic or governing principles, and when it is convenient various states are compared across pre / post industrial revolution times -- as if the entire world had not changed in the mean time! In the end, then, all you have is a bunch of secret sauce. The authors begin by (in their minds) debunking quantitative factors such as poor tropical soils, disease, ignorance (of economics), lack of resources, poor education, climate, and so on by pointing out exceptions, failing to notice that a multi-factor situation will usually have exceptions to each factor considered in isolation, and also failing to notice that later in the book they imply the significance of some of the very factors they have debunked. Most of the book is made up of cherry-picked history -- very good history as a matter of fact -- to illustrate the use of their vaguely defined factors, which really amounts to intellectual use of anecdotes. To give you a sense of the authors' failure to grasp the concept of theory, near the end they provide a trivial anecdote as proof against the 'theory of simple solutions.' I'd like to know where that theory is described! Clearly, not only are most of their critical terms undefined, to the authors theory itself is undefined. There are no statistics, no quantification, so even the success or failure of a nation is according to their subjective judgment, and they are forced to use extreme cases to make their points. In sum then, they are moving away from a scientific and toward a subjective social, soft explanation, which begs many questions. Ultimately, disappointingly nothing is causal, all is contingent. Really?