Robert Skidelsky, New York Review of Books, April 17th 2008
Stiglitz underestimates the extent to which poor countries are
responsible for sustaining their own poverty. He shirks the key
question: Why, over time, did some countries get rich and others stay
poor? His implicit, quasi-Marxist answer is that it was because the
rich exploited the poor. An alternative, and to my mind superior,
approach, pioneered by Douglass North, is that countries now rich
developed institutions superior to those of countries that stayed poor,
and that the gap in economic development between different parts of the
world had already emerged by the eighteenth century
