THEY fail when they exclude people from effectively participating in the political process — that is, when a powerful minority takes over the government and creates a system, including laws, for its own benefit and not for the people at large. The extension of this political exclusion is economic exclusion — in other words, when the powerful and rich minority create extractive economic institutions, whereby they shield and perpetuate their own economic interests by extracting wealth from the national resources and from the people at large. This is the central argument of an influential book Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Turkish-American economist Daron Acemoglu and British-American economist and political scientist James Robinson.